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30th November| Saturday | 2:00pm | 57mins | MMB
SPECIAL FOCUS – JAPAN
RECIPES FROM THE JAPANESE KITCHEN
Curated by Chris Gehman
1. Ito Takashi ‘Zone’ Japan 1995 16mm 13 minutes
Later in his career, Ito’s practice shifted from one based on the exploration of representational space, and influenced by structural cinema, to one in which these explorations have a psychological basis. Many of these later works have an affinity with the refined surrealism of the American-born, UK-based animators the Brothers Quay, but they also connect to horror cinema, and films such as Zone may have had some influence on the more subtle films of the recent “J-Horror” genre of Japanese horror films. Zone combines animation with live-action footage to create a claustrophobic portrait of a headless figure trapped in a room haunted by uncanny objects and floating images. An ominous dreamscape.
2. Tabaimo ‘Japanese Kitchen: Three Stories’ Japan 2000 video 9 minutes
“There are many problems in Japan and I am doing nothing about them” (Tabaimo). Upon winning the Kirin Contemporary Art Award in 1999, Tabaimo made an almost instant transition from recent art-school graduate to international star. Her animations are mostly made to be viewed within specially constructed architectural environments, but this variation on the animations made for her installation Japanese Kitchen was commissioned for television and exists as a stand-alone video. Using a deadpan surrealism, Tabaimo explores the anxieties and tensions underlying everyday life in Japan, with the average Japanese represented here by a rather lumpen housewife cooking according to televised instructions.
3. Keiichi Tanaami & Aihara Nobuhiro ‘Inch-High Samurai’ Japan 2007 16mm 8 minutes
Tanaami Keiichi is a famous and incredibly productive graphic artist, filmmaker and animator, the artist primarily responsible for bringing pop and psychedelic styles to Japanese graphic arts. He made many animations in collaboration with his late friend and colleague Aihara Nobuhiro. In Inch-High Samurai, the two artists indulge their memories of a series of picture books published when they were young, reviving in their own wild style the feelings they remembered from reading these books: “In every book there was enough latent eroticism, horror and malice to make you shiver… We wanted to somehow recreate the surrealistic shock we experienced in our youth” T. K. & A. N.
4. Tsuji Naoyuki ‘Children of Shadows’ Japan 2006 16mm 18 minutes
In this film, Tsuji Naoyuki also takes inspiration from stories remembered from childhood – he refers to it as a short film “based on a fairy tale by Grimm, contain[ing] a similar atmosphere to 1970s nonsense manga.” Here Tsuji reimagines the story of “Hansel and Gretel” as a series of harrowing episodes involving a boy and girl who are threatened first by their own father, and then, upon escaping their home, by a number of other menacing figures. In its own grotesque way, at its own deliberate pace, the film becomes a powerful parable about transformation and survival.
5. Takamine Tadasu ‘God Bless America’ Japan 2002 video 9 minutes
Notorious performance, video and visual artists Takamine Tadasu (formerly of the performance group Dumb Type) has worked in many media. In this unique animation performance, Takamine and his lovely assistant shared a room with a huge clay face for eighteen consecutive days. Before the eye of the camera, they ate, slept, read, made love and made continuous changes to the face, animating it to synchronize with a scratchy, halting recording of the old American patriotic song “God Bless America.” This video is Takamine’s oblique response to the American invasion of Iraq that was impending in 2002.
30th November| Saturday | 3:30pm | 73mins | MMB
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 3
1. Nobu Adilman ‘A+’ Canada 2012 video 6 min
A+ was commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, and completed in January 2012.The film documents an exceptional diary kept by Moen Mohamed, a dedicated cinema lover who lives in Toronto. Cinema finds its accounts in an uncommon ledger, whose lines and tabulations conceal the greatest love of all.
2. Karl Mendonca ‘Desh Vidhesh (Travels Abroad)’ USA 2013 video 7 min
Shot on Super 8 over six years, Desh Videsh is a biographical diary film that explores the themes of migration, identity and belonging.
3. Anuradha Chandra ‘Pulse’ India 2013 16 mm 15 min
Pulse explores the interplay between the pin-hole and different film speeds. The film harks back to the early days of photography, when long exposures were required to record images that made human activity scarce or only recorded as a trace in the cityscape or landscape. This project creates a record of the felt time or lived time of a space.
4. Joe Hambleton ‘Days of Future Past’ Canada 2012 video 8 min
Trapped in a rut. Unable to say what I wish to say. I look to Burroughs for an answer. Video is cut up, randomly selected and interwoven with objects from my travels. My process is changed, memories are stirred. Visions of the future appear, a narrative forms. My fears and insecurity about the future come to fruition through an understanding of the past. Together they create a realization of my present. These are my Days of Future Past. Days of Future Past is an experimental video work that utilizes the technique described above in an attempt to alter my process of filmmaking. Multiple scenes were shot across Windsor and Detroit and then randomly selected and organized, creating the structure and tone of the work. During this time, I also began to pick up any objects that had the potential to stir up memories. I imposed these objects onto the original footage as a reference point in each scene’s narrative. Through this process, a realization of the present became strongly apparent within the work.
5. The Youngrrr ‘Another Colour TV’ Indonesia 2013 video 9 min
Another Colour TV is a documentary film showing the interactions of a family in front of their television, a tool used mostly to escape reality. This film captures a real situation of economic and cultural condition in a suburban family of Indonesia.
6. Pallavi Paul ‘Nayi Kheti’ India 2012 video 11 min
In the piece ‘Nayi Kheti’ (New Harvest) I have tried to create three impossible, unfeasible conversations. Taken from the fascinating anarchic text ‘After Lorca’, poet Jack Spicer writes to Garcia Lorca nearly twenty years after his death and unlike the book, in the video, amidst relentless velocity of images and sounds, Lorca has to write back. Simultaneously, Paul Henningson, credited with the invention of the pH lamp speaks about the desire of the scientist to reverse the rhythm of the day and the night and reflects on how that dream lacks creativity, because ordained laws of creation too must be challenged. Caught within this question of light and darkness is the image of cinema itself. It has now been scratched out, cut open and remade to the extent that what now exists is only a trail of what we recognized as the filmic. Located as a witness to all these metaphysical, scientific and aesthetic exchanges are the poems of Vidrohi, a vagabond political poet. Nayi Kheti, is not about the persona of Vidrohi, rather I attempt to use his poems as a kind of “dis-location” to test the tensile strength of resistance as a material of life.
7. Scott Miller Berry ‘Ars Memorativa’ Canada 2013 video 20 min
Ars Memorativa is an experimental documentary in four chapters that examines what is left behind when someone passes away and how memory traces emerge from the remaining artifacts and memories. The four people intersected with the directors life in a variety of ways and their stories are shared in a mix of forms: hand processed celluloid, digital animation, audio interview and home movies.
30th November| Saturday | 8pm |
IMPROVISED SOUND – INSTRUMENTS AND MUSIC
Live Performance by Akio Suzuki/ Aki Onda/ Niki Neeke/ Indian Sonic Research Organisation
Akio Suzuki
A legendary Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki has been performing, building instruments, and presenting sound installations for nearly 40 years. His music is simple and pure, exploring how natural atmospheres and sounds can be harnessed and then set free. To experience his art is to lose oneself in the sound that surrounds us. Akio performs on a range of unique self-made instruments including Analapos – an instrument he invented in the 1970s that creates echoes through the acoustic transmissions of a spiral cord stretched between two metal cylinders, De Koolmees – consisting of hollow glass tubes suspended over a frame, and an ancient stone flute (Iwabue) passed down through his family for many generations. Akio has collaborated with artists such as Toru Takemitsu, Takehisa Kosugi, Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Steve Lacy and John Butcher.
Aki Onda
Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. Aki was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by himself over a span of two decades. Aki’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In recent years, Aki often works in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers, choreographers and visual artists. He has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Lionel Marchetti, Linda Sharrock, and Blixa Bargeld.
Niki Neecke
Niki Neeke has studied classical music, took courses at the School for Art and Design in Basel 93/94 and graduated in Audio-Design in the Elektronic Studio at the School of Music in Basel. Niki works does sound design, music composition and production for silent films, video installations and theater. Niki Neeke performs with his band ‘Octopus’, and in Autonomous Orchestra’ with circuit bent instruments. Also, together with Gilbert Engelhard he designs sound installations that are presented under the label of SONOgames. Niki Neeke has also designed the sound for the ‘Remote Berlin’ series with Berlin based theatre group Rimini Protokol. While in Bangalore, he will also be designing the ‘Remote Bangalore’ performance
Indian Sonic Research Organisation (ISRO)
The Indian Sonic Research Organisation is a collective of artists, musicians, designers, hackers and scientists. They conduct free workshops, clinics and public concerts, and welcome collaborations and offer residencies as well. ISRO also runs a record label which disseminates works by South Asian and South East Asian composers, sound artists and musicians. https://www.theisro.org/
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