Film Screenings 

Drifting Cities

Premiere

Structural Film

Curator: Jānis Putniņš (LV)

Essay Film

Curator:Lāsma Bērtule (LV)

Baltic Experimental

Curator:Ieva Balode (LV)

Only Trains Remember

Found super8 footage and found photographs from the 70’s – 80’s Ireland and the US are used along with 16mm material and video in various formats shot by the artist himself, and finished digitally. The film is made in a distinctive manner, characteristic of the author, assembling different images in a joint story. A dramaturgy emerges, based on the spectator’s associative image-making experience and supplemented with the author’s very personal and poetic texts about lost love.

Michael Higgins is a photographer, filmmaker and installation artist best known for his analogue film work. Higgins is interested in using the filmmaking process to rupture the reality of the everyday, skewing documentary and fiction in order to highlight alternative ways of seeing and experiencing. Over the years his film and video works have been screened around the world including New York, Tehran, Berlin, Paris and London. He is also a member of Irish filmmakers collective Experimental Film Society in Dublin.  In 2015 Higgins co-founded Open Night Cinema – a film studio and venue that is home to a series of expanded cinema events that incorporate sound art, film installations and improvised performance in response to place.

Filma veidota no Rīgas Kinostudijas vēsturisku spēlfilmu fragmentiem laika periodā no 50. līdz 90. gadiem, kuros redzams vilciens. Kā stāsta Jānis Putniņš, „vilciens ir lieliski piemērots vēsturiska kinošķērsgriezuma veikšanai. Tas ir ne tikai ātrs, spēcīgs, dinamisks un vienmēr saistīts ar pārmaiņām, bet arī ar apskaužamu regularitāti sastopams visdažādāko žanru spēlfilmās. Līdz ar to izmantotie fragmenti ir ļoti daudzveidīgi un ļauj sajust attiecīgā laika perioda kino garšu.” Atrauti no sākotnējā konteksta un dzidri ieskenēti no 35mm kopijām, tie ļauj sajust vēl kaut ko, kas citādi varētu paskriet garām, izveidojot nepasakāmu, brīnumainu pavērsienu pilnu un neticami ievelkošu stāstu, kas iedarbojas ar līdzīgi nenovēršamu spēku kā ainava aiz loga, braucot cauri tālai, neredzētai zemei.

 Filma ir ceļojums Latvijas kino vēsturē un Latvijas kino arhīvos, kas īpašā autoru salikumā stāsta arī stāstu par cilvēka identitāti Latvijā un Baltijā.

The programme consists of films that employ the found footage technique developed in experimental cinema and that are chiefly made out of found, recycled and in other ways appropriated material already in existence. These films regard the image as an integral part of contemporary reality and act upon it with the very weapons it hands over or hides. At the same time, they allow to establish a very direct link to the past: irrespective of the visible objects, the celluloid film carrying the images is present, magnificent and openly fragile in these works.

In the programme’s films  the very structure of the film medium with its mechanisms, materiality and being in time is posed as the main organisational force. Light, movement, time, the physicality of film instead of working as a means of representation turn into substantive units that don’t disappear behind the image but get into intensive relations with it. That way, the film expresses primarily itself. Perhaps, by opening ourselves to this kind of experience with film as film, us, too, can be be for a moment humans as humans.

Selected films  embrace, refer to and expand the practice of essayist filmmaking in various ways. These are works in which cinema operates as a thought process, reflecting the things that happen around and inside us through images, sound and/or text. With keenness and suspicion looking for possibility to approach that, these films offer a deeply personal author’s view as a starting point for unpredictable forking paths of questions and answers in spectators themselves.

1. "Scoreline" by Greg Pope (UK/NO)

solo film - sound performance

16mm projector, black film, contact mics, guitar pick-ups, engraving tools,  hobby grinder, other tools and unspecified local materials.

2. "New Museum of Mankind" by OJOBOCA (DE)

A traumatoscopic presentation

16mm, 30 min, sound

3. „The Invisible Octave” by Clausthome (LV) and Mārtiņš Ratniks (LV)

Audiovisual performance/association in the environment of VHS and analog synthesis.

1. "Observer" by Justas Žekonis and Vytautas Juozėnas (LT)

16mm film performance with analog sythesizers

2. "Victory Song" by Ieva Balode (visuals) and Jelena Glazova (sound,poetry) (LV)

16mm film, 35mm archival slide un overhead transparencies projection and poetry, sound

3. "Cell Obelisks" by Signe Birkova (visuals), VSKB (sound) and Toms Treibergs (poetry) (LV)

An audiovisual performance where 8mm film projections cooperate with loops of poetry and cassette tapes.