Long Live the New Flesh uses found footage to transmogrify existing fragments from horror films into a new video. It deploys a digital technique with painterly quality in which the images literally consume one another and the horror in all its visual power is brought to a natural boiling point. Provost strips down the imagery of a mass medium, uses it to construct a new visual story behind the dissection and horror, and allows the viewer to cross every phase of the emotional spectrum.
The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.
"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)
Strike Anywhere is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-20th Century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today).
Rosa Barba produced a science fiction film based on interviews with local residents and individuals involved in the land suppletion project for Maasvlakte 2. Barba asked the interviewees to imagine what this new land could look like in the future. While we see images of the new land, the slufter: a storage reservoir for heavily contaminated sludge from the new Meuse river, the construction of the huge docksides, basalt blocks, empty containers and the mechanical movements of the transhipment process, we listen to a story apparently taking place in the future.
An alcoholic, emaciated father; a grossly obese, tattooed mother; a goofy, hormone-addled brother—all together in a claustrophobic council flat. Welcome to the Billinghams'. Richard Billingham wowed the art scene with his book Ray's A Laugh. Fishtank, his first film, charts the emotional territory of the flat and the family who play out their lives within its confines.
A kind of warped Folktale, the video follows two women through a bizarre, broken landscape of collapsing signs and imploding meanings, on a pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, to cure their green baby. In this fantastic, primitive-future world, the difference between technology and magic has become incomprehensible. Our characters become entangled in a cargo-cult of Margaret Thatcher, and buy a Maggie doll which spouts quotations to guide them when they pull its string.
"Bricks are the resonating fundamentals of society. Bricks are layers of clay that sound like records, just simply too thick. Like records they appear in series, but every brick is slightly different – not just another brick in the wall. Bricks create spaces, organize social relations and store knowledge on social structures. They resonate in a way that tells us if they are good enough or not. Bricks form the fundamental sound of our societies, but we haven't learned to listen to them.
On the Flies of the Market Place deals with the idea of the European space, divided and sacrificed. In a visually surreal world of facts and emotions—using documents from books and magazines—the video suggests a re-reading of the European space, i.e. Eastern and Western Europe. Referencing history, philosophy (Kant), and art, the video elaborates on the idea of Eastern Europe as the indivisible residua of all European atrocities. Eastern Europe is a piece of shit and the bloody symptom of the political, cultural, and epistemological failures of the 20th century.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) gained international recognition with her three-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which portrays a housewife’s dull existence and eventual violent action. She has continued to be one of Europe’s most innovative filmmakers with more than forty film and television projects to her credit. Akerman’s work is minimalist, structuralist, and feminist. Major themes in her films include women at work and at home; women’s relationships to men, other women, and children; food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. In this interview from 1976 Akerman discusses her early films, and the development of her particular vision.
German filmmaker Valeska and her crew—soundwoman Constanza and cameraman Albert—arrive at Maple Tree Farm during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1971 to film a piece for German TV on the Videofreex. In this video, the Videofreex turn the tables so to speak, making the Germans’ filming process—and the artificiality of the filmmaker’s prefabricated shots—their subject.
A fragmented puzzle of a sinister narrative turned inside out and comprised of digital video, digital video animation, and Super-8, with model animation and human pixelation.
“This is a video about the thing that won’t go away. It has been trying to contact me by altering bits of my reality for several years now, and this seven minutes is a clear demonstration of that. My 8-year old nephew got drawn into the whole thing, and that’s why his voice is on this video. I’m not sure if it’s dead now. We’ll just have to see.”
—Jennet Thomas
A simple yet moving story of children and a baby deer set against the background of a go-kart track.
Ireland, October 20th 2007
The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series and looks back at the events of the past six years.
Six Years Later is the eighth episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry, but rather a new policy on images.
A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voiceover tells us extraordinary things — how this man is special — the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.
This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives to "sell themselves" better. This course, designed for managers, teaches the basic rules of dialectics and rhetoric and provides training in body language, gesture and facial expression. The aim of selling something has always been a principle of mercantile action. Yet it was only through the marriage of psychology and modern capitalism that the idea of selling oneself was perfected.
-- Lutz Hachmeister
On the Flies of the Market Place deals with the idea of the European space, divided and sacrificed. In a visually surreal world of facts and emotions—using documents from books and magazines—the video suggests a re-reading of the European space, i.e. Eastern and Western Europe. Referencing history, philosophy (Kant), and art, the video elaborates on the idea of Eastern Europe as the indivisible residua of all European atrocities. Eastern Europe is a piece of shit and the bloody symptom of the political, cultural, and epistemological failures of the 20th century.
A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T.S. Eliot that explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an anagram. "A brilliant, absurd staging of Eliot’s The Waste Land in the local pub by the master of irony himself, John Smith. Smith’s use of the subjective camera tradition of independent film takes the viewer on a shaky journey from bar to bog and back again."
—UK/Canadian Video Exchange (touring program, 2000)
Made in Ireland, October 8th, 2001.
A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.
Frozen War is the first episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.
X-Mission explores the logic of the refugee camp as one of the oldest extra-territorial zones. Taking the Palestinian refugee camp as a case in point, the video engages with the different discourses — legal, symbolic, urban, historical — that give meaning to this exceptional space.
This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster, feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to play they take her to the disco. A dark, comic, experimental fantasy on the implications of Little Girls Toys — with the existential melancholy of Frankenstein's monster.
"A compelling exploration of a child's inner life and logic. Impressive and distinctive."
"How can the distinction between "man" and "machine" still be made given today's technology? In modern weapons technology the categories are on the move: intelligence is no longer limited to humans. In Eye/Machine II, Farocki has brought together visual material from both military and civilian sectors, showing machines operating intelligently and what it is they see when working on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction becomes reduced to "eye/machine", where cameras are implanted into the machines as eyes.
In this surreal experimental narrative, there’s something wrong with a patch of sky. As it travels over Southern England, objects cast up into it come down hugely enlarged, bloated. Meanwhile in London, the patch is in fact a troubling scab on a crippled old man’s head. As the scab develops, all he can do is wait, going through the changes, led on gently by the idiot-savant son with his childlike multiple identities.
The vanishing point of Images of The World is the conceptual image of the 'blind spot' of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn't wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target.
