Independent Film Show 23 edition, coordinated by Raffaella Morra and organised by E-M ARTS and Fondazione Morra, is a rare chance to enjoy and experience Super 8mm, 16mm films and video without distractions, Independent Film Show is a way to educate/approach to divergent perceptions and changes, it is a ritual of the senses and a pursuit of an expanded sensibility. What is interesting here is the media effects on the perceivers and the liberation of the feelings not constrained in specific area. The approach is with the image and sound/silence - through sensations and thoughts. Independent Film Show oscillates among disparate sources merging in a transformative flux: the avantgarde solutions, the direct in-camera editing, the structural film and found footage practices, and Do-It-Yourself innovations tested in cooperatives and laboratories.
The programs focus on contemporary film practices and unconventional meanings, on the unique opportunity to approach the film-makers as lovers of film materials, in interaction with the projection components, fully aware of the media complexity and its powerful impact.
On Thursday June 15 Digitally made flicker techniques on DaVinci Resolve - the workshop by Peter-Conrad Beyer focus on experimental film techniques found footage and flicker, working with single frame patterns, composing with single video frames like music notes on a music sheet. A pool of moving image material found footage is available to work. With this given moving image, we carry out various editing exercises in fast cuts / flicker, and experiment with form and content in digital film editing. The participants create their own short experimental film sequences. https://www.peter-conrad-beyer.de/
On Friday June 16 Visual Music: controlling Laser and Vector Monitors through Sound - the multidisciplinary workshop by Alberto Novello aka JesterN brings together expertise from different theoretical fields: media archaeology, analog electronics, graphic design, optics, computer vision, coding and early 3D modeling for 1980s gaming. Through digital prototyping, the workshop shows possible hardware configurations to setup an analog video-synthesis workstation, build mathematical modules to achieve different aesthetic results - from Lissajous curves to 3D modeling and raster video, while learning about the history of video art. http://www.jestern.com/
on Thursday June 15
Shooting the volcanos (to seeing the unknown) curated by Nomadica
Shooting the volcanos (to seeing the unknown) is the films selection curated by Nomadica, founded by Giuseppe Spina and Giulia Mazzone - a “thing” that interweaves cinema, science, art, thoughts, and screenings of any kind, place, and time. Nomadica is an ongoing permanent autonomous laboratory approaching the moving image as a transversal medium with the potential to cross borders and open itself up to new explorations.
Where do the old ignored gods go? is a 67-minute feature film by Giuseppe Spina and Giulia Mazzone shot on volcano Etna, ranging between video essay, diary, fiction, and science film. The film is divided into three parts: “the lower region” in which superhuman titanic bodies, like contemporary Cyclopes, tear and cut volcanic boulders; “the fire region” where gods wander doomed between the Earth’s interior and exterior, between shadows and fire; and “the deserted region” in which the film detaches itself from the human eye to go into the ultra-visible: inside the ash, among the crystals inside the rock, to the extreme point. http://www.nomadica.eu/
Volcano by Peter Gidal, shot on 16mm on a volcano in Hawaii, combines the central themes of his practice: experiments with duration, repetition and the relationship between film and photography. The film’s primary conceit concerns the afterimage of the volcano: from the effect it has on the landscape to its filmic and photographic representation. The use of leader tape provokes the viewer’s awareness of the process of watching a film, allowing them to recognize the ways in which time and space are deployed in the film to depict reality.
LASER DRAWING see the Sound and hear the Light
analog audio-visual improvisation by Alberto Novello aka JesterN
Alberto Novello aka JesterN is a scientist, composer, multimedia artist, his practice repurposes found or decontextualized analogue devices to investigate the connections between light and sound in the form of contemplative installations and performances. He repairs and modifies tools from our analogue past: oscilloscopes, early game consoles, analogue video mixers, and lasers. Enveloping the audience in synchronous sound and light information, the performance LASER DRAWING see the Sound and hear the Light is designed to create a synaesthetic experience and what you hear is also what you see. The same electricity generated to move the speaker membranes is sent simultaneously to the high-speed motor that deflects the laser light on an x/y axis, converting sonic vibration into light motion.
on Friday June 16
LUCE curated by Raffaella Morra
Claudio Caldini began filming in Super 8mm; this light format allowed him to bypass the limitations of professional cinema and to obtain a personal aesthetic that is deeply linked to his practice and vision of cinema, leaving a lasting impression on young film-makers. In HELIOGRAFÍA, Caldini deploys an evanescent writing to capture glimmers of light in a moving landscape, as in the famous photographic sequences by Eadweard Muybridge, he decomposes movement into a succession of fragile instances, making them oscillate. The forms dissolve and colors explode on the screen like in an Impressionist painting.
TRAMPA DE LUZ by Pablo Marín: “During the last few years, I discovered in Super 8mm a world of possibilities very unique and profound. By way of pushing the format and camera to its mechanical limits I’ve found that Super 8mm can be turned into a medium surprisingly flexible and infinite in terms of shooting and (especially) in-camera editing. It is certainly an art form that fits what poet Eileen Myles once labeled as ‘pathetic technologies’: tools perhaps too simple, obsolete and/or outdated but through which it is possible, nonetheless, to explore the limits of the imaginable.”
Pablo Mazzolo works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. PHOTOOXIDATION is de-electronation of a molecular entity as a result of photoexcitation: light increases its oxidation state, at the same time it releases free radical electrons.
Program Super 8mm and 16mm films by the friends of LEC curated by Azucena Losana
LEC Laboratorio Experimental de Cine is a project dedicated to the training, production, curatorship and dissemination of experimental film in México. At LEC we promote the moving image and the relation with other artistic formats to create a cinema that expands and challenges the limits of conventional audiovisual language. Above all, we are interested in generating multiple discourses from the relation between film and art, with installation, performance and new media art. Currently we are particularly concerned about archival material, we strive to collect and rescue this material to work with techniques such as direct to film or camera-less cinema. In this way, we ask ourselves if from an artistic proposal conscious of the importance of both preservation and re-creation, it is possible to link the different actors in the archival experience: artists, preservationists, archivists and community.
La aparición de Tezcatlipoca by Annalisa Quagliata uses handmade film techniques to create a portrait of Mexico City, addressing images of the pre-Hispanic past through its contemporary landscape.
Cumbia en la Alameda by Pablo Cruz Villalba, in November 2021, passers-by stopped to dance cumbia in the main park at Mexico City.
Bandera Churubusco by Walter Forsberg, created during the residency at Laboratorio Experimental de Cine located in the Studios Churubusco, is a visual guide to the history of film-making in Mexico, made with illustrations from second-hand books on Calle de Donceles.
Desaparecer by Elena Pardo and Morris Manuel Trujillo, disappear, cease to be somewhere, cease to exist. It’s been calculated that in Mexico someone disappears every 110 minutes - that’s 13 people a day. No-one really knows how or why. In their search for their loved ones, families find only ash and fragments.
Program Super 8mm and 16mm films by Azucena Losana
“I’m interested in experimenting and directly accessing the material, both physically and chemically. It is a small feat of magic to be able to go into all of that, which lies on top of what can later be seen. I’m also very attracted to the logic of machines, the analogue projectors that are super transparent, and completely noble. Its functioning is diaphanous and naked, and one can see it, and access it, intervene, and utilize it, in one way or another. I believe I am really interested in the conjunction of those things, not just when I’m filming. Because it’s not just the projectors; it’s the cameras, and many other ways of accessing light. It is the direct relationship with light that is produced through them.
I think the way in which we operate in experimental cinema implies a dual job for me. There is an initial task at the time of filming, if you are filming, or at the moment when you come face to face with footage and get an idea of how to operate on it. The second part is thinking how it will all take place at screening: how it will run through the projector, how many projectors, what is going to be sounding or not sounding, as well as the idea of shooting, and screening, because the amazing thing here is that the show, although it may not be a performance, although it may be a short film, will never be the same twice.” Azucena Losana http://www.azulosa.com/
TROCO 3x16mm Film Performance by Azucena Losana
Film support as a plastic source is an investigation that in this performance proposes the formal study of the perforation as a fundamental element of analogic film, and the human face as a representation, as a color chart configuration and as a target of electronic detectors.
Several meters of 35mm film from the color reference strips known as ‘China girl’ and other 16mm close up takes were perforated and their faces were exchanged manually to other faces; the film perforations are displayed iteratively on live performance.
on Saturday June 17
RITMO curated by Raffaella Morra
Focusing on movement, rhythm, tension and release, the program explore the creativity to catch a synaesthetic mingling. From early on in film history, images and sounds from different sources are handled into unusual configurations, through alteration, cut-up, collage and détournement, treating the frame as primary material.
PWDRE SER THE ROT OF STARS by Charlotte Pryce depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance, and is equally inspired by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by Kirlian photography with hand-processed images. ‘Pwdre ser’ is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400s.
ORIGINATE & RECOMPILE by Federica Foglia is a reappropriation of the film ‘La Taranta’ shot by Ernesto De Martino in 1962 for his ethnographic research in South Italy. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests.
ULTRADREAM by Guillaume Vallée, created on an optical printer from hand-painted 16mm film, embodies a state of mind about benevolence.
ENHARMONIQUE - Chapitre 1 by Kaveh Kavoosi is the result of transformations caused by the encounter between matter and imagination. In this film, - inspired by the cycle of nature via its four principal elements, water, wind, earth and fire - the existence follows non-existence and vice versa. With the help of music, the audience is immersed in one event after another, thus hearing a complete symphony. The notes of these compositions are interpreted by algorithms, generating an evolving organic film, a sort of matter in motion.
In AFTER NATURE by Barbara Sternberg, the digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading plunge to no(w)here - new beginnings or more of the same? With text excerpts from Heinrich Boll and Gertrude Stein.
In Permutations by John Whitney, each point moves at a different speed and in a direction independent according to natural laws’ quite as valid as those of Pythagoras. Their action produces a phenomenon more or less equivalent to the musical harmonies.
In Der Nacht by Walter Ruttmann, with artist Nina Hanson playing the piano, made on the 75th anniversary of Robert Schumann’s death. The central motif is water, the symbol of new life and infinity; it shines in a raging whirlpool, a torrent, a steaming geyser, and also the peaceful water surface or the innocent, playful waves. The film dated 1931 is a predecessor of a music video.
Visionary Cinema - My Personal Underground by Peter-Conrad Beyer
From the lighthouse on Hiddensee on to the Mayas in Mexico and back to the mountain Hohe Meissner, into the kingdom of Mother Hulda. All short films are without dialogues and work exclusively with purely audiovisual means.
Peter-Conrad Beyer is an experimental film-maker, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig (2000-06); he later studied as a post-graduate at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (2007-10) He lives and works in Stralsund at the Baltic Sea. https://www.peter-conrad-beyer.de/
FROM END TO END 3x16mm Film Performance by Peter-Conrad Beyer
The structural opposition of images from nature and from civilization engenders a process of comparison and visual unification. This three-screen 16mm film projection, in the tradition of expanded cinema, creates an apocalyptic atmosphere inclining towards the chaotic.
