The third and final day of ASFF gave us one last opportunity to explore York’s beautiful buildings whilst filling our corneas with film. The day promised that the established range of genres would continue well into Sunday’s evening hours, with all the venues playing host to anything from documentary, to thrillers, to animation.
The day began in the New School House Gallery which gave a different experience of the selections of film on offer. The one room housed five looped screenings, available to one person at a time willing to sit for an extended length of time with headphones on. Such a one-on-one experience allowed personal reflection on the work much more easily, yet it was a shame to be quite so isolated in the act of viewing. Nonetheless, some stunning film work was on show.
Movement #4 (Daniel Hopkins, UK, 7m 8s) (Artist Film 4)
This film, according to the gallery booklet, is unlike Hopkins’ others in his ‘Movement’ series. It is, in fact, unlike the title: stillness abides throughout the woodland scenes whose landscapes are repeated in a quickening loop. It is peaceful and picturesque with the frosted ground and swaying bows set to the sound of birds chirping. Rumbling in the background however, is the hum of cars and human infrastructure which, it becomes apparent, is the concern of Hopkins’ film. The speed of the scenes’ repetition intensifies to the point of once-familiar flashing images, the sound coming to a similar crescendo. Hopkins’ movement from such stillness to rapid calamity is almost violent, representing our intrusion on natural spaces in the name of connectivity and progress.
Island Going (Alistair I Mcdonald, UK 11m 45s) (Artist Film 4)
Using humour to liven up the familiar art-film preoccupation of the reliability of images and narrator, Macdonald gives us the travel account of a German explorer going boldly into the Hebrides. Rare in this cohort of films for using a spoken narration, here sounding wonderfully with Werner Hertzog, we are sold an image of the Scottish Isles as one of a war torn country recovering from nuclear attack and feral sheep with heightened intelligence. By re-attributing meaning to common images – of derelict sheds, municipal buildings or attentive sheep – Macdonald manages to question the validity of the documentary image but in a refreshingly funny way.
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Staging Silence (Hans Op de Beeck, Belgium, 20m 48s) (Artist Film 5)
Though unclear if this had any narrative thread because I sat down halfway-through, the succession of beautiful landscapes composed in miniature were enough to capture my interest. Filmed in monochrome, hands were the only human protagonists, featuring as prop changers akin to those in theatre. The stand out image was of a city built of sugar cubes with shadows being cast as illumination moved steadily around the scene, and streams of light ran through sugar windows.
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Clik here to view.
Screen Bandita – Reels From Life Two or: How We Learned to Love Postmodernism
Edinburgh collective Screen Bandita delivered a live ‘performance’ of film which was made up of a live projection of found, recut Super 8 film accompanied by a soundtrack of live handwound LPs. Promising to focus upon the ‘so-called postmodern condition’, the performance fell slightly flat; yes the pictures were nice, occasionally including an interesting layering technique, and the temporal element of the ‘live performance’ enhanced the viewing but it was only the professed experimentation which saved Screen Bandita. Without the live element this would have been rather drab.
Anniversary (Curt Apduhan, USA, 21m 5s) (Drama 14)
This laboured drama tries to build a relationship between a dissatisfied wife -the typical lady who lunches- and the stripper she hired to live out a fantasy of her husband watching the two women together, something he’s apparently not down with. Dialogue so laden with cliché it’s laughable and a self-involved duo ‘bonding’ over their white malcontent, this film deals with problems that aren’t there; if it had done it in even a semi-ironic way Apduhan’s attempt would have been better but it was so earnest and heavy-handed that it was a relief when it ended.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
