MASTER OF FILM ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA
Suspension Points
2020
The master Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy is a two-year international course for a select group of filmmakers and artists with several years of experience under their belt. They are offered time and space to research and experiment in an open-ended trajectory in which thinking and making are one. The programme privileges questions over answers, process over product, experimentation over mere execution and long-term effects over short term gain… During the Artistic Research Week, the graduates present their research and the projects related to it – proposals, films, installations…These lectures, performances and workshops contextualise the projects and raise questions for further development. More information about the course: www.masteroffilm.nl
INTRODUCTION / SUSPENSION POINTS
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MISHO ANTADZE
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ALBERTO DELGADO DE ITA
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JUAN PALACIOS
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FEDERICO SANDE NOVO
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SOPHIE WRIGHT
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COLOFON
MASTER OF FILM 2020
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SUSPENSION POINTS
And then it was the middle of March…. Never a year like any other, this graduation year was even more different. For the five researchers that graduate now, in 2020, from our Master’s programme, their final year has been marked by a sense of interrupted time that they have aptly summarized in the theme they’ve given to the public presentation of their research: ‘suspension points’. The three dots at the end of the sentence open up the sentence and question its claim to truth. They make us aware that there is always more to be said or seen and they invite us, they even force us, to use our imagination…
INTRODUCTION
Covid-19 challenged each and every one of us, in similar and different ways. It thwarted our routines, made us question the relevance of what we do, and forced us to find new ways of living and working. This was true also for the researchers presenting themselves on the pages of this magazine. For some it put an end to their research traveling plans, forcing them, as one of them described it, to live in a kind of extended ‘nowness’ or travel in the mind or the imagination instead. For others Covid-19 reinforced an understanding that life, and art making, is fundamentally but also fruitfully and wonderfully uncertain. Being restricted to the few square meters of one’s house or room underlined for one of them the layered value of the everyday objects and images that surround us, while the ensuing Black Lives Matter-protests for yet another researcher gave extra context to his critical and cinematic research into historical monuments. Suspension Points as the title for this year’s Artistic Research Week thus recognizes how time is always present. We can see it in all of the research projects here on view: time as the here and now, time as eternal, time as unsuccessful cover-up, time as political history, time as primarily spiritual... All of these understandings of time leave traces in space, hence the simultaneous focus in many of the projects on nature and landscape. All of the research projects of these five graduates are contemporary and urgent. They are also temporary though. Not just because they are works-in-progress or intrinsically ephemeral in that they are performative, but also because this graduation is in itself only a moment in time, an opening to the unknown. Individually and together, the projects in Suspension Points are themselves a series of three dots.
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Filmmaker Misho Antadze, from Georgia, came to the programme with an interest in the presentation of space and atmosphere in cinema, which gradually found its base in an even more fundamental interest in history. Hence the title of his research: Like music from a distant room: relating to history through cinema. Asking whether, if history is invisible, how it can be glimpsed through film, Misho's practice based research led him to write essays, make an alligator the subject of a film poem, and shoot a feature length documentary Ozymandias (work in progress) on the presence of Stalin in contemporary Georgia. It is in Alberto Delgado de Ita's Mexican background that his long-time interest in the simultaneity of beauty and horror originated, and for which he found inspiration and conceptualization in the art and theory of Romanticism. For Imagining violence through landscape, Alberto zoomed in on the landscape around the city of Acapulco, the city with the highest murder rates around the world and the location of his family’s summer residence. Using film in a spatial context, Alberto is seeking to create an imaginary to evoke the co-existence of landscape and violence, heaven and hell. Trained as an environmental scientist who then went on to make films, Juan Palacios from the Basque country in Spain, wanted to research a subject that deeply concerns him – the global ecological crisis – through film, the medium he feels devoted to. His research Geological Drama(s) – on living ruins and earthly entanglements investigates the possibilities of cinema to fundamentally question and even propose an alternative to the systematic subjugation of the nonhuman to the human which is intrinsic to the Anthropocene. For that reason, Juan’s fiction film-in-progress Permanent Being decentralizes the human figure in its storytelling and rethinks what acting can mean in non-anthropomorphic cinema.
As a cinematographer and producer from Argentina, Federico Sande Novo sought to ‘rethink filmmaking from new perspectives’. Interested in the notion of ‘belief’, exemplified by his mother’s search for spiritual guidance, Federico’s research ultimately led him to embrace uncertainty instead. His research Inhabiting uncertainty thus led him in the making of his film-in-progress Lightseekers to fundamentally question the cinematic idea of authorship. British photography critic, curator and visual artist Sophie Wright always felt frustrated by the ‘still’ nature of the photographic image and joined the Master’s programme to find ways to ‘unfasten the image’. Taking cues from amber stones and amber lampshades, combined with battered family photographs in a box, Sophie embarked on a journey that led her to see and work with the multilayered interplay between still and moving images, as succinctly encapsulated in the title of her research: Rewilding the Everyday: a Crosspollination of Stillness and Motion and resulting in work that combines film, photography, performance and tactile publications. Mieke Bernink Head of the Master’s department / Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy
MASTER OF FILM 2020
THE GRADUATES AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS
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Misho Antadze LIKE MUSIC FROM A DISTANT ROOM:
MISHO ANTADZE
RELATING TO HISTORY THROUGH CINEMA
Misho Antadze (b. 1993) is a filmmaker and artistic researcher from Tbilisi, Georgia. He holds a BFA in Film/Video from CalArts, where he studied 2011-2015. As a student, he made his first feature, The Many Faces of Comrade Gelovani, which went on to premiere at the Viennale in 2014. He returned to Georgia where he made his second feature, The Harvest (2019). His work has been shown at festivals such as IFFR, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Full Frame Film Festival among others. The Harvest was awarded at Jeonju International Film Festival and at Palic European Film Festival, and is pending an online screening on e-flux. Misho weaves threads between film spectatorship, history, film history and his own observational documentary practice, his interest is their intersection. If history is invisible, can it be glimpsed through film? His work explores this question in relation to watching films, thinking about films, making films. With post-Soviet history as his focus, his work tries to find it in landscapes, overheard conversations, statues and other objects.
www.mishoantadze.com misho.antadze@gmail.com
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My two years in the Masters program have led me to write a small volume of essays. They deal with a variety of subjects, but circle the same question: How do we imagine and relate to history through cinema?
MASTER OF FILM 2020
I tried to approach this question as much as a film spectator and as a maker. As it would be impossible to reproduce the essays here in full, I would like to offer here some excerpts and additions to the final publication, some of them referring to my own practice, others about the films of others.
Khrustalyov, My Car (Aleksei German, 1998)
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE POST-SOVIET? Sometimes, when I’m asked what my films are about, and I don’t want to go into detail, I say that I am trying to represent post-Soviet history. What does that mean? I am shopping for books. Specifically, I am shopping for books in a Russian-language bookstore. The attendant walks up to me, looks me up and down, and asks me what I am looking for. I say the title in Russian, but then we speak in English. I am from Georgia, the teller is from Ukraine. There’s an implied understanding between us, that even though we both speak Russian as a second language, and even though I’m buying a Russian book in a Russian bookstore, we don’t have to speak Russian to each other. It is a small act of rebellion against the empire of the past, against the imposition of history on our existence. If we don’t have anything else in common, at least there’s this.
The term ‘post-Soviet’ itself is used mostly by Western writers, an intellectual short-cut that allows the writer to imply some kind of ruinous geography with erased specifics. It is an othering phrase. I didn’t know I was post-Soviet before I lived in the West. Yet being post-Soviet is so much more than what the term means in the Western imagination. It is not a geography, it is a condition. I would like to leave it all behind, to leave the past in the past, just like one can leave a place and emigrate. I want to make films about somewhere and sometime else. But, by the circumstances of my birth, I am forever tied to a place and a time. Like every emigrant, I know that it’s never possible to leave anything behind.
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MISHO ANTADZE
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
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A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)
FILM PROPHECY When, in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Professor Baum examines the notes of Dr Mabuse collected under the title of Empire of Crime, the spirit of Dr Mabuse appears in front of him and whispers that: Humanity’s soul must be shaken to its very depths, frightened by unfathomable and seemingly senseless crimes. Crimes that benefit no one, whose only objective is to inspire fear and terror. Because the ultimate purpose of crime is to establish the endless empire of crime. A state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world doomed to annihilation. When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime, and then the spirit of Mabuse possesses the body of Baum, and the year is 1933, that is prophetic filmmaking, arising not from divination, but from an observation of the present. We have been living out the prophecy ever since. ON HOU HSIAO-HSIEN How much should a spectator know about a place to understand a film with the place’s history as the subject? My knowledge of Taiwan is very superficial, certainly not enough to create an appropriate cultural understanding. Yet, when I’m watching the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, I know that I am looking at Taiwanese history. They relate stories of love, family, youthful rebellion, life and death. They foreground real events and periods. As Taiwan becomes independent, in A City of Sadness (1989) the Lin family comes together and falls apart. At the centre of the film is the February 28 massacre of 1947, that
unleashed the White Terror of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT government. Lin Wen-Ching, who is a deaf-mute photographer, gets beaten up in a crackdown by KMT forces, who suspect that he’s feigning his inability to speak to hide his Mainland accent, thus embodying the traumas of early Taiwanese independence. Are these films like didactic history lessons? In Hou's films, history is like a melody from a distant room, that suddenly overwhelms the picture, and quietens again. It is always there, but not always audible. As a spectator, one should be sensitive to this melody, even without understanding the lyrics. Photography is a recurring theme in the films of Hou-Hsiao Hsien. Staged family photographs bookend the beginning and end of A City of Sadness, and appear in A Time To Live, and a Time To Die, and Good Men, Good Women. They measure change over time, betraying the glimpses of tragedies that occur in between. Likewise, these films offer history as a glimpse of the past, as it continues to fade into the present.
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Ozymandias (Work-in-Progress)
THE LANDSCAPE IS EMPTY We are standing in a ravine. I have been told that starting in 1937, this place might have been an execution ground, where hundreds of people were taken to and shot. These are rumours from 83 years ago. Those who saw are long gone. I want to look at the landscape and see the past, its history, the proof of its witness. But the landscape is empty and I see nothing.
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MISHO ANTADZE
OZYMANDIAS (SHORT SUMMARY OF A WORK-IN-PROGRESS) As recently as this June, we saw the removal of statues by activists in cities of Europe and North America. Leopold II came down in Antwerp, the slaver Robert Milligan went into the Thames in Leeds, confederate Robert E. Lee fell in New Orleans. The toppling of the statues were acts of restorative justice by protestors, expressions of societies grappling with history. In a civil society, monuments to despots are out of place. What happens with such monuments when a country is not able to confront its past? Almost thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and more than 70 after his death, monuments to Stalin populate the Georgian landscape. They appear in various shapes, whole and broken, preserved and decaying, mostly still, but sometimes even moving. Only stray dogs seem to be affected by their presence. At the Stalin museum, a group of sixth-graders is shown his death
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mask by a tour guide that tells them of his virtues. In Tbilisi, a drunken Stalin impersonator for hire waits for tourists by a fragment of the Berlin wall. An anonymous field nearby is rumoured to be a mass grave for hundreds of victims of Stalinist persecutions in the 1930s. At night, a statue of Stalin emerges from a homemade monument, makes a speech, and disappears again. Films have been made on the subject of Stalinism in Georgia by other filmmakers. Yet, they always frame the matter as a generational conflict, where a small minority of the elderly refuses to let go of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and so remains out of step in time. So far, no film has been made that looks at wider implications of passive complicity, and our collective refusal of confronting the past. The only way to break this cycle is to change the form in which we engage in the subject matter.
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Ozymandias (Work-in-Progress)
Confronting history also means acknowledging complicity, yet the narratives that we tell ourselves frame us exclusively as victims. Nevertheless, we continue to put up with monuments to one of history’s greatest butchers. While a small minority supports this actively, the rest of us do so passively, through our indifference. We refuse to look, to take a position, and thus become complicit. My film, Ozymandias, aims to break the taboo of looking at the past. To do so, it looks at the present, and at the symbol of the violence that we so freely tolerate. Thus, I chose to work in the observational form, without a voice-over. I let the film travel through various landscapes that frame these monuments, taking time with each of them, allowing the viewer to observe and to come to their own conclusions. To look is to take a position. The title of this film, Ozymandias, comes from a 19th-century poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A broken statue of a pharaoh from long ago is a way of talking about the passage of centuries. My film talks about the passage of several
decades, and yet they feel just as distant. Soon, as the older generation passes away, most people will have spent more time living in independent Georgia than in the USSR, and the questions of complicity will be forgotten. I feel a moral imperative to confront these questions but to do so gently, by looking and listening.
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Alberto Delgado de Ita
ALBERTO DELGADO DE ITA
IMAGINING VIOLENCE THROUGH LANDSCAPES
Alberto Delgado de Ita is a visual artist and a documentary filmmaker (Mexico, 1988). He studied Communication at IBERO University and has worked as a video editor and videographer at VICE Media before developing his Master of Film at the Netherlands Film Academy. His work explores the depiction of criminal violence in Mexico through landscapes. By using upsetting events from his social context and personal experiences, he creates narratives to portray the natural environment as a place where wonder and terror coexist consistently.
delgadodeita.com alberto.delgado19@gmail.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2020
Cemetery by the sea in Acapulco, Mexico
Still from Dark Paradise, video installation
Alberto Delgado de Ita spent most of his childhood holidays at his family’s summer house in Acapulco. The Mexican coastal city, that gained popularity in the 1940s when heaps of Hollywood-stars moved there after the war, grew into a place with one of the highest murder rates of cities worldwide. For Alberto, the stories about violence that filled the daily news felt like something abstract and part of everyday life. This changed when one of his uncles was murdered in Acapulco during the Christmas holidays of 2018. The image of Acapulco as a paradisiacal refuge was purposely fabricated in the 1950s, when president Miguel Alemán Valdés commissioned the famous Mexican
photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo to shoot a series there, which was then used as a marketing tool. The enticing images that were built on expectations of prosperity and modernization heavily influenced the development of the area. A correlation that intrigued Alberto, who started researching the violent history of Acapulco and the relation to its imagery. Alberto: “Images have the power to build an imaginary world around an existing location, which then seeps into the real world. I argue that, when you consciously portray a place as beautiful and paradisiacal, you also invite a certain kind of exploitation. This exploitation causes disparity, and I believe that where there is economic disparity, trouble and violence will follow.”
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ALBERTO DELGADO DE ITA
Still from Dark Paradise, video installation
Still from Dark Paradise, video installation
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Alberto decided to use Acapulco and its landscape as a space to imagine its violent context. Alberto: “Acapulco is a place of extremes; it has a very violent sea, it is very rainy, and its surroundings are used to cover up the severe violence that takes place. When people have been murdered, their bodies are often hidden in the landscape.” Take for example the notorious death flights, when the military dropped bodies from planes into the ocean – a crime of which evidence is untraceable, but stories remain imprinted in the sea and the minds of Mexican people. Alberto: “The landscape became an accomplice to cruelty. I started viewing the landscape not also as a device to hide things, but also as an entity that can be used to reveal. By using the landscape to trigger imagination you can find answers where they are normally hidden and give access to what can't be seen.” At that time Alberto was studying Romanticism and how 18th century Romantic painters portray nature as a menacing and overwhelming, but at the same time astounding force. The relationship between awe and terror always fascinated Alberto – something he attributes to his Mexican background and growing up in a country with many contrasts, where some of the most dangerous places are surrounded by the most beautiful landscapes. A duality that is very evident in Acapulco. Alberto: “The Romantics depicted reality in an almost unnatural way: the sun looked fiercer, the sky more threatening and the landscape more gloomy. I link this to the concept of the sublime: the notion that explores how something can be menacing and attractive at the same time, which was used in Romanticism to portray nature. By applying this to Acapulco, Alberto attempts to explain where this attraction stems from. The assasination of his uncle
marked a turning point in his research. “I was the one who had to deliver the tragic news to his sons in Switzerland,” Alberto explains. “Suddenly I became a translator not only of language, but also of social context. They asked me why he was murdered and when the perpetrator would be captured, and I could not give any straight answers. Everything around this terrible event, e.g. how the government handled the investigation, became murky.” Alberto needed to reconstruct the complex context of Acapulco in order to find answers and represent a violence that, for him, remains unaccountable. "What these images show is only a fragment of what truly exists: irrepressible violence that cannot be grasped or apprehended in a solid way. It’s something that is connected to a system that I perceived as out of control and I wonder if landscape images could work as a portal to access what cannot be seen behind the surface of a violent image."
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Family house in Acapulco, Mexico
But how do you build empathy and address violence when images depicting these atrocious acts have lost the power to shock? Is there an alternative, besides that the image of the newspaper becomes, unexpectedly, a family member? Instead of using images that show actual violence, Alberto tries to offer an alternative. By creating cinematic journeys of imagination he invites the viewer to explore this imagery of violence through Acapulco’s landscapes. He started using the concept of pareidolia – the phenomenon when you see figurative things in abstraction, e.g. seeing faces in clouds – to explore the relation between perception and stimulus. "This relation between perception and stimulus makes me wonder – what is a landscape, really? Is it natural elements from the outside world, or is it inner projections? Or could it be that the outer world and inner world meet on a threshold through the landscape image?"
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ALBERTO DELGADO DE ITA
Arnold Bรถcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1880
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In his video installation Alberto aims to trigger this phenomenon. The viewer is led through narratives that portray the natural environment of Acapulco as a place where wonder and terror coexist consistently. A birds-eye-view of the ocean where bodies were dropped during the Mexican Dirty War is played in a loop, as well as footage of the big tree in the garden of his family home, which became the sole witness of his uncle’s murder. “By combining this footage with a video of Acapulco's highway where my voice can be heard, I explain to my uncle the context that devoured him, and at the same time offer the viewer an entrance into the backstory of this dual place.” As a spectator, you are invited to step into this dark paradise and explore its meaning through your imagination. “‘You enter a suspicious landscape that is seductive and sinister at the same time. Where images allow a transformation from the physical to the psychological, and the other way around, creating a new narrative from a place that was initially presented as a harmonious paradise, but over time became more like hell."
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Acapulco, Mexico
Interview conducted by Lianne Kersten
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Juan Palacios
GEOLOGICAL DRAMA(S)
JUAN PALACIOS
ON LIVING RUINS AND EARTHLY ENTANGLEMENTS
Educated in Environmental Studies and Audio-visual Communication, Juan Palacios (b. 1986, Basque Country, Spain) is a filmmaker based in Amsterdam. With a particular predilection for the boundaries between human culture and the nonhuman, mysticism and materialism, he mostly employs imagery from a natural world to create an alternative universe. His first feature documentary film, Pedaló, was awarded at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, 2016. His second feature film, Meseta (Inland) is a sensorial trip through the empty landscape of Spain. It has been awarded at CPH:DOX 2019, L’Alternativa 2019 and Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro 2019. In 2019 he was part of Berlinale Talents. www.juan-palacios.com juan@juan-palacios.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2020
Still from Permanent Being.
AT THE BEACH WITH THE TECHNO FOSSILS The beach of Tunelboca, which literally translates as “tunnel mouth”, is located at the end of a long underground tunnel that goes all the way to Bilbao, the biggest city in the Basque Country. The purpose of this tunnel was to send Bilbao’s unfiltered sewage straight to the sea, following the old saying “the solution to pollution is dissolution”. The tunnel was in use for almost a century. Back in those days, Bilbao was a very industrial city, well-known for its blast furnace and other big factories, including shipyards. That industry was active for over a century, up until the 1980s. The residues and debris it generated were supposed to be dumped in the deep sea a few miles offshore. However, to save fuel and time, they were just dumped very close to the shore, where the river meets the sea near Tunelboca. Somehow, and it’s not entirely clear how this worked, the bacteria from the Bilbao’s dirty, fecal water combined with the calcium carbonate in seawater to create a particular limestone crystal that up until that time had only existed in the Bahamas. This crystal acted as cement, and along with the sand at the bottom of the sea, it petrified all the debris and residue from the factories. A new kind of stone was formed in the bottom of the sea. Then it was just a matter of time and a few storms, before pieces of this stone surfaced and were brought to the beach by the waves. On the beach today,
there is a roughly four-meter-high layer of solid rock that contains all kinds of material and objects from the industrial days of Bilbao; bricks with dates and names on them, metal pieces, bits of plastic—all turned to stone. These are techno fossils. There is nothing like this documented anywhere else in the world.
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These rocks offer an uncanny image, one that fuels sci-fi speculation. The fossils embedded in them are traces of an epoch that is very familiar to us and our lifestyle. A process that usually takes millions of years is truncated here, foreshortened as if by a wormhole, and we are faced with a temporal paradox; our recent history is fossilized, as if we’ve traveled at the speed of light and came back to Earth a couple of years later only to find out, like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, that our trip took too long and all we knew is now not only gone, but turned to stone.
In recent years, there have been many films dealing with the concept of the Anthropocene. Very often, these films aspire to decenter us from the Anthropocentric view that seems to have corrupted our gaze on the world. In order to do so, they portray a world without humans; the premise is usually that humans have disappeared or gone extinct, or perhaps are just minding their own business somewhere in the background as the non-human takes up the role of protagonist. This removal of the human is done to different degrees; a lonely drone ostensibly piloted by AI takes “random” shots of the frozen landscape of Antarctica, or a tripod-mounted camera captures a series of post-apocalyptic postcards picturing the remains left behind by homo sapiens all over the planet.
JUAN PALACIOS
The Anthropocene presents us with a similar time-travel-oriented mental acrobatics. “We live with the uncanny sense of existing on two timescales simultaneously: everyday actions feeding into processes that extend far beyond our lifetimes.”However, coming to terms with this seems key in order to deal with our current lifestyle’s long-term effects on Earth. “Ecology, after all, is the thinking of beings on a number of different scales, none of which has priority over the other.” But can we engage with other time scales than our own? This almost sci-fi question becomes relevant when it comes to not only understanding the rest of the living and non-living entities we share the planet with but also establishing new alliances with them. “Interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now material for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many
kinds of beings.” In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that in order to survive in the ruins of capitalism we must find ways of collaborating with other species. To do so, we must know what these species need, which other species they can and can’t live with, where they are, and so on. Positive sciences are key to learning these things, as they provide factual knowledge about the entities in question. However, can we engage with them other than on the scientific level? Can storytelling be a way to do this? Can cinema provide a terrain for earthly narrative entanglements?
Still from Permanent Being. Some tourists immortalize their presence with a selfie.
It’s this decentering effect, in favor of engaging with the non-human, that I’m trying to achieve in my research project Permanent Being. However, I don’t think that tackling the question of anthropocentrism means removing the human from the picture. On the contrary, it means embedding the human in the picture to the point that it is just another entity, one equal to the non-human. Yes, it’s about paying
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attention and listening to the non-human, but I see that as a relational matter. The non-human question, as its name indicates, is actually a human question, so removing the anthropos from the picture doesn’t seem like the best way to address it. The non-human exists because of the human and vice versa; not as its opposite, but as what it is not. Each defines the other. The human must stay in the picture.
THE MORE-THAN-HERO When we take the more-than-human into the realm of storytelling, it becomes the more-than-hero. The hero can also be a lion, for instance, true, but we know that the lion will be one whose heroic quest no lion would understand— that is, an anthropomorphic lion more human than anything else. In a traditional story, a hero is minding his own business when he receives the call for adventure. He answers the call, and off he goes on his epic, three-act quest, a search for bounty or an elixir of some sort; in the end, he comes back and redeems the world. But the hero’s journey would be nothing without the soil he walks on or the bushes he hides in. Everything, that is, that allows his story to unfold. A spear, considered the first human tool-weapon, is a big part of this traditional way of telling stories. A hunter-hero goes on a quest to kill prey with his spear, then returns to the cave triumphant. There he tells his story, which will later be retold in many different ways by others. However, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin posits that the first human tool was not a weapon, a spear, but a container of some sort used to carry food or drink water from. This changes the perspective. “If one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-Arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.” Instead of relating a hero’s quest, let’s make a film that tells a multiplicity of stories embedded in a place, in the stones that form the landscape, a container where some particular humans roam. Perhaps instead of having, say, two scientists walking on the coastal stones—as we’ll see later in my
research project—we have rocks, pools, mussels, waves, and humans around. However, the conventions of traditional storytelling won’t make it easy. There is a lot of undoing, unlearning, deindustrializing, and decolonizing to be done in order to tell stories in a different way. Especially in a medium as industrial as the moving image. But what are the cinematic means that allow the hero and the more-than-hero to intertwine? How can we dissolve the hero into his surroundings, to the point that there is no hero and all characters are main characters? PERMANENT BEING The absurdity of the global ecological crisis and the Anthropocene is that they occur on a geological time scale, something humans can barely attempt to grasp. But we can try, and in this project I use different cinematic means to do so. This geological drama takes a different shape. It’s a drama not in the catastrophic sense but in a narrative one, a kind of storytelling whose speculative tentacles are interwoven with the temporality of the stones.
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Still from Permanent Being.
My film Permanent Being is a dramatic exploration of the stories embedded in a flysch—a kind of natural geological formation— on the Basque Coast. In this place, a large part of the history of our planet is literally written in stone. All kinds of global events are recorded in the vertical rock strata of these coastal cliffs: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the inversion of the magnetic poles, and even past global warmings. Each strata is a long-exposure photograph registering the image of a long-gone world. If one day our current time is also turned into stone, how will it be remembered? The film operates on the assumption that these rocks are a sort of memory that records the complex dynamics of not only the transformations of the Earth over eons, but also the memories of those who walk on them. Scientists from all over the world have been coming to the Basque Country to study the different Earth events that happened in the past, in order to understand the future.
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JUAN PALACIOS
Still from Permanent Being. LiDAR scan of the rocks.
They say that these rocks show us that time is cyclical: whatever occurred previously will happen again. Understanding these stones and reconciling with them could therefore be key to the survival of the human race, especially in times of ecological crisis. But in just a few years, from being a secluded place, this geological site has now become a tourist destination. All sorts of visitors interact with these stones everyday, many of them trying to immortalize their presence with a selfie. On the one hand, the rock strata registered “an image” of the world millions of years ago. On the other, a human takes a picture with his cellphone. I’m interested in this strange attempt of proving that one exists by leaving some sort of mark in this world, something that remains. What does this futile but very human attempt of prevailing reveal? Could it just be a profound fear of being forgotten? ACTORS AS SENSITIVE DEVICES While location scouting in the cliffs for a yet non written film, I began to develop the story of Celso, a scientist from a distant future and his helper, Roke—who has an intellectual disability—exploring this geological site. We watch them walk out into the landscape, passing strata after strata. We observe Celso carrying out different scientific calculations, like a ritual we cannot completely comprehend. He takes different rock samples, touching them, scratching them with his fingernails to test their toughness, and making them react to different liquids. He’s looking for something. Roke, in the meantime, has a more intuitive and sensorial way of “measuring” the landscape. We see him mesmerized by the sound of the little pebbles that continuously fall down the cliffs like a waterfall of rocks,
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putting his hand on a tide pool so little fish eat the dead skin from his hand, and urinating on the surface of a strata full of fossils, leaving a visible mark (though just a temporary one, that soon evaporates). If Celso is mind, Roke is heart. I think of these actors as sensitive devices for tapping into the non-human, as tentacles that entangle themselves with the elements of the landscape, organic and otherwise, surfacing a myriad of micro narratives otherwise hidden under strata of traditional storytelling conventions. Vehicles that carry us through the place the film arises from and in which it plays out, that keep us going deeper into the multiplicity of stories, bringing us in and out of different time scales. Actors, by their actions and interactions, dissolve the human scale into that of the rest of the more-than-human beings. Can fiction give agency to the more-than-human? Scientific inquiry itself starts as fiction. That is, a hypothesis that has to be proved right or wrong. In storytelling, the equivalent to that hypothesis is the “what if?” According to what science tells us, the flych’s rock strata are like memories, ones that can be retrieved through different scientific means. For example, by studying the chemistry of a particular strata, geologists can know what the atmosphere of the planet was like back when the sediments that compose that strata were deposited in the bottom of the sea. But what if these rocks could, for instance, also remember a song from the past? This is where science ends and science fiction begins, an extension of our epistemological tools in order to understand the world and give “speculative agency” to the more-than-
There is an aesthetic-conceptual resonance between the point clouds and the materiality of these particular rocks. This geological site is primarily made of limestone, a sedimentary rock made up of very small particles. The LiDAR allows us to immerse ourselves in the physicality of the stone and its particular nature. I am interested in experimenting with the images created with this device in order to create a filmic cleft with the aspiration of reaching closer to the temporal scale of the rocks.
human. No one is saying that those rocks can sing a long-forgotten song. What’s important is that the possibility of them doing so is proposed. Establishing a fictional premise like this gives actors a framework, a context in which to interact with the rocks. The script and the direction are kept open enough so the actors have room to intuitively interact with the elements around them while the camera is rolling. Ideally, the human and non-human elements of the film — that is, Roke, the rocks, the sea anemones, Celso, the sea urchins, and so on — are at the same level of significance in the film. The goal is to contaminate the narrative of the film with the non-human presence of the location.
I wonder if the filmic experience allows us to speculate on modes of being in the world beyond traditional limits of human subjectivity. How can we think from and with the stones? This aspiration may give us a different sort of awareness, an ability “to pay more attention to nonhuman entities, even nonliving entities, and to consider how all these entities are not just tools we use, or impediments to our actions, but ‘actants,’” as the French sociologist Bruno Latour says. “They have their own tendencies, desires, and needs. At a time of impending ecological catastrophe, it is important for us to recognize as fully as possible the presence of the entities that share the world with us.”
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Using software, the LiDAR landscape outlined by the points can be decomposed and re-composed in order to create new abstract or figurative landscapes. The particles can also be made to react to sound. One of the goals is to create a “feedback system” in which the points react to the sounds recorded at the source with different mics—a contact mic placed on the rocks or underwater mics, for example. The millions of virtual points are like the particles that give shape to the sedimentary rocks of the karstik landscape of the Flysch. The aim is to experiment with these point clouds, nudging them towards abstraction in order to dissolve ourselves into the stones like the limestone does in water. This world is one where things just change shape. Still from Permanent Being. LiDAR scan of the rocks.
ARROWS OF TIME Making a film in a non-heroic way means that there is no arrow of time. As the stories of the small and the big (in size) are intertwined, there is a multiplicity of time arrows pointing in all directions, like a disorientated compass. But how can one engage with time scales other than that of the human? I wonder if image-making technology can allow us to do so. At some point in Permanent Being, we see the entrance of a cave defined by millions of white and red points against a black background. This image has been registered with a LiDAR scanner. LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is a technology used in different fields that deal with space, including architecture, geology, and geography. This technology allows one to scan the space and create a cloud of millions of points. This cloud is a virtual environment that represents the space that has been scanned. Each point is geo-referenced in space and one can freely (virtually) move within the scanned terrain.
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Federico Sande Novo
INHABITING UNCERTAINTY FEDERICO SANDE NOVO
JOURNEY TO THE CITY OF LIGHT
Born in Buenos Aires in 1985, Federico Sande Novo graduated at ENERC and worked as a Director of Photography for several years. He gradually undertook the responsibility of developing projects and in 2012 created his own production company, Le Tiro Cine. He worked as a creative producer for a dozen of films with great success in the international film festival scene until 2018. Standing out among them Rara, by Pepa San Martin (Grand Jury Prize in Berlinale 2016) and The Prince, by Sebastian Muñoz (Queer Lion in Venice IFF 2019). The film industry paradigm eventually led to an imbalance between his own desires and responsibilities, and he decided to redirect his career towards a self-driven artistic trajectory in filmmaking. Federico’s research is about the value of experiencing not knowing, and contrasting this to the value of reasoning and theorizing. Playing into the theme of uncertainty, his approach seeks to restore it as the source for filmmaking methodologies that enable him to invest on and harvest from it. In this sense, his research project Journey to the City of Light takes the form of a pilgrim’s diary, as a solution to the problem of making and experiencing simultaneously. At the core of his concerns lay the questioning of the image of the author-in-control that is sometimes rigidly imposed on us. federicosande@gmail.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2020
Federico Sande Novo first ventured to the City of the Light, a village run by a cult high up in the mountains of west Argentina, in December 2017. Once there, he found himself experimenting with the making of a hypothetical film that seemed to change its shape and meaning every day. What followed was a period in which he started to question everything he had learned about filmmaking and authorship thus far. Or as Federico describes it: “My time
at the cult felt like a crisis happening in slow motion. I understood very quickly that what I came to do was never going to happen.�
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FEDERICO SANDE NOVO
MASTER OF FILM 2020
He went there to shoot a film about the controversial spiritual sect his mother belonged to, to experience her beliefs and tell a story that would reflect on the phenomenon of fanaticism. Ever since he was young his mother had moved from one spiritual quest to another and in a way her identity had always felt elusive to him. Initially Federico tried to experience her choices through cinema, by diving into the questions that otherwise felt impossible to ask. But the film soon became about much more than his mother and his relationship with her. In 2018, Federico came to the Master’s programme with, what he describes, the rashes of his time at the cult still on him. He decided to further explore the project and kept working on “finding the film”. The making of Lightseekers became about error and the unpredictable that characterized the project. His mother never showed up in the village to shoot. The people in the cult didn’t cooperate as planned. Federico struggled with his first time working as a director and the surreal surroundings started to play mind tricks on him. To top it off, he realized that after several trips to his mother’s hometown Buenos Aires he still had relatively little footage of her. He abandoned the project for a while, only to return back to it with a
new perspective months later. Federico: “When I was able to take some distance and embrace the flaws of this project, I could turn what initially felt as a problem into a value.” The value of error and the unpredictable changes in his creative process shaped the final form of his film, and sparked the deep ethical concerns he went into. “I learned that error can be something that informs me and that I can use – it is a very expressive tool. Even though it reveals you as a vulnerable author that maybe did not exactly get what he was looking for.” Federico continued his research about the value of experiencing not knowing and contrasting this to the value of reasoning and theorising. In this sense, the outcomes of his research are a sequence of different experiments under one umbrella: the praising of uncertainty as the primordial force that enables creation. Something he dealt with both on a personal level and in his identity as a filmmaker. Working in a field of uncertainty felt like complete unknown territory to Federico, who has a background in film and ran his own production company for years. The process of research through searching for the film meant a huge change in his working paradigm and led him to a deep questioning of his
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FEDERICO SANDE NOVO
Reading back his notes, Federico started viewing not only his film but also his methodology as a pilgrimage with different stops. The answers came through the process, every time he paused. Slowly, what started as a film about two people and their relationship, became an exploration of to what extent cinema can be a tool to have at hand when you enter unknown phenomena and try to understand what others experience. Uncertainty became the driving force of Federico’s work and questions about the quality and direction of the film were a continuous source of adjustment and action. “Only after turning what looks like a weakness into a feature was I able to feel comfortable in my practice and portray what my journey taught me. Something I will take with me in every project I will embark on in the future,” he concludes.
In the end, what did this journey of self transformation teach him about his mother? Federico: “I learned a lot from her values and sensitivity. The film got us closer, to a point that I don’t need to question her anymore – a conclusion I am satisfied with. She became an example and a guide. I now realise she is a researcher herself. She went on her own journey without an ending, looking for something that she can’t fully explain either. I learned a lot from that attitude – to allow yourself to get lost without controlling where you end up.”
Interview conducted by Lianne Kersten MASTER OF FILM 2020
idea of authorship. “As filmmakers, we are trained to portray authorship, to show you are in control, and to be able to explain to others what you want and why. My big lesson was embracing, trusting and allowing myself to be in a state of complete unknowing.” Accompanying his film, Federico published a travel diary with notes he made during his confusing trip to the cult. Precise and personal, they give the reader a tangible insight into the alienating experience he had.
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Sophie Wright REWILDING THE EVERYDAY:
SOPHIE WRIGHT
A CROSSÂ POLLINATION OF STILLNESS & MOTION*
Sophie Wright is a British filmmaker and writer, based in Amsterdam. She has worked in many different roles in the photography world as a writer, editor, curator and creative producer. Using motion as a mode of exploration, her research focuses on developing DIY forms at the interstice of photography and cinema to investigate the ways we tame time, document our experiences and make sense of the world. She works across film, performance, installation and tactile publications. www.a-ga-rd-en.berta.me sophiewright26@gmail.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2020
SOPHIE WRIGHT
Stillness \ stil Adjective Devoid of or abstaining from motion. SEDENTARY. Relating to, or being a static photograph as contrasted with a motion picture. Uttering no sound. QUIET. SUBDUED, MUTED. TRANQUIL.
*...and so? Is it archaic to draw a strict division between the still image and the moving one in the environment we live in today? Look here! They live side-by-side as part of our landscape, silently zipping between one another, sometimes mutating suddenly and without reason. Images born into an agitated world, jettisoned across it in a matter of seconds, quick and weightless, only to lose their importance a few minutes later. You’ve probably even received a few in your pocket whilst reading this, their arrival signalled by your wriggling, restless phone. You’ll probably forget them in a few hours …
Motion mo•tion | \ mō-sh n Noun An act, process, or instance of changing place. MOVEMENT. An active or functioning state or condition. An impulse or inclination of the mind or will. A proposal for action. A melodic change of pitch. STIRRING. TOING AND FROING.
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Photographs + Time + Cinema
My ties to these places were either complicated or non-existent. Strangers inhabiting my space, no connection, but then yes in fact, somehow, part of me. And down to circumstance, there wasn’t much of a tight grip on the when, why, what, how of these objects. Certainly there were attempts to translate things, but there were gaps. After all, stories can be told in many ways, from many perspectives. And each time we tell them, they are reimagined. So these pictures were vaguely irrelevant, kind of fuzzy and above all enigmatic – as most are, if we look properly. Now. As a result of my background as a photographer and a writer (writing about photography) I have to admit I have been unwell with image consumption. These images that dictate and shape our experience of the everyday; the torrent that floods the landscapes of our daily lives. Like elsewhere, the cycle of production and consumption of our times is such that we live among a glut of them: cluttering our phones, piling up in the trash of our laptops, not to mention the old ones piled in boxes and albums. Despite the flood, images are still confidently woven into the fabric of our life stories as evidence that helps us tame time, memorialise fleeting moments and order and make sense of the world. We have become used to the daily shower of flat and floaty pictures, numb to their cycle of distraction and attention. (They really move too quickly to observe their behaviour, let alone focus on one alone.) A common condition it produces is one of passivity. Like you, I had become so accustomed to this constant stream that the way images behaved had little to no effect anymore.
portance? How do they travel, and who takes them where? Why and how do we document our experience of the world? And what emerges when we look for longer? There. In my research, I have tried to cultivate sensory image landscapes – from tactile publications to sensory films, installations and performances – where contradictions, different perspectives and temporalities can play out using the tools of cinema. Places that stretch the fleeting ‘moment’; where you can observe the connections and interactions that grow when we stay longer with the fragments that fill our natural habitats. Places that make use of our personal ‘junk’; that recycle, recollect, renew. With care, strange, hybrid stories and forms can grow that demand we review our process of looking; experiences that waver between past and present, truth(s) and illusion, the perspective of people and things, order and disorder. Places where sometimes it takes being still to set things in motion. Before, during, after. It is in these environments that the possibilities of a single image can grow, inviting us to look from different perspectives. From losing all context and sensing the depths of individual images to zooming out and falling into the web of their relations to all the others, an act of surrender is involved in order for things to reveal themselves over time. Our presence in these climates requires dirty hands, mess and work, as well as a sensitivity to how these images are shaped by, and reactive to, the environment they are placed in. Here, there. My current projects both unfold from two static starting points sourced from my surroundings: a photograph of an eccentric great aunt on the top of Mont Blanc from the Polish side of my family, saved on its way to the trash, and a lamp made with amber – the native gemstone of the Baltic region. Both materials that capture time and motion, both objects enshrouded in myth. From these two seeds, several unwieldy experiences have bloomed, each with their own relation to time and space.
MASTER OF FILM 2020
Then. Growing up in England there were lots of photographs all messed up in boxes. When I was small, they were what I was drawn to more than anything. Especially the ones with anonymous faces. It soon emerged that these objects were fragments of my own family, scattered from across Europe: Poland, Germany (secretly), Russia and Ireland. A common puzzle, but one where the pieces have come into sharper view over the past few years. (Brexit).
Here. The murky crevice where my research desires started: the pursuit of a more active and sensitive relationship to making – and looking at – images, and their many truths. To journey beyond first glance and discover the flurry of invisible actions happening on the outside and inhibit the layers that lay beneath their surface. To experience and tell stories of what they did, how they act on us, how we relate to them. And further down the line, to nurture a curiosity for the overlooked objects and other traces of activity that litter our visual landscape. Now, then. On closer inspection, things become slippery. The image may be fixed, but its meaning isn’t – and its growth in time and space allows a series of problems to surface. Does it belong to ‘now’ or ‘then’? Is it the beginning, the middle or the end of a story? Does it mark an event, a specific point in time and space, or is it a process? Does it change each time it is looked at? Is it complete or is it an ongoing moment? What is its lifespan? How does it relate to the surroundings it lives in? How do things lose and gain im-
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Nie Było Nas, Był Las
SOPHIE WRIGHT
(When We Were Not There, There Was Forest) Short fiction film (WIP)
A collection of trapped moments is discovered in a house by the sea in Poland. An amber lamp, some family albums and a box containing photographs of a woman posing on a mountain, Mont Blanc. A myth passed down from aunt to aunt: “The first woman to reach the peak.” Everything is still and has its place. Or so it seems. As these objects defrost, stories leak into the frame, morphing and breeding into a journey across time between Europe’s highest mountain and the Baltic shore.
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In Vetta
MASTER OF FILM 2020
(On the Top) An ongoing series of live cinema installations made with Giorgia Piffaretti (WIP)
You are about 15,782 feet above the sea. Sparked by a family image marked ‘On the Top’, In Vetta is an investigation into the idea of the ‘ascent’. Searching for the truth about who the first woman to climb Mont Blanc was, I stumbled across an avalanche of fragments from our collective imagination: a ‘natural archive’ at its peak, conserving a bizarre humanimage-nature relation. Together with artist Giorgia Piffaretti, this project has taken the form of several live cinema events, pairing together different ascents across time to build an image-mountain through the traces left behind by various travellers. The shared desire: to ‘conquer’ the peak and etch their arrival into history. This time, the installation at A-lab takes you to the peak itself, drawing on records from the first ever ascents of Mont Blanc to its ‘live view’ today.
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Artistic Research Week |Suspension points (Master of Film Graduation Show) is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 2-5 October 2020 Generously supported by festival partner Keep an Eye Foundation Master of Film, Netherlands Film Academy Director Netherlands Film Academy Bart Römer Programme Director Master of Film Mieke Bernink Coordinator Master of Film Kris Dekkers Programme Coordinator Sabien Schütte Mentors Sander Blom, Wineke van Muiswinkel Interviews Lianne Kersten Curator Maaike Gouwenberg Design Dog and Pony
Jazz, fine arts, film, photography, design, fashion… We are keeping an eye on talented young artists. By providing grants and awards we are assisting the brightest musicians, artists, designers and filmmakers to develop their talents, create new opportunities and above all, to achieve their creative goals. www.keepaneye.nl KEEP AN EYE
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