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Four Seasons
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An absurdist, phony, low-fi mixture of a variety of film genres: film noir, thriller, soap opera, documentary and melodrama. The video opens with dramatic music; fake blood drips on bathroom tiles, snowflakes whirl through an apartment and a woman climbs a staircase. She introduces herself as Lucy and says she is complaining about the music - and then finds a naked, bleeding man rising out of a bath tub. The narrative becomes more and more complex and incoherent when the man starts calling the woman Stella - a reference to Tennessee Williams' ›A Streetcar Named Desire‹. From that point, various story-lines are interwoven and more and more visual clichés and low-fi special effects are introduced. Camera work and dialogue are deliberately kept amateurish; a multitude of filmic and literary references are touched upon: surrealist storytelling, avant-garde dramaturgy,movies by Polanski and Stephen King. A rather neutral voice-over recites a text about labyrinthine architecture, influenced by Borges' short story ›The Immortal‹.
Director/author: Keren Cytter
Germany 2009
Film & Video Video 12 min.
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Juanita
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›In an associative manner,Nina Yuen places several stories side by side: stories of death and its rituals, of growth, bloom and decay.Wearing a little black dress, she herself plays the various roles in the film. She plays Juanita, the cat that is being buried, with three pink flowers being placed on her grave. Or she is her dead mother who appears in a tree after her death. She also plays someone who returns to the place in the river where she thinks she will die. This time the artist has not built a set in her studio or another inside location; everything is happening outside, in the lushness of nature. While the voice-over links the diverging stories together, you wonder if these are stories from the artist's personal life or if it is all made up.‹ Netherlands Media Art Institute, Nanda Janssen.
Director/author: Nina Yuen
USA 2010
Film & Video Video 5 min.
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Lesser Apes
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A winningly oblique narrative of forbidden love, Lesser Apes offers an inter-species fairytale between primatologist Farrah and the female bonobo (ape) Meema. Farrah extols the virtues of language as it offers the hope of empathy, but at the same time it pushes her out of her body, which she can recover only through a series of transgressions. These are offered in an impressionist collage – misted landscapes and time lapsed animals rotting, balloons caught in a rainshower. But most harrowingly there is a stunned vérité encounter with Vey Duke lying comatose and jaundiced in a hospital bed, very near death, while her partner, Cooper, looks on with a face that signals that everything will be alright, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. These lyrical diary moments are filled with the punctum, with the sharp point of a picture that looks back, raw memory fragments that hurt the viewer to witness. They are interwoven with a-go-go animations that run beneath Farrah/Emily’s sing songs, offering musings on the trials of living in a body, whether via animal love or addiction. ›And nobody wants to die/And everyone wants to get high/But we can’t get high all the time…‹ – Mike Hoolboom
Director/author: Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Canada 2011
Film & Video Video 19 min.
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Pain So Light That Appears As Tickle
/ Pain So Light That Appears As Tickle
Pain is slowed down in slow motion up to the sensitivity threshold and is sold as an everyday anesthetic.We browse through ready-made catalogues of horror, complete with instructions for use,we order attractive idea-images; we wish to leave our bodies and become the image for a change. Watching a film, we forget about ourselves, pretending not to be interested in the content; in fact, we are interested in the hypnotizing, pulsating light, which is when we discover our magical and tribal conscience and repressed fear of life.
Director/author: Dalibor Baric
Croatia 2010
Film & Video Video 4 min.
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Sea Swallow'd
/ Sea Swallow'd
Sea Swallow'd charts the choppy waters of gut feelings, capturing the flotsam and jetsam of impulse, desire and fights to the death. A film by Andrew Kötting and Curious shot as a series of lapping and flowing, irregular chapters, which borrow their titles from Moby Dick. The film is image and urge driven, giving the viewer the feeling of beach-combing for different fragments of treasure on the shoreline. A highly experiential journey mixing 16mm B&W footage with video and archival footage.
Director/author: Andrew Kötting & Curious
United Kingdom 2010
Film & Video Video 18 min.
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Threesome
/ Threesome
While Stefan and Paul relax sipping their cocktail, Ann-Kristin gets cosy on her couch. ›Some company wouldn't do any harm,‹ she considers, and in doing so she thinks of Stefan. He and Paul are sitting in a bar, when suddenly Stefan’s phone rings. It is an invitation from Ann-Kristin. Stefan does not contemplate for long and asks Paul to join him. Ann-Kristin is happy about the visit and kindly invites the two men to join her on the couch, where they gradually get closer to one another ...
Director/author: Johannes Dullin
Germany 2010
Film & Video Video 10 min.
