I showed two pieces – or iterations – of work: One Second a Day and 31 Days
Amnesialand
Amnesialand, approx 22 min
Part of The Presence of Absence, or the Catastrophe Theory
https://nimac.org.cy/the-presence-of-absence-or-the-catastrophe-theory/
Mixed BW and colour archive film with contemporary footage
No diegetic sound, just high-quality voiceover interspersed with silence – three voices, one female. The shots of the landscape appear to be shot on colour Super 16 although grainless as projected there is a subtle but evident weave. Projection from Blu-ray with mpeg gop stuttering particularly on shots with sea in the upper frames.
I sat in NiMAC’s auditorium (where we hope to screen Father-land) watching the film. The clear narration filled the space. “We do not remember, we rewrite memory as much as history is rewritten.” (Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1982)
“Stefanos Tsivopoulos takes a photographic collection found in the public archives of the port city Cartagena as starting point for a poetic investigation on the questions of memory and forgetting, on the role that images play in the construction of history, and their relation to reality and historic truth.”
anamnesis, a recalling to mind, or reminiscence. Anamnesis is often used as a narrative technique in fiction and poetry as well as in memoirs and autobiographies. A notable example is Marcel Proust’s anamnesis brought on by the taste of a madeleine in the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27). The word is from the Greek anámnēsis, “to recall or remember.”
31 Days LSFF screening at The ICA
We drove to London to see 31 Days in the Celluloid Traces experimental film programme at LSFF.
The DCP which the festival produced was great and the widescreen format looked excellent in the ICA’s cinema, probably the best looking film in the programme.
The programme raised questions for me about the perceived nature of ‘experimental film’ as a category. The programme was described as embracing “our nostalgia for all things analogue in this varied programme of experiments, indulging us with the crackling aesthetic of Super 8 alongside found footage from the archives and the fuzziness of early VHS.”
In Celluloid Traces it seemed the benchmark/criterion was quirky or mannered, maybe just films which weren’t obviously narrative or documentary or ones that could fit into a genre like ‘music video’. Perhaps now shooting on film has become – of itself – experimental as filmmakers grapple with old equipment, processes and substandard facilities businesses.