BAMcinématek's Migrating Forms (December 17, 2013)

BAMcinématek, Migrating Forms, December 17, 2013
by Kristen Bisson, Social Media Assistant, The Living Gallery

(originally posted on The Living Gallery Blog)

Last Tuesday was the last night of Migrating Forms. Closing off the evening were two films: "Lo que el fuego me trajo" ("What the Fire Brought Me") by director Adrián Villar Rojas (43 minutes, 2013) and "Sequence 0" by directors João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva (35 minutes, 2013). (For more information on the films themselves, click here.) Tonight, I went with my friend and colleague Brandi Martin.

The first film, "Lo que el fuego me trajo," is a thing of beauty. The composition is extremely well done; the lighting and the colors are so incredibly vibrant and rich; the sounds were poetic, simple and mesmerizing. The depth of field was shallow. It was slowly paced and meditative. There was very little dialogue, and what little there was couldn't be heard very clearly at all. In the film, men and women are found to be working extremely hard building and collecting various objects and structures, deep into night and next morning. The film was shot at the Casa de Vidro (1951, Lina Bo Bardi) in Morumbi, São Paulo.

Brandi and I talked a little bit about the themes this film was addressing: modernism and voyeurism. These themes can be found in: the glass house, where everybody can see you and you can see them; the actions the characters went through in their projects; the way it all was filmed in general; the ending, where a character looks you, the audience, directly in the eyes (which is no where else in the film); the credits themselves, which went on for so long that many in the audience could help but laugh, and I don't think they left anyone out of their list; even the font chosen for the credits, and oh man... that kerning; and then, to top it all off, there was a segment, which felt like forever, where two black circles adjacent to each other would spin at center and leave their mark every few millimeters, so that eventually it became a larger, opaque, black dot. Yep. But seriously, such a great film. Definitely see it if you get the chance!

The description for the second film, "Sequence 0," is as as follows (pulled from BAMcinématek's website):

These 14 short films were created by the Portuguese filmmaking duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, whose poetic philosophical fiction explore and interpret the uncanny through acts of magnetism, transference, and material transformation.

Some of these shorts were poetic, sentimental, and others were absolutely hilarious. Many, if not all, were done with extreme slow motion, which brought about either a painful how-long-do-we-have-to-sit-through-this kind of experience or a fun and pleasurable experience. These shorts didn't really have sound, and usually consisted of the overlapping of shots with different opacities. The various films included: a close up shot of someone getting the very top of their head shaved; the same landscape at different times of day so that three suns were overlapping and slowly shifting; three men at a campfire apparently having a hilarious conversation; three egg yolks moving around together, again overlapping; lots of eggs shorts, actually; a couple of emu-bird-things wandering around in front of a painted backdrop, blocking the camera, investigating the backdrop itself, and being funny overall; a number of other shorts; and my favorite short from the series that night was a close of up of the top of a table with an elephant's trunk trying really what seems like desperately hard to grab a few peanuts.

Overall, I found the films of the night to be interesting, funny, beautiful, and weird. I enjoyed the various films I got to see at Migrating Forms. You can read my two previous reviews on this blog from December 13 and December 15.

Let us know in the comments if you saw anything awesome at BAMcinématek and/or Migrating Forms!

BAMcinématek’s Migrating Forms (December 13, 2013)

BAMcinématek, Migrating Forms, December 13, 2013
by Kristen Bisson, Social Media Assistant, The Living Gallery

(originally posted on The Living Gallery Blog)

I returned from a night at BAMcinématek just moments ago. I had joined my friend Andrea Chen for screening of “The Unity of All Things” (2013). (She is one of the actresses in the film.) We enjoyed viewing the film and chatting about her experiences in the filming of it, and subsequently her viewing of it in its entirety. Sometimes, even for the actors, this is the first time they’ve seen the films they star in.

The film itself was surreal, dreamlike, bizarre, funny, sentimental, philosophical, and an interesting take on the idea of science fiction. The directors, Daniel Schmidt and Alexander Carver, spoke after the screening, and discussed how they went about the idea of science fiction as a genre in terms of this film. Rather than the construction of a whole new world or a whole new society in order to talk about certain issues, which can be typical of science fiction, they decided to take what was already existing as structures and shift it slightly, taking what we already know as reality and dipping it into the unusual.

The description from the website states:

In their debut feature, Daniel Schmidt and Alexander Carver crafted this utopian science fiction allegory about the development of a massive particle collider intended to probe the origin of the universe. Taking the instability of everything from identity to gender to history to the image itself as a starting point, the film follows two teenage boys as they visit their mother, an expatriated Chinese physicist, in the US. As their journey spans from Jiuzhai Valley in China to the Sonoran desert, it reveals the alienation and otherness beneath the surface of all things.

I stayed for the second screening of the night, Migrating Forms Program 2. The films that were shown included: “Birds” (2012) 17 Minutes (Directed by Gabriel Abrantes), “Utskor: Either/Or” (2013) 8 Minutes (Directed by Laida Lertxundi), “Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off” (2012) 16 Minutes (Directed by James Richards), and:

“A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital” (1982)
26 Minutes (Directed by Anne Charlotte Robertson)
In this harrowing self-portrait, Super-8 master Anne Charlotte Robertson lucidly narrates footage of the daily routines and rituals that governed her last breakdown. - BAMcinématek

“Emily Died” (1994)
27 Minutes (Directed by Anne Charlotte Robertson)
Possibly Anne Charlotte Robertson’s most devastating film, Emily Died chronicles the death of her young niece. Set in the spring, Robertson seeks solace in her garden as Emily’s death sends her spinning toward another breakdown. - BAMcinématek

I scribbled some notes in the dark as I was viewing the above short films. Ultimately, of those five films, I think I was struck most by both of Anne Charlotte Robertson’s creations. My rambling reflection will be for the both of these films:

There were simultaneous dialogues happening in the films, and one could pick up pieces of both, but one was obviously louder and clearer than the other, and you had to struggle to get small sections of the second overlapping dialogue. The video shifted, often quickly, amongst different moments in time, going from self-reflection, to family portrait, to environmental observations, to philosophical and metaphorical inquiries, and the experience of a range of emotion from joy, to curiosity, to anger, to helplessness, to fear, to obsession, etc. The fragments of her life, the people in it, her environment, her situation, all of which pointed to and revealed something very raw and very real about the human experience and in particular her mental experience.

In Emily Died, she said things like, “All we have are pictures now,” and “I hope there is a heaven,” “I hope I believe in God, and I hope I believe in heaven.” She then talked about how she wished to help children, to care for them, to be pregnant, but that her age, medications, and mental states wouldn’t allow her to experience the things that she longed for. She was distraught over Emily’s death. She expressed guilt for thinking about other things, rather than thinking about Emily’s death. She would wonder why she thought she herself was allowed to think about food, or her weight, or her own problems, when something so tragic had happened to someone she cared about.

“Significance” was a frequently heard word. We’re invited to contemplate along with her as she thought out loud, narrating her mind and the events in her life. Her train of thought seemed fluid and unhindered. Moments in the films were funny, poetic, thought-provoking, sentimental, troubling, sweet, serious, philosophical, uncomfortable, etc.

The night’s films gave me a lot to chew on.

I will be going to the following film screenings:

Conor O’Brien, also of The Living Gallery, will be going to these screenings:

Please, go check out BAMcinématek’s film series, Migrating Forms!
Let us know in the comments about what you’ve seen or plan to see.