Memorable images, moments, qualities, techniques and scenes from the competition strand at the 2021 edition of 25FPS.
When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such, we’ve shamelessly pilfered this very technique for the ALT/KINO festival reports.
On this occasion, Patrick Gamble went in search of memorable moments and motifs in amongst the deluge of interesting experimental work screening as part of the competition at 25FPS.
Berlin Feuer (Pedro Maia, 2021)
The disintegration of cultural memory in Pedro Maia’s Berlin Feuer
Due to its highly combustible nature, many nitrate films have been disposed of rather than salvaged. Pedro Maria’s Berlin Feuer suggests that when we destroy these prints, we also destroy the memories they captured. In an ironic gesture towards the erasure of cinematic history, Maia’s latest work takes high resolution scans of a fire filmed in Berlin during the 1940s and uses the decaying images to highlight how it’s not the flames that have damaged the print, but years of neglect. Like staring into a campfire and becoming entranced by its flickering flame, the film burns with an urgency that demands our attention. Amongst the movement of light and evolving colours we witness shapes and figures disappear into the crumbling celluloid. By emphasising its qualities rather than its liabilities, Maia’s study of disappearance and disintegration becomes a rallying call for the preservation of nitrate film.
The Canyon (Zachary Epcar, 2021)
The architecture of desire in Zachary Epcar’s The Canyon
An immersive séance on consumerism and our nagging desire to have it all, Zachary Epcar’s The Canyon is a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia of suburban bliss. An anthropological exploration of late capitalism, this portrait of a modern urban development takes the clean, unhurried architecture and committee designed green spaces of a luxury condominium and depicts it as a 21st century garden of heavenly delights. Hypnotic and oneiric, the inhabitants' incantatory speeches - “the linens, the linens!” - are delivered with a precision that is at once anatomical, yet beautifully articulates our society’s passage from an era of utopian promise to an age of pleasant empty dreams.
Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (Eva Giolo, 2020)
The violent nature of childhood games in Eva Giolo’s Flowers Blooming in Our Throats
A film of deafening silences and creeping unease, Eva Giolo’s film explores the power dynamics at play behind the closed doors of domestic spaces. Frustrating our basic assumptions of the home as a place of refuge, Giolo stresses the violence that underpins the repetition of daily chores through mirroring, echoing and an instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life. However, it’s the film’s focus on the power imbalance of childhood games like “Red hands” - also known as “Slaps” - that gives a real sense of the contingency and danger of occupying a female body. The insidious horror of the film comes not from turning our gaze onto these forms of microaggression, but realizing the extent of our blindness to such forms of abuse.
My Own Landscapes (Antoine Chapon, 2020)
The mechanization of the male form in Antoine Chapon’s My Own Landscapes
Towards the end of Antioine Chapon’s latest film, about the French and American military’s use of video game scenarios to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, a group of digitally rendered soldiers find themselves marooned on a desert island. Originally designed to fight in a CGI simulation, these featureless avatars find themselves stripped of their uniforms and weapons, and left to wander a virtual beach. It’s difficult not to compare them to the topless Legionnaires in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, who circle one another in a balletic choreography before lunging into a homoerotic embrace. However, here the eroticism of the rhythmic patterns of those training exercises is replaced with chaos and confusion, as the men shout random orders to each other as they roam this digital terrain. The conflicts of the future might be fought online, but it seems that the aestheticisation of masculinity will remain an intrinsic element of modern warfare.
Passing Place (Sofía Petersen & Shaun Finneran, 2021)
The lost art of spirit photography in Sofía Petersen and Shaun Finneran’s Passing Place
Named after the wide spots on rural roads that allow vehicles to pass each other before continuing on their journey, Passing Place is a film of restless ghosts written in defiance of the darkness that conjures them into being. Composed of unfixed images that come to light during the chemical process of a darkroom, the film is a celebration of transience that allows for a deeper understanding of time and the impermanence of life. It is a film that forces you to lean in and look closer. At first it’s hard to decipher what these images contain, yet you can’t help but feel that there’s something important here, even if it’s barely more than a whisper in the dark or the shudder of a ghost. Preoccupied with the way in which technology can materialise and erase memory, these images evoke a sense of mourning for the faces and places we’ve left behind.
Trust Study #1 (Shobun Baile, 2020)
Topographies of mistrust in Shobun Baile’s Trust Study #1
Positioned against picturesque travel images of Pakistan, a subtitled interview between Shobun Baile and an anonymous banker plays out in total silence. Their conversation explores the complexities of Hawala, an informal money transfer system based entirely on trust that is used throughout the Middle East, Southern Asian and some parts of Africa. Baile’s interviewee is reluctant to reveal too much information, but begrudgingly describes the need for new modes of encryption following the US Government's attempts to clamp down on the transfer of funds to terrorist organisations. As the film progresses we begin to understand the significance of the images which frame their discussion. Not only do they represent the increased surveillance of Islamic countries following the events of 9/11, they also contain a set of secret codes used to transfer money between various parties. Through a deceptively simple premise, Baile shows how heightened monitoring and counterterrorism strategies do little more than create more inventive ways of exchanging information.
The 2021 editions of 25FPS ran from 23-26 September 2021
Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.