Crazy, surprising, transcending the classic narrative. And simply beautiful. The films inhabiting the Visual Front treat cinema not so much (or: not only) as a storytelling tool, but as a starting point for creative play, experimentation, and searching for the boundaries which the person with the camera can reach or cross.
What will we see as part of this year's Visual Front? Read Anna Sańczuk's text for Vogue.pl
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According to the festival's artistic director and Visual Front curator Ewa Szabłowska:”These are the most interesting films of the season, which bring different perspectives on how cinema can merge with art. These are movies made by artists who sometimes need to loosen the classical narrative and make a film using experimental means, or simply images about art and artists.”
In 2024, there will be 10 pictures, among which we will find all cinematic genres, from thriller and offbeat musical or tropical erotic to a psychoanalytical essay about the creator of psychoanalysis. The curator writes in the programme:”What they have in common is a revolutionary energy, the unfettered imagination of the artists and a disagreement with conventional narratives and predictable formats. The Visual Front is more maximalism than minimalism, because, contrary to what the ascetics of form and dieticians of cinema claim, more is more.” Alongside these, there will be a set of shorts - surprisingly avant-garde in form - biological films from the Educational Film Studio Life Is Movement, Cinema Is Death. This is a guest programme by Michal Matuszewski with an introduction and a lecture based on the research work of the selection’s author.
Vogue-ing musical, nature sci-fi and the return of Denis Côté
One of the most surprising proposals seems the hit of this year's Berlinale, Reas (Spanish for Queens) by the Argentinian director and artist Lola Arias - a documentary musical about female prisoners. Sounds like madness? But there is a method to it - the director invited former female prisoners to dance and sing their personal stories and dreams about life after prison to the rhythm of their favourite music genres. The result is a bravura work that combines punk energy with vogue-ing and sociological reflection. ”It seems that a film taking place in prison would be a downer and a drama, and yet it is a real emotional and visual firecracker”, says Ewa Szabłowska. ”Arias also made a play based on it with the film's characters, which is premiering at this year's Avignon theatre festival, making the musical a unique social-rehabilitation project.”
Another out-of-the-box Spanish-language film from the Visual Front is The Human Hibernation by the Spanish visual artist Anna Cornudella Castro, honoured with the FIPRESCI Film Critics Award in Berlin. What if humans, not animals, went into winter sleep? How much would the Earth change? ”This is not only a film experiment, but also a mental one”, the curator believes. ”It makes us confront a situation in which humans are those who have to surrender to nature. Shot in an immersive way, based on sounds and evocative images - it makes us feel it almost in our bodies.”
Denis Côté, a Canadian filmmaker well-known to the New Horizons audience, is returning to the festival with his film Mademoiselle Kenopsia. He is a director who shoots high-budget popular art house cinema alternately with personal experiments created in a small team. This year's premiere, which feeds on the eponymous kenopsia, belongs to the latter trend. The term, coined by a linguistic geek John Koenig, describes the unsettling, strange atmosphere that prevails in an abandoned space once filled with life. It is to such a place that Côté transports the audience and explores this ‘phantomological’ space - a combination of an abandoned hospital, a church, perhaps an office - with its warden and sole inhabitant.
Hybrid documentaries on Maria Lassnig and Freud
Anja Salomonowitz's film Sleeping with a Tiger is the culmination of the director's long-term project (which also includes short films), dedicated to the work of the great Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, one of the most important artists of the 20th century. The true story of Lassnig, told in chapters built around episodes from her life, provides a basis for an insight into female artistic biographies in a male-dominated art world. As Ewa Szabłowska says:”On the one hand, Maria was an excellent painter and, from a certain point on, an export artist; on the other hand, though, she was subject to fierce rules of the game imposed by the art market, shown in a very ironic way.”
Interestingly, from childhood to old age she is played by a single actress, Birgit Minichmayr, and it is an outstanding performance indeed. This formally intriguing film eschews the clichés of a classic biopic and sheds new light on the, still underestimated, women’s place in art.
Moses, in turn, is referred to as a ‘totally crazy’ documentary, and a kind of psychoanalytical essay about the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. It is also about Moses, the protagonist of the researcher's last book, published at the dawn of the war in 1939. The Finnish artist couple Jenni and Lauri Luhta get to the book, deconstruct and analyse it, but at one point abandon Moses to focus on Freud. He is played by a female artist - what, in the context of the male-centric Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, seems like the artists’ perverse joke. This eccentric, erudite project explores how the realms of scientific theory, myth and culture are intertwined with the brutal political context of the world on the brink of the Second World War.
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