european short films - experimental, set 2

Director Nicolas Provost once again returns to his favorite themes, exploring the storytelling techniques and codes of cinema. In Moving Stories, he minimizes the role of narrative while raising the soundtrack to equal status in an attempt to broaden perceptions of how viewers’ imaginations interact with creative work in film.

Who has been the most frequently portrayed figure in film over the past decades? Though not wholly surprising, it is still strange to hear the answer: it’s a tie between Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Conference is combines 65 actors’ portrayals of the infamous dictator. It makes for a truly eclectic gallery of roles and acting sensibilities that includes Udo Kier, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins, Charles Chaplin, Mel Brooks and Luis de Funès.

Andreas Rochholl’s film is saturated with the music of pioneering American composer Morton Feldman. Though Feldman passed away in 1987, his work continues to inspire new experiments. Rochholl juxtaposes Feldman’s postmodern compositions with seemingly random scenes, some unspectacular, others strange. Well-versed in music and film techniques, director Rochholl ably uses both to pay a synchronous homage to Feldman’s creative work.

First, there were landscapes. Later, there were films of them. Now, digital editing has made it possible to transform images of landscapes into something that barely resembles the natural world. The sceneries in José Miguel Biscaya’s #29 are filtered through various effects, taking on the characteristics of the techniques used to transform them and losing their natural attributes. Media no longer relay an external reality – they create their own.

If God would come down to earth and try to earn a living in Bombay, most probably he would very soon become successful as a voice over artiste, lending his voice to thousands of Hindi movies and even more documentaries and public service films in India…

Meteor is a collage of European and American suspense, Sci-Fi, and horror films from the 1930s to the 1960s, including Peeping Tom, The Angry Red Planet and Children of the Damned. The result is a work that brings viewers on a voyage from the fantasies of starry-eyed heroes of children’s adventure stories to strange and scary extraterrestrial worlds.

Try as you might – berate the projectionist, adjust the focus, blink – there’ no fixing the images in Vexed, the latest creation from experimental collective Telcosystems. For half an hour the screen is filled with what might pass for the results of a technical glitch. The work concentrates all our attention on images we would normally ignore or want to change, but which in the hands of its creators become something mesmerizing.