Surface Tension

How should we reason about analogue film today, its political and poetic dimensions, its resistance and liberating powers, when all discussions seem to be about its imminent end? An end which, according to many, is already a fact. Despite this, younger generations continue to shoot on Super 8 mm or 16 mm film, in dialogue with a tradition, as well as to explore, here and now, the materiality of analogue film, its unique material properties, light sensitivity, and what possibilities its limitations invite. Two wide-ranging programs, one consisting of classic films projected in 16 mm, the other with both older and contemporary works projected digitally but filmed on analogue formats will hopefully activate several of these questions, and demonstrate analogue film’s continued relevance and its important role moving into the future of film.

From fairly varied points of departure, one could say that the films in this programme are concerned with the film’s relationship between surface and depth, but also between inner and outer dimensions. It can be about studies of facades, urban and spatial surface layers, or the surface effects of the analogue film material. In Too Close Too Far, Elke Marhöfer films a Japanese home and its objects, but all the time with intense movement towards an outside, where sound becomes a binding factor. Tinne Zenner’s and Eva La Cour’s Honeycomb Image/Archive Cladding is named after the technique used in the facade restoration of marble, the marble that the Danes often took from Greenland. Their film – consisting of both archival film and new 16 mm material – examines the history and contemporary use of the material via, among other things, strikes and labour uprisings. Djouhra Abouda’s and Alain Bonnamy’s Algérie Couleure is a tribute to the teeming colours of the urban city and its surfaces accompanied by a soundtrack which initially contains Arabic music and then gradually transitions into free jazz. Alexandra Cuesta’s Lungta is a structuralist material study with remarkable colour scales where a couple of seconds of shot material is stretched out to ten hypnotic minutes of image and sound. Danish composer and artist Knud Viktor’s Akvarel studies the vibrations, light and change of movement of the water surface in interaction with his own sound art.

Curator: Martin Grennberger

Screened:
SAT 29/10, 15:00 FYRIS