|
Emmanuelle Antille
born in 1972, lives and works in Switzerland.
Her movies and video projects are intimate fictions staging mothers and daughters, friends, lovers. The near melodramatic situations, lovers’s stories or family’s stories, like «Night for Day» (2001), are overrated, shot and edited in a peculiar way, generating a feeling of oddness. Often screened in specific situations/installations, Emmanuelle Antille’s works can also be watched in a classic screening room, as it will be the case during the Biennial of moving images. Her work is constantly questionning the permeable relations between dream, illusion and reality and the development of discrepancies: «Through their ritual quality, the repetitions of absolutely banal gestures, like washing one’s hands or stroking oneself, turn into something else, something that’s no longer normal. It’s this drift beyond the clichés and beyond normal understanding, from the ordinary towards an uncontrollable universe that’s no longer political or moral - that’s what interests me.» E.A
Lee’s Season, 2001, 26’, DVD
Four young men and women are together in an isolated chalet near lake Geneva. Their gestures as well as the way they are dressed are slightly special, almost porn-chic. They all dream the same dream at the same time, and this dream shifts into reality, little by little washing away the borderline. The gestures and attitudes become more and more erotic, tender and cruel, and generate a tense ambiguity between onirism and orgy. The spectator watches a kind of melting up of young bodies that are sexualy not yet clearly defined.
Lee’s Season
Night For Day, 2000, 23’, DVD
A daughter and a mother staging their ambigouus love, revealed through seemingly simple gestures during a morning-breakfast-in-bed scene. Wavering between tenderness and concealed cruelty, the first tender hugs turn into ambiguous kisses (when the mother starts to bite the pulp of her daughter’s thighs). Repetition creates a discrepancy, so that so-called normal elements slide towards signs of odness. This causes the represented reality to become derailed. Through her exploration of the feminine/female world, Antille creates genuinely female characters: no woman’s role written by men, no traditional mother/daughter competition. In the dark rooms which are gradually turning white, the sensuality of intimate rituals turns into funny cruelty.
Wouldn’t it be Nice, 1999, 13’, DVD
Everthing begins like a typical Sunday, with the car ride to the artist’s parents’ home. After greetings and huggings, alchools are poured, but the normal gestures increasingly reveal their concealed odness, secret fantasies and veiled violence. The confusion becomes even more inense when we discover that this home video’s characters are members of the artist’s own family...
Atlas Group/Walid Ra’ad
Born in Lebanon (Chabanieh) in 1967, lives and works in New York.
Winner of the Grand Prix de la Ville de Genève at the 8th Biennial of Moving Images in 1999.
The artist works under the name of an imaginary foundation, The Atlas Group, of which he is the Executive Director. The Atlas Group is a non-profit visual and cultural research foundation established in 1977 in Beirut, to conduct and to facilitate research on the contemporary history of Lebanon.
«The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents from the Atlas Group Archive», 2001, 80’, performance
Atlas Group presents a performance including slides, video and a question and answer session. the artist will screen videotapes (The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs), films, notebooks and photographs as documents authored by imaginary figures (such as historian, Fadl Fakhouri, or ex-hostage, Souheil Bachar) or by anonymous figures (as is the case with the works titled, Secrets in the Open Sea, and I think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep).
Tobias Bernstrup
Born Sweden in 1972, lives and works in Berlin.
Tobias Bernstrup uses computer game software, which he manipulates and transfers into new mediums like videos, performances and photo prints. By using software patches and editing tools for computer games he builds up his own game environments with their own unique interiors, textures and characters. In his video tapes, Bernstrup is often music oriented, performing concerts, documenting the cultural construction of the pop-star; he also produces monochrome PVC paintings, 3D animations, pointing at his fascination with artificial materials and behaviours. The Biennial will show his animation videos, inspired by video games environments.
Untitled (Friedrich Passage), 2001, 6’30, DVD-loop
Computer animation, where the camera slowly moves through an empty and desolated fancy shopping interior inspired by the textures of Friedstadt Passage in former East Berlin. The animation was made by importing photos, rebuilding the architecture into the computer game engine
of Half-Life (by Sierra 1998).
Penthouse Idle
Tobias Bernstrup has used game software to build up the environment of a fancy penthouse with a swimming pool. Like in several of his earlier works in various mediums as videos, performances and music there is a fascination for artificial surfaces, fetishes, fiction and transgender themes. The virtual cityscape where everything takes place is a «Generic City» (like Rem Koolhaas’), a city without quality, without identity, a typically fictional city, the image of the city as a city. The interiors as well as their colors and texture details are reminders of the horror movies, and travellings are clearly referring to Kubrick’s «The Shining».
T. B. Tonight Live, 2000, 4’24, DVD-loop
A computer animated S/M-club where the artist appears as one of the characters performing the soundtrack of the video on stage. This animation was made by importing new skins for the characters and building a new environment for the computer game Sin (by Activision 1998).
Untitled (Super Twins, documentation), 1999, 14’, DVD-loop
Untitled (Super Twins, video), 1999, 30’, DVD-loop
Two videos in a intimate documentatary style about the two "Super Twins" sisters, while they are recording their 80s euro pop, which they later performs in the 2nd video; wearing strong make up, dressed up in glossy-PVC and stiletto boots. Like in the other later works by Tobias Bernstrup this works shows a specific interest for artificial surfaces, crossgender, voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Alexandre Bianchini
Born in 1966, lives and works in Geneva
Alexandre Bianchini made drawings and collages, super-8 films and installations before he started with more cineman oriented projects. «Le chemins des fins» (1998) «Les mystères de l’ouest» (1999) and «Do you remember Tino Ranch» (1999) were large screen installations in dark rooms. Editing is for Bianchini a new form of collage, making frequent use of filmed photographs and always mixing several levels of reference, going from intimate images shot with friends to TV or feature-films excerpts.
Alexandre Bianchini also shows an installation at the Biennial exhibition at Mamco.
The Undiscovered Country, 2001, ca. 55’, vidéo
The story centers on the late-night ramblings of three characters, two men and a woman, who wander from onne improbable place to anoher, appartment, street, playground, pool hall, bar, the shore of a lake. They soliloquize, walk, drink and smoke for no apparent reason. The video’s sequences play one after the other, regularly punctuated by still shots of images «found» at the locations where Bianchini was filming his story: postcards, thumbtacks stuck in the wall, paintings in an appartment and posters. Finally, interwoven throughout the snippets of dialog, various off-camera voices recounting in English bits and pieces of Bob Marley’s life are heard. The film is a collage of short sketches, elliptically edited. Althought this is a very cinema-like project, Bianchnini insists on taking it as an artist’s work, far from the movie-industry productions patterns.
Brice Dellsperger
Born in 1972, lives and works in Paris.
Brice Dellsperger’s video work, the «Body Double» series, is on the edge of remake, plagiat and artistic use of cinema as a cultural object. The series is based on the use of soundtracks of famous feature films (like Hitchcock’s «Psycho» and Brian de Palma’s «Body Double», «Dressed to Kill», or Gus van Sant’s «My Own Privat Idaho»); friends of the artist, often transvestites, re-play the scenes. The acme of the series is «Body Double X», where only one actor (the French artist Jean-Luc Verna) plays all the parts (based on «L’important c’est d’aimer» by Zulawski); this very radical and funny work underlines the mechanisms of drama. Substituting his doubles in the game of the actors, Brice Dellpserger disturbs the well known characters of the heroes in the story. Specialist in the art of imitation and artifice, he dissects and analyzes each gesture and each shot before reactivating it in its new context.
Body Double 5, 1996, 5’, vidéo
In this video Dellsperger plays the two characters in the scene of pursuit and seduction in the MOMA from «Dressed to Kill». The sequence was shot at the Eurodisney resort near Paris. Dellsperger shot and edited this pursuit sequence a number of times (for example also in “Body Double 15”), clearing away the anecdotal narrative, extricating a simplified action, showing how the same forms produce in some way the same effects.
Body Double X, 2000, 115’, vidéo
In some respects the culmination of this series of works, since one actor (Jean-Luc Verna) plays all of the roles in Zulawski’s film «L’imporant c’est d’aimer». After two years of work and tinkering around, with a shaky film set, travelling in a wheelchair, Dellsperger recaptured shot for shot the original film in a process of recovery. From Romy Schneider to Jaques Dutronc, and in passing, Klaus Kinski, Verna redoubles himself to excess, amassing mimicry and make-up, defying identification, creating growing confusion in the soul of the spectator. The result is a film that is strange and avant-garde, which sheds an extraordinary light on the dramatic mechanisms of character identification. The artist confides: “We wanted to empty out the fiction, pump all the energy out of the film. It was to be nothing more than an empty envelope. But it’s very difficult to say who produces which effect, Jean-Luc, me, the voice of Romy Schneider behind the face of Jean-Luc, or whatever it is that people keep as souvenir of the life of Romy.”
Body Double 14, 2000, 4’30, video,
Based on My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant. Remake of a scene of camping and sitting around a fire, both charachters are played by Sophie Lesne.
Body Double 15, 2001, 9’, vidéo
Dellsperger enters the shoes of heroines from Dressed to Kill by Brian de Palma. He says: “A film runs in a single direction, it manipulates the eye from beginning to end. This is particularly true in the films of Brian de Palma, often shot with a subjective camera. I wanted to reverse this strategy which puts the spectator in a very passive position. ”The video maker takes up again the scene of pursuit and seduction at the MOMA, he interprets the two characters himself. The scene is shot in the exhibition rooms holding the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art at Wiesbaden, Germany.
Body Double 17, 2001, 15’, vidéo, work in progress.
Based on Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me by David Lynch.
The scene is a discotheque, several characters are played by Morgane and Gwen Rousseau. It was shot at the ENBA in Bourges in September 2001. ”Most of the cinematic production exploits some codes repeating themselves endlessly. I try to recuperate this stock of clichés which turns around itself. I’m only carrying further a process which was started by the cinema itself.”explains the artist.
Body Double 15
Derek Jarman/Brian Eno
Brian Eno is a great artist, musician, compositor and a pionneer of experimental music.was a founder member of Roxy Music, manipulating sounds on their debut album and the legendary For Your Pleasure. Leaving Roxy Music in 1973, he began his solo career with the album Here Come The Warm Jets. Eno has released a string of critically acclaimed records, and over the years his work has been compiled on two 'Best Of's and three Boxed Sets. As well as Eno's own albums, he has collaborated with the likes of John Cale, Nico, Robert Fripp and the band James. His co-writing and playing on David Bowie's Low, Heroes and Lodger helped define the sound of this classic trilogy. After having produced U2's The Joshua Tree, Unforgettable Fire, Zooropa and Achtung Baby, he formed a loose collective with members of theband and other artists (including Luciano Pavarotti and Howie B.) Brian Eno is also one of the most significant record producers of our age. His ability to steer artists into radical new areas was first made obvious on the three albums he made with Talking Heads, culminating in Remain in Light in 1980. By this time he had also produced the seminal compilation of New York's New Wave, No New York, and Devo's Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. A pioneer in tape-looping and other early forms of sonic manipulation, Eno's work with Robert Fripp in the early 1970s (No Pussyfooting and Evening Star), signalled a determination to look beyond the conventional song format. His unusual, strategic approach to music-making (more likely to involve drawing a diagram than writing down chord changes) was made clear with the 1975 publication of Oblique Strategies - a set of problem-solving cards for artists. Bringing the ideas of John Cage to a pop audience, the true significance of Eno's landmark ambient releases (including Music for Airports and Thursday Afternoon) only became apparent in the early 1990s when ambient exploded into the charts and into a range of new hybrid musical forms. Eno also pioneered sampling and the use of found sounds on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne released in 1981; again it would be some years before the rest of the world fully cottoned on to these ideas. Eno's instrumental works continue, with The Shutov Assembly released in1992 and the minimal masterpiece Neroli in 1993. His composition for Derek Jarman's Glitterbug soundtrack was processed by Jah Wobble and released as Spinner in October '95.
Glitterbug, 1994, 60’, 35mm, couleur, sans paroles.
Dir: Derek Jarman, editing: Andy Crabb, music: Brian Eno Int.: Andrew Logan, William S. Burroughs, Genesis P-Orridge Prod.: James Mackay
A montage film of Jarman’s Super 8 footage from 1970 to 1986, with music specially composed by Brian Eno. It is a portrait of Jarman the artist and his milieu. This home-movie is for Jarman «the centre of my film making, perhaps more interesting than the feature films».
“Glitterbug” became the British filmmaker Derek Jarman's last film. He kept a frantic working pace before tragically dying of AIDS in early spring 1994. The feature film “Wittgenstein” (1993), a brilliant biographical film about the Austrian philosophical genius based on a script by the professor of literature Terry Eagleton, opened in the spring of 1993, and in the autumn of the same year Jarman screened his fascinating film “Blue”, an immobile blue screen inspired by the French painter Yves Klein, accompanied only by an all the more lively soundtrack with dazzling dialogue and emotional music by Simon Fisher Turner. The monochrome, immobile image was in the end a metaphor for Jarman's own state of being: the blindness caused by his devastating illness. “Glitterbug” consists of film strips shot by Jarman with his Super-8 between 1971 and 1986, a format he was constantly experimenting with and made use of in the film collage “In the Shadow of the Sun” (1981) for example, it is an endless montage of loosely connected Super-8 sequences put together alternatively into an impressionistic shimmer of beauty, alternatively with an aggressive, rhetorical edge. Jarman's most distinct feature was his constant role as a man against the tide his attacks against anything considered to be part of the Establishment, whether it concerned sexual preferences or political power structures. The boldness reappears in “Glitterbug”, where images from Jarman's own everyday life in London in the early 70's, with rooms filled with anti-cultural fetishes from the Swinging London era, are mixed with various documentaries from the making of some of Jarman's notorious successes: the gay film “Sebastiane” (1975) and the punk protest “Jubilee” (1977). Sometimes everything takes place in slow-motion, sometimes in fast-motion, always accompanied by Brian Eno's expressive synthesizer loops. On the whole the combination Jarman and Eno, seem to be a perfect symbiosis of a bygone era, the early seventies with its bold mixture of styles and elements of camp. Some of the series of images shows a more lyrical documentary side to Jarman, the brilliantly colourful shots from the sublimely beautiful rolling countryside surrounding Stonehenge in the west of England, or the pictures of Antonio Gaudi's uncompleted cathedral Sagrada Famiglia in Barcelona, a fantastic building where fallic towers and pinnacles where no doubt seen by Jarman as a suitable monument for the homosexual love he spent his life trying to portray.
Sharon Lockhart
Born in Norwood , Massachussetts in 1964, lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photographer and filmmaker, born 1964 in Norwood (Massachussetts), Sharon Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles. She gained attention in the mid 1990s for her large-scale photographs that intimate narrative in their subtle depictions of figures and landscapes. She uses the (cine)camera to record images. These images she makes her own by staging every aspect of them; the lighting, casting of the personages, placing of the objects and composition of the setting are all precisely thought out and weighed up. Lockhart is searching for a balance between staging (what should the photographer fix, how should she bring out a certain aspect) and the seemingly natural poses of people in their own surroundings. Here people, objects and settings say much about the lives of the subjects, their relationships and enthusiasms. Today she focuses specifically on cross-cultural issues, and has made numerous works in Amazonia. For the Brazil project, the artist worked with two anthropologists to examine the cultural gaze as it is framed by anthropology and ethnography. Photographs and film were inspired by the communities that once supported a flourishing rubber-production industry which in its heyday afforded Manaus, Amazonas' opulent late 19th century opera house: the Teatro Amazonas. Lockhart's film of the same name offers a portrait of the city via an audience of its inhabitants .
Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence, 1994,16’, 16mm
In her short film Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence, Lockhart sets up three discrete parts of the film to conjure various psychological responses. The film begins with two clinical presentations of fake scars and wounds as they multiply and move on the bodies of two young boys, and it concludes with a scripted rereading of a scene from John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence.The first two segments suggest Andy Warhol’s Screen Test films (1963-66) in their banally singular focus on particular individual. A discomforting empathy emerges within the viewer for the scarified boys. This feeling begins to wane, once it is revealed that Shaun is enjoying the process of controlling the placement of the makeup. Forecasting the further complication of viewer’s expectations, the single piano tones that separate the credits in the first two segments become a morose melody introducing the final segment. What exists in the Cassavetes film as a heartbreaking scene- a show of affection between a mother returned from a mental institution and her son- is startingly unsettled by the presence of Schaun (still in grotesque makeup). The almost affectless an dawkward reading of the scene heigntens the viewer’s sense of detachment, yet the strangely moving words and gestures of the actors retain the emotional impact of the film.
From Sharon Lockhart, an essay By Dominic Molon & Norman Bryson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2001
Goshogoaka 1997,63’,16mm
In 1996 Lockhart was awarded a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to spend three months in Japan. While there, she made her first feature film,Goshogoaka . Goshogaoka is a suburban junior high school outside of Tokyo with a girl's basketball team, and Lockhart's film records the systematic, artful, athletic drills enacted by the girls, revealing issues of corporeal discipline, masculinity/femininity and the individual versus the group.
Directors statement about her film: “I am interested in uneasy relationship between truth and fiction that cinema creates and, in particular, how this relation ship becomes even more strained in documentary and ethnographic films. For my film Goshogaoka, I took an extended look at Japanese culture through the peculiar filter of an American sporting event: basketball. This created an unusual context for an ethnographic investigation especially when it was combined with the fictional element of choreography. I worked with a choreographer (Steven Gallaway) to expand upon the everyday movements, exercises, and routones of a junior high school girls basketball team. At the time I wwas interested in the choreographic practice of the dancers assembled in the mid-sixties at the Judson Theater, particularly their emphasis on everyday movements and their examination of the theatrical apparatus (the proscenium and the frame). This non-narrative film has a structuralist framework, establishing a space which functions asa static image, a still photograph, within which the viewer explores temporal changes. Without the certainity a narrative structure provides, the viewer is forced to assume an active role, which produces a prolonged state of contemplation and individual interpretation of one culture looking at another”
Teatro Amazonas, 1999, 40’, 35mm
Teatro Amazonas was shot in the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil in June of 1999. The film might be considered a literal interpretation of the idea of “one culture looking at another.” In this case the culture we are looking at is that of the inhabitants of the city of Manaus : Lockhart filled the seats of the 102 year old opera house, with a cross section of the region’s indigenous and European population and filmed them, an attentive audience, from the theater’s stage. Photographed from a stationary camera position in one unedited twenty nine minute take the audience listens to a live performance by the Choral do Amazonas.The musical score, an original composition written dy the California composer Becky Allen, begins with a solid chordal mass which gradually reduces to silence over 24 minutes using the mathematical model of a cone. As the sound of the choir diminishes, the audience sound rises and fills the space. Lockhart also incorporates the sound of the audience moving in their seats, their conversations with each other, even a baby's cry. The result is both an anthropological and artistic tour de force. By locating the film in the Theatro Amazonas and populating it with an audience that is representative of each bairro in the city of Manaus, Lockhart dispenses with the standard practice of ethnographic documentary by resisting the temptation to have her cast perform their tasks of daily life. Finding them instead, engaged in the relatively leisured activity of observers. Lockhart frees the film from the strict moorings of cultural observation and allows it to float into a less articulate, more visceral and thus more filmic sense of time and space.
Teatro Amazonas
Christian Marclay
Born in 1955 , lives and works in the United States.
Since the 70’s, uses all sorts of audio recording and transmitting materials, as well as detritus from the music industry to construct his collages and his performances; he used to perform in art centres and in clubs long before scratching and DJs became fashionable; he is a fully skilled musician, has recorded many cd or vinyle disks, while continuously working visually, producing sculptures, collages or photographs. He will show an installation at the Mamco and screen his video tapes at the Centre for Contemporary Images during the Biennial.
“ The intimate relationship between the visual record and recorded sound is the driving force of his art. But tied to that fundamental dialectic is another: that of personal space and public performance. from the pillow woven out of audiotape containing the complete recorded works of the Beatles to hhis teenage-bedroom fantasy poster of himself as arock star, Marclay has returned again and again to the place where private listening shades into public performance, and vice versa.” (Russel Ferguson, in Le son du silence, catalogue of «Amplification»)
Record Players, 1984, 5’, VHS
In «Record Players» New York multi-media artist and vinyl saboteur Marclay with a group of almost anonymous players including Zed, Shelley Silver, and Pat Hearn are using records as instruments: vinyl records are scratched, rubbed together, broken - everything but played on a turntable - and the forest of sounds beautifully matches the dense images of bodies and discs.
Ghost (I don't live today) 1985, 5’, VHS ou DVD
From a performance at the Kitchen made for video in homage to Jimi Hendrix. The crazed intensity of Marclay's live performances is also captured, for which he strums a phonograph as if it were a guitar..
Téléphones, 1995, 7’30, DVD
Telephones is a video work which utlizes an archive of film clips from Hollywood film history, recreating the scenario of the human encounter with the telephone in all its manifestations. This work was included in the Venice Biennale in 1999.
Up and Out, 1998, 110’, DVD
For Up and Out, a single-channel video in which Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) collides with Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), the artist imposes the sound of one film onto another, creating a peculiar remix of both. As is the conceptual basis of Marclay’s art practice, Cinema pays equal attention to our perceptions of sound and visual representation. On the other hand, his work reveals an interest in aspects of the audio track in feature filmmaking and in the predominance of the visual over the auditory in our culture. In Up and Out, the soundtrack of Brian De Palma's Blow Out is laid over the visuals of Antonioni's classic Blowup . The driving force behind each of these suspense narratives is a clue to solving a murder. In Blowup the clue lies buried in a photograph while in Blow Out it is found recorded on tape. Marclay complicates interpretations of both films while creating an entirely new experience where the visual and auditory elements are perceived at times autonomously and at other times in apparent synchronization.
Installations at MAMCO: Guitar Drag, 2000, 14’, loop, DVD, Mixed Reviews (American Sign Language), 1999/2001, 30’, loop, DVD
All works are Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC
Jeff Mills
Born in Detroit, lives in the USA (New York & Chicago)
Présence exceptionnelle le mercredi 7 novembre à 20h30 de Jeff Mills, pour la projection unique de son projet musical sur le film de Fritz Lang Metropolis, projection suivie d'un débat.
Appearing in the late 80's as radio DJ The Wizard and the mastermind in The Final Cut, Jeff Mills took up the heritage of the techno fathers Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May, inaugurating the next sound generation of Detroit. Mills characterized the new Detroit sound like no one else; together with Mike Banks (and later also with Robert "The Vision" Hood) he founded Underground Resistance label, and brought the Detroit Techno sound of the early 90's into the clubs and onto turntables all over the world. Apart from his work in the studio, Jeff Mills also constantly maintained his DJ-career, thus he was able to pursue the actual party movement worldwide but he eventually followed New York's "call" and installed himself in one of Manhattan's largest clubs: the Limelight. He recorded Waveform Transmissions Vol. 1 in 1992. This landmark release was his first solo album revealing the state of Electronic Music in 1992 and providing important hints for the future of the genre at the same time. Jeff Mills began the 90's founding his own Axis Records label releasing futuristic, experimental sounds; a mark which continues to influence Techno producers worldwide.
"As barriers fall around the world, the need to understand others and the way they live, think and dream is a task nearly impossible to imagine without theory and explanation. And as we approach the next century with hope and prosperity, this need soon becomes a neccessity rather than a recreational urge. Theories and subjects of substance is the elementary element that fuels the minds within our AXIS."
In 2000 Jeff Mills created a musical piece based on the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang; he then re-edited the film, reducing it to a duration of approximately one hour, based on its new soundtrack.With Metropolis a vital project for a crossover of the genres Techno and Classic film, Jeff Mills continues to lead in new directions.
Selected Discography: Every Dog Has Its Day (2001); Lifellike: Axis Compilation (2001); The Art of Connecting (2001) ; UFO/4ART (2001); Metropolis Pt, 2 (2001) ; Metropolis, "Inspired by Fritz Lang's 1926 motion picture Metropolis (2000) ; From The 21st ; The Circus / Jet Set : Purpose Maker Compilation (2000) ; If / Tango (1999) ; Time Machine "Inspired and noted on the novel Time Machine by H.G. Wells ; Mix-up Vol.2 ; Shifty Disco (1996) ; The Other Day ; Music Man ; Waveform Transmission Vol. 3 (1994) ; Atlantis (1993) ; Waveform Transmission Vol. 2 (1992) ; Waveform Transmission Vol. 1 (1992) Rings Of Saturn (1992).
Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1926
Metropolis, 2000, 60’, vidéo
Inspired by Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis (1926), Mills recorded his own soundtrack of the 21st-Century for the hugely influential film in a transmission of traditional orchestral interpretation into electronic soundtrack matching Langs' master-vision of the Utopian Dream.The 60-minute soundtrack works independently but of course the complete meaning is much better defined in connection with the film sequences Mills was himself inspired by. To visualize his own musical interpretation, Scott Stephanow/Pilot Pictures (Detroit) undethe direction of Jeff Mills re-edited the movie to fit the new soundtrack.
Jeff Mills explains about his project: "In 1926, Fritz Lang's timeless masterpiece, Metropolis, exceeded the laws of morality. With his acute executions of detail and dynamic formation of storytelling, he managed to capture minds and extort acts of passion. Needless to say, his contribution to the advancement of motion pictures was bold enough to create political manifestations of such proportions that the scale of influences have yet to be match by any other film in history. His socialist overtones peered across the line of ethics while at the same time, presented the fruits of capitalism and in their applications. Only by the heart will there be inner peace thus, outer. It seals the fate in this story, a lesson, I hope, should be reissued with time.
It is my intention to reintroduce and educate the theories and ideology of Fritz Lang.'s contribution of Metropolis to the cyber-youth of today. Implying the timeless message of solidarity and the romantising of the perfect world. A Utopian Dream. It seemed fitting that this movie, the movie that shaped the young minds in 1926 be reiterated and re-intergrated at this beginning of our new century. We hope through the advance made in technology and the acute sense of futurism by the youth of today, we can capture the minds and expand the imaginations, the ones that will soon forge and form our new world."
PERFORMANCE RIGHTS ARE PROVIDED COURTESY OF TRANSIT FILM GMBH and FRIEDRICH-WILHELM-MURNAU-STIFTUNG
The CD soundtrack is available via Tresor Records, Berlin (Rec Rec), the Maxi-Single via Axis Records, Chicago
Ana Torfs
Born 1963 in Belgium, lives and works in Brussels.
Among the focusses of her artistic investigations are texts in all forms: documents, theatre, literature… which are articulated in film, installations, video’s photographs, and books. After graduating in Communication Science at the University of Leuven (1986), she studied at the High Institute for Visual Arts, St. Lukas, Brussels (1986-1990). Between 1990-1993, she made 3 commissioned video-essays (Akarova-Baugniet, l’entre-deux-guerres; Background (infinite), and Mozartmaterial) in co-direction with Jurgen Persijn, before creating the video-installation Il Combattimento (produced by Antwerp 93, Cultural Capital of Europ in 1993), which was selected a.o. for the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon in 1995. In 1994 she started with the research for her 35mm-film Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten (Cycle of Trifles/Cycle des Bagatelles) which premiered in 1998. While the film was being made, photos were taken in view of composing a book, Beethoven’s Nephew, published by Yves Gevaert in 1999. In 1998 she started with the preparation of the slide-installation and book Du mentir-faux, which was shown for the first time in automn 2000, in the Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, together with the first three photographs of a series called La Narration. Since January 2001, she works on a new slide-installation and book, called Elective Affinities/ The Truth of Masks. Ana Torfs’ work is widely shown. She received the Prix du Jeune Créateur at the Semaine International de Video in Geneva for the commissioned video Condition, made for the Canadian artist Jana Sterbak in 1995 and le Grand Prix at the International festival for New Film in Split (Croatia) for her film Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten (Cycle of Trifles) in 1999.
Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten (Le cycle des bagatelles), 1999, 85’, 35mm, n/b
Director: Ana Torfs. Photo: Jorge León. Sound : Michaël Nijs, John Van Craenenbroeck, Rudi Biber. Editing : Jurgen Persijn. Mus. : Beethoven by Quatuor Danel. Prod. : Cobra film, Balthazar film, Storm, Navigator Film, A-V Dienst, Canvas, KunstFESTIVALdes arts.
By 1818 47-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven’s hearing grows so bad that his surroundings are forced to communicate with him through notes for the following 10 years. Many of these notations were preserved in conversation booklets, in which he hardly wtote himself, least of all about music. Ana Torfs drew a portrait of the composer’s final years from the small talk that can be found in them, which she calls “the trifles from the every-day life of a musician.” He is the key figure in her Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten, yet he does not enter into the picture even once. Call it radical filming, since the absence of the protagonist is not the only drastic measure in film which commits itself to showing the invisible. Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten takes its time to show simple things: how does one drink a cup of coffee, what does a landscape look like, how do you prepare a fish. it is no film of spectacle.
Zykuls von Kleinigkeiten
|
