Personal filmmaking is so often described as journeys or voyages that the terms are rarely employed literally. While metaphorical, temporal and suggestive trips abound in this programme, so, too, do genuine trips with their attendant discoveries and excavations. Rodakis is German visual artist Olaf Nicolai’s first film. The title refers to nineteenth-century Greek craftsman, Alexis Rodakis, whose home became an architectural icon studied by the likes of Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. Nicolai documents the house and summons its creator, allowing him to transcend his own mythology in a decidedly unorthodox way. Block B by Chris Chong Chan Fui also examines a building, a modernist grid housing an Indian community within the Brickfields area of Kuala Lumpur. Block B observes its subject from a distance, in one long shot, mirroring the city’s disparate cultural enclaves. The monumental scale contrasts with the intimate real-life fictions that spill out of the monolithic structure in expressions of resilience and hope. A similar doll-house effect is achieved in Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s playful yet rigorous MOSAIK MÉCANIQUE, which systematically unspools Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 short A Film Johnnie, laying out its ninety-eight shots in parallel loops across a CinemaScope image. With a nod to Fernand Léger and Peter Kubelka, the flickering mosaic creates a visual polyrhythm as editing becomes architecture and time becomes space.
Ben Russell’s Black and White Trypps Number Three is an atypical concert film focused on a young, blissed-out crowd, alternately mesmerized by the noise band Lightning Bolt and posing coyly for the camera. Its large-format image, chiaroscuro lighting and smoky textures recall portraiture from another era. A similar mood is achieved in Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s Flash in the Metropolitan, a sibylline nighttime excursion through The Met’s antiquities galleries. Erika Loic’s Parícutin combines various genres of animation with contemporary footage to chronicle the history of the titular town in Mexico, uncovering a cloistered series of events metaphysically tied to the famous Strombolian volcano eruption.
Concluding the programme on an ironic note, Ben Russell’s Trypps #5 (Dubai) renders a slice of happiness, packaged in a candy-coloured, flickering neon sign – a reminder of all that is possible, or conversely, all that is errant.
Andréa Picard
Olaf Nicolai is a Berlin-based visual artist. The recipient of numerous grants, he has exhibited his work in galleries and museums around the world. Rodakis (08) is his first film.
Chris Chong Chan Fui is a Malaysian-based Canadian filmmaker. His short documentary POOL (07) was voted Best Canadian Short Film at last year’s Festival and was declared one of Canada’s Top Ten Films of 2007.
Norbert Pfaffenbichler is an artist and curator based in Vienna. His films include notes on film 01 else (02), notes on MAZY (03) and Notes on Film 02 (06).
Ben Russell is a Chicaco-based curator, experimental filmmaker and Guggenheim award recipient. His other films include Daumë (00), The Red and Blue Gods (05), Black and White Tripps Number One (05) and Black and White Tripps Number Four (08).
Rosalind Nashashibi’s films have screened internationally. In 2003, she won the Institute of Contemporary Art’s prestigious Beck’s Futures Prize and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.
Lucy Skaer graduated from the Environmental Art Department at Glasgow School of Art and is a founding member of the artists' collaborative group Henry VIII's Wives.
Erika Loic is a Toronto-based, Ryerson University film studies graduate. A protégée of R. Bruce Elder, she works exclusively with 16mm film.