Opening Program Installation Program 1   Program 2-3  Program 4-5 Program 6 Program 7 Program 8 Program 9   Program 10  Program 11 Program 12 Program 13 Program 14 Closing Ceremony

Program 13: Film as a Plastic Art: Canvas in Motion

Kwadrat (5min, 1972, Poland)
Director: Zbigniew Rybchinsky

A human figure is slowly generated from a white square, against a black background, and is colored and decomposed in space, generating in turn other squares, which reunite, retransforming themselves into the original white square.


Zbig Rybczynski was born in Poland in 1949 and has been working as a film director in Europe and the United States since the early 1970s. His work has received many prestigious industry awards in the United States, Japan and Europe. The awards include an Academy Award in 1983 for “Tango”, an Emmy in Special Effects in 1990 for “The Orchestra”, the Prix Italia, the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco and awards at the Electronic Cinema Festival Tokyo/Montreaux. Numerous other awards include MTV, American Video Awards, Monitor Awards and the Billboard Music Video Awards. Zbig is a pioneer in using High Definition television technology, and an innovator and experimentator in the technical field - he's an author of several US patents, which are mostly the innovative ideas for film and video making, including "Zbig "software for matting. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works for the Ultimatte Corporation as a member of their R&D team www.ultimatte.com and runs his own company, Zbig Vision Ltd.


Soma (4min, 2001, UK)
Director: Erica Russell

"Soma" is film about the fragmentation of identity and body image in the chaos of the post-modern urban culture. Presenting images of dislocation and violence, the film is inspired by street dance styles, graffiti art and the paintings of New York artist Basquiat. It uses various styles of brush-painting.

Erica Russell entered the animation industry as a paint-and-tracer and she has worked on all aspects of animated film production. In all her work Erica prefers to be the complete auteur, executing every stage of the work herself. She has shown her work at numerous festivals around the world, at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery, London. In '92 Erica set up an independent production company with her partner and producer Adam Parker-Rhodes, in her own home at Highgate in North London, under the name Gingco. Her company has produced and contributed to numerous music videos, TV title sequences and commercials, for Europe and the US including three for FCB/SF’s Levi's Jeans for Women series. One of these, “Sensual”, which was based on Erica’s own designs and concept, won a Cleo Award. She is currently working on a project to set up an animation department and production studio at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad.


“Nascent” (10min, 2005, Australia)
Director: Gina Czarnecki
with Australian Dance Theatre and Christian Fennesz
Produced by Forma and Australian Dance Theatre
Commissioned by Forma and Adelaide Film Festival

"Nascent" is a visual and visceral journey through and about being. A film and installation, the piece's hybrid form exists between visual art, experimental media, technology and dance.

photo by Gina Czarnecki

In “Nascent”, raw footage of improvised and choreographed performance by ADT dancers is confronted with compositional techniques applied in the post-production stage. Images form a complex and dense rhythmic structure, stretching, smearing and distorting ‘real’ time. The dancers' gestures and bodies, poised and isolated, gradually become intertwined, indistinguishable and frenetic - turbulent, mutated fragments that form and reform. A few frames of internal body image blast in as subliminal interventions or as momentary abstractions, leaving fleeting impressions of parallel structures - organisms, mutant animals, ghosts, mechanical insertions. The image processing creates new traces of movement that appear as blips in transmission or digital ‘vibrations’ where the body and its image tune-in, momentarily, then become ‘unplugged’ leaving behind traces of skin-print as after-images.

Ultimately the image remains recognisably human, but only just.

The score is specially commissioned music from Fennesz, whose own computer manipulation and processing of 'analogue' source sound echoes Czarnecki's approach to the treatment of image, and in turn influenced the final edit of the piece. «Nascent» was awarded Best Dance Film at the Australian Dance Awards, 2005.

Gina Czarnecki works in time-based and digital media, making single-screen, photographic and installation works. Through sampling, generating and re-processing image and sound, she creates contemplative spaces with strong visual aesthetics. Her work focuses on the human, the physical, biological and psychological. More recently this has been concerned with the ethical and cultural issues raised from scientific and technological advances in the fields of genetic engineering, as well as on their future commercial and non-commercial uses. Her work has been exhibited internationally including ISEA 1998 in Liverpool and Ars Electronica ‘life sciences’ in Linz, Austria in1999. She won a prestigious Creative Scotland Award in 2002 for work on her interactive installation Silvers Alter, which was exhibited at the Natural History Museum, London in summer 2003.

with the support from FORMA

 


Tango (8min, 1980, Poland) – Oscar winner 1983
Director: Zbigniew Rybchinsky

photo by Zbigniew Rybchinsky
A child enters a room to get back his ball. Slowly, the entire space becomes filled with bizarre characters, all of them intent on repeating the same gesture ad infinitum.

"Thirty-six characters from different stages of life - representations of different times - interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities… “- ZR

Zbig Rybczynski (see above)


"Ma Mère l’Oye" (30min, 2004, Belgium)
Director: Thierry De Mey
Choreographer: Anna Theresa De Keersmaeker

photo by Thierry De May
The orchestral richness of this ballet by Maurice Ravel is conveyed in episodes inspired by Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tales. The choreographic material was produced by choreographer-dancers invited to choose a character from the fairy tale and create a dance sequence in the unusual setting of a forest. The illustrative or narrative arguments are used in a very free way, more like poetical suggestions. The plant world acts as an agent provocateur that helps inspire an original quality of movement in front of the camera. The film editing will use different formats: triptych, double screen, split screens, full screen in order to link the dance sequences according to the musical motifs and orchestral moods.

Thierry De Mey, born in 1956, is a film director and composer. The incorporation of movement and rebound are the common thread at the core of his work: "the rebuttal of the idea of rhythm as a simple series of durations in a time frame, but rather as a generative system for impulses, falls and new developments” constitutes the preliminary overture for his musical and cinematic endeavours. For the choreographers Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus and his sister Michele Anne De Mey, Thierry continues to be an invaluable collaborator in the invention of "formal strategies" - to employ a term which holds great importance for him. The installations of Thierry De Mey, which include music, dance, videos and interactive processes, have been presented in exhibitions such as the Biennials of Venice, Lyon and in many museums. His work has been rewarded with many national and international prizes including the Bessie Awards, Eve du Spectacle, Composers Forum of UNESCO to name a few. He is currently working on the composition of an original score for the project between the choreographer Akram Khan (London/India) and Sylvie Guillem (Paris).

“Triangle” (9min, 1994, UK) – Oscar nominated
Director: Erica Russell

"Triangle" is a film where the passions of young lovers and another woman are expressed through dance and paint. It makes powerful use of music and artwork that range from classical drawing to pure abstraction. Charlie Hart's soundtrack uses African and Brazilian musicians and themes.

Erica Russell (see above).


“Infected” (7min, 2001, Australia)
Director: Gina Czarnecki

“Infected” is a film about the nature of the physical body in the context of future technological possibilities, seen through dance and digitally manipulated imagery. The new bio-engineered body is still a sexual, stark, brutal, organic, pounding bloody system with ripping tendons. It is beautiful and repulsive, indulgent, curious, emotional, un/controlled, breeding, changing….

photo by Gina Czarnecki

“Infected” begins in darkness; a small streak of light expands into a series of more complex shapes, eventually revealing itself as the body of a dancer. Confined within a circular projection screen the dancer moves with the distracted, disorientated impatience of a caged animal. As the film progresses, the image is manipulated until flesh takes on an almost liquid appearance. The figure stutters, jumps, blurs, is broken. We observe this image corruption as if by electronic interference. The deformation of the image is analogous to the descent of this once controlled body into trauma. There is something of the tortured, hallucinatory figures and distraught sexuality of Francis Bacon haunting this work, destined to repeat its infection in perpetuity. Is this a futuristic vision of the human body infiltrated and changed, 'infected' by biotechnology, or is the reverse happening? Is the human body, the warm-blooded body of sinews and emotions, corrupting the "pure light" of technology?” - GC

Gina Czarnecki (see above).

"La Piccola Russia" (17 min, 2004, Italy) – ("The Little Russian")
Dir: Gianluigi Toccafondo

photo by Ginaluigi Toccafondo
An Italian short, winner of Best Narrative Short Film Under 35 Minutes at the Ottawa Animation Film Festival 2004, “traces the life of a young boy who grows up to be a murderer. Arguably Toccafondo’s most narrative driven film, each image stands alone like a painting or a photograph in a scrapbook. Greys, whites, and blacks distort and swallow the photographed images in “La Picolla Russia”, giving the film both a cloudy, dour ambiance while reflecting the menace of doom and chaos that litters the protagonist’s confused mind…

In summarizing his work, Gianluigi Toccafondo says, “Cinema is my starting point. I make photos from film-clips; I xerox them on paper and then paint on them, transforming the original subject. Finally I make the shots with the 35mm film and they become cinema again.” Like Dr. Frankenstein, Toccafondo takes scraps from an old world and breathes new life into them.” – Ottawa Animation Film Festival

Gianluigi Toccafondo
was born in San Marino, Italy. He attended the National Arts Institute in Urbino to study hand-drawn animation. Besides his independent animations, he produced numerous pieces for French Television including a series of shorts – “Tunnel”, “Avanzi”, “La pista del maiale” as well as a five-hour film “Criminal” that was also presented at the Venice Biennale in 1993. He has also worked on quite a few commercials including the ones for Levi's and Sambuca Molinari. Since 1992, he has exhibited his drawining in many galleries in Italy and abroad. At the same time, his drawings became part of editions released by Fandango, Einaudi, Feltrinelli, Mondadori and other publishers. Gianluigi currently lives in Italy.



with the support from the TTV Festival