Cinéwomen II - Art Cinema Dance 2015

MAŠA DRNDIC AMIE SCHOW EMMA KANTOR SABINE MOLENAAR JULIE HONG JACLYN SLIMM YUAN LIU VINNSLAN VIDEO ART PERFORMANCE THEATRE CINEMA

editorial womenartconnect.com

Building on the success of the fourth edition, CinéWomen continues showcasing video practice from around the world. As the ultimate mirror-medium of our times, video is all around us. Despite the proliferation of mainstream cinema, independent films continue to be made –radical, poetic, and dreamlike films, whose directors work on the edge of the mainstream film industry, never restricting themself to any single field, yet inviting the eye and the mind to travel further. Cinema is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investiment: in the last decade the technological advances have dramatically changed the economic conditions of cinema production.

Revolutions arise from obstinacy.

It is not by chance that today one of the protagonists of the digital revolution in cinema is a talented and courageous woman director, Elle Schneider, co-founder along with Joe Rubinstein of the Digital Bolex Project, who after developing a cult-camera harking back to 16mm film aesthetic -a significant leap towards the democratization of technology- is now promoting an application process for a grant for producers employing women in their camera troupes.

Only eight percent of 2014's top-grossing films were directed by women: it's time to reverse this trend.

However, cinema is not only technology, but ideas, experimentation, and above all dialogue, networking, interaction. Creating and supporting a fertile ground for innovation and dialogue does not necessarily require compromise. Honoring the influence of women in video art and cinema, our womenartconnect.com editorial board, in patnership with Stigmart10 Videofocus, is proud to present a selection of powerful and surreal visions from seven uncompromising outsiders.

In these pages you will encounter details on a new wave of filmmakers and videoartists marching away from the Hollywood stereotype, with films like The Vanishing point by the talented director and documentarist Maša Drndić; ; the surreal and disturbing world of Sabine Molenaar, a Belgian choreographer and dancer whose solo works aroused great interest in the contemporary art scene; the independent cinema by Yuan Liu; the refined fashion atmospheres of the duo Amie Schow and Emma Kantor and much more.

CinéWomen Board

COVER Still from Breakfast, Maša Drndić LEFT Still from Phase Break, Jaclyn Slimm TOP Still from ROF, Vinnslan collective

Edition curated by

wac* VIDEO ART CINEMA THEATRE DANCE

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maša drndić “

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Maša Drndić directed six documentary films and also worked on over a dozen short fiction films as a director, cinematographer, editor and assistant.

She makes her own deeply personal documentaries that often use specific locations as inspiration for larger emotional and philosophical inquires, focusing on the relationships between urban space and its inhabitants.

We have selected for this year's edition her refined black and white film , whose strong absurdist vein reminds us of Samuel Beckett's work. The Croatian director plays homage to the French roots of Nouvelle Vague, however if Godard overfilled his tangents with abundance of signifiers, Maša Drndić's temps mort attemps to underfill them with ambiguity and absence: in her film a crowded Croatian bus terminal becomes a mirror of the collective memory of a nation. Maša, could you tell us a particular episode, who has helped the birth of this project, or simply an epiphany?

I was doing my MA studies in in Tallin, Estonia when I first started thinking of making a documentary somehow related to the topic of transition, more precisely on the disappearance of public places, authentic or socially important locations that died out or were replaced by new, modern, more “functional” architecture. I was interested in the effect that these is changes have on social dynamics, ways of interaction and communication, as well as on individual lives. Tallinn was quite a good example and inspiration for such a topic, it being the capital of a country that was determined to go through a quick transition and was eager to replace and erase some remembrances of the Soviet past as much as possible.

After having gained independence and due to the rapid development of the free market, a large area of the center was rebuilt and reconstructed. Only 9.1% of the city is municipally owned and therefore planning became a matter of private developers’ initiative. This resulted in the emergence of a strange fusion of modern and medieval architecture, side by side; sometimes these architectural solutions

were beautiful but also quite alienating.

To come back to your question - while residing in Estonia I read an article in a Croatian online newspaper that was announcing a grandiose new project for the bus terminal in my hometown, Rijeka. It was planned to be a huge shopping mall type of station .

That was when I found and recognized my story. The film was meant to follow the last "surviving" year of the old bus terminal, its final breath, its last pulse, until the moment of its extinction. I wanted to capture this miniature model of a society that was watching its future being built just in front of it. The “old” bus station was and still is called Žabica ("Little Frog") after an old fountain that used to be located on the square. It was and is an open type of station integrated in the very heart of the city of Rijeka. During the past decade it became clear that “Žabica” was hardly able to host the number of buses and travelers passing through Rijeka.

On an exceptionally small space (of some 40 square metres off the roadways and 8 platforms), approximately 12 different services and contents are squeezed in: the bus stops, a ticket office, a shop, a currency exchange office, a casino, a café a fast-food restaurant, two kiosks, and a waiting room with a public toilet and a checkroom, as well as a taxi station. Furthermore, most of the services work around the clock, which makes the bus terminal the most active, lively, and crowded location in town, especially in the evenings. The bus station Žabica is permanently packed with beggars, the homeless, gamblers and drunken kids getting late night booze. In respect to this, the bus terminal often turns into a live stage of numerous conflicting situations with the daily attempts of its employees to guarantee it as normal a functioning as they can. So, after almost twenty years of promising its citizens a new station, Rijeka’s municipality had an architectural plan for the first time, a ridiculously large complex just opposite the old one. The construction of a new terminal was planned for the early spring of 2011.

I started shooting around February 2011 with a lot of excitement. With me I had only one assistant – Josip Grabar, so that we do not draw too much attention and could become more intimate with the people

around. We shot often that winter, trying to make friends with this small community of workers, alchoholics and beggars who hang out there. Spring of 2011 arrived, but the construction of a new station was postponed for autumn. Nevertheless, construction had not started even by autumn. We found ourselves waiting for our real shooting to begin, but THAT film was nowhere in view. News and gossip about the project were less and less present, and soon the whole ambitious plan was forgotten. There was no money for such projects, Croatia was about to enter the EU and many other events became a priority.

At that point I was seriously thinking to give up, to stop shooting, I had some very nice materials but my initial story was falling apart.

I remember, on a clear sunny day in the spring of 2012, my assistant and I were sitting at the bus station caffĂŠhaving a beer (instead of shooting). We were not really talking, not looking around, just waiting for something, anything, to happen, or even secretly hoping nothing

would happen so we could order another beer. At that point I realized we had already started being part of this station, we became quite like the people we were shooting, I realized that this film would not be about the disappearance of one world, but about the state of permanent, passive waiting . I wanted to picture a society with a dreamy yearning for modernisation, a society that with longing fantasizes about integration into Europe, and at the same time feeds on its romantic mentality, simultaneously patriotic and critical. It is a story of a community that in an authentic manner patches up the gaps of a worn-out system, a community that polishes and decorates its decomposing structure in a Sisyphean way, from day to day facing the same chaos and similar narratives around it. From day to day this community was (and still is) patiently waiting for tomorrow.

We have been impressed with your black and white cinematography. is inspired by the French New Wave, the use of normal lenses and frontal composition are trademark of the 60s. Yet your visual

imagery is not confined to a specific style, just think of the intimate color cinematography of (2010).

Where does your visual sensibility come from?

Perhaps my inspiration for making a documentary always develops from the feeling triggered and offered by a specific location. For me the location is the frame of the story, a stage for the action, a miniature of the world I wish to represent, a model, and as such it often holds a certain potential – that of telling a tale.

The story that usually catches me is that of the characters who are either tightly connected with or in complete opposition to the location they inhabit, visit, or pass through. In this sense the location and the main character either blend or they become opposed, counter elements in the story, and in some way try to find their meeting point, some middle, neutral piece of territory. I take quite a lot of time before I start shooting and I patiently observe my subjects until I understand their rhythm, routine and their manners. This influences my choice

of the mood, camera movement and also of the editing. I do the same with locations, I try to depict how spaces breathe at different times of the day, sometimes even through seasons, in order to understand how to tell the story. I don’t like to force a specific style on the story, every story has a unique rhythm and its specific tone.

For The Waiting Point I knew exactly how I wished to shoot it. I felt from the beginning that it should be in black and white and that the way it was shot should feel very natural. I wanted to reflect simple everydayness, a kind of a raw “normality” of the life of this bus station. I felt shooting this place in color would be a lie, it just didn’t feel right; all the characters and details would be lost in a raging chromatic mess. I felt that this exact feeling was not to be represented in an image, but actually in sound. A dense, occasionally overwhelming ambiental sound was actually the color of the film.

I kept my camera mostly at the same level with the characters, I wanted it to be a silent participant of the action. As a contrast to this, I built slightly

surrealistic moments, little breaths away from daily life, a view from above, capturing those rare (magical) moments in the early morning and late afternoon when the station would become emptier, calmer - leaving space for reflection.

For the few short fiction films I shot as a cinematographer, I also found my inspiration in reality, usually carefully choosing locations that can reflect sensibility in the story and then extending the existing mood, enriching it. I am not very good at inventing from scratch, also I am not very keen on building sets, but I think I am not bad in recognizing and finding magic in the obvious. That is where I find my inspiration, and I continue to build, sometimes completely transforming the primarily chosen reality. is marked by a sapient use of temps mort. In your recent work Nostalgia you push this technique almost to paroxysm. Could you introduce our readers to this project?

“On Nostalgia” is an on-going project meant to be developed through a longer period of time on different locations. It is

a documentary essay, a collage of reflections on memories and remembering, fragmented recollections floating between the past and the future, unique and familiar, at home and away from it. With this work I wish to create a world for our sentimental subconsciousness, a space where the viewer is triggered to imagine, relate and remember, reflect on temporality.

Nostalgia is a subject that always kind of squeezes itself in or comes up as a leitmotif in all of my films and previous works, but I never looked at it detached from a specific context. So, now it’s vice versa. I take nostalgia and find the context that comes into it. I try to see which different events, places, objects can lead to nostalgia, or which topics nostalgia can open.

During the past two years I started experimenting with creating documentary video installations (working with multiple projections and video mapping) with a wish to expand the cinematic space that engages the viewer to become part of the story as a live actor in the middle of a “given” narrative. This work has grown out of one of these experiments. I started

researching this idea as part of an amazing art expedition organized by Sound Development City and Haller Enterprise. It was a very inspiring art expedition that lasted three weeks and moved across Latvia and Finland. At the final presentation for SDC 2014, held in Helsinki , I created a documentary 3 channel video installation projected in an old harbor warehouse. The video transformed an empty industrial space into a series of ambiances and settings that changed according to the narratives (intimate stories, interviews) delivered through sound.

Your documentary Puppet Story (2014), realized thanks to the collaboration of Inese Tikmane, tells the impressive story of a Caucasian puppet director. Could you describe this collaborative experience?

Puppet -Story is surely one of my dearest projects and this is very much due to the collaborative process with Inese Tikmane.

Unfortunately, it is still an unfinished project as it is not supported, so it relies on our own financial means, on our time and enthusiasm. We are planning to

continue working on this project this year and honestly hope it works out.

Working with this very talented Latvian cinematographer was great. We studied together at the Baltic Film and Media School, so we made some films before the Puppet Story. On one of our shootings we had the luck to meet Russian actors who were unusually creative with using props, and then we found out that they worked for the Estonian National Puppet Theater. We learned about the charismatic and talented puppet theater director Evgeny Ibrahimov and he would become the main character of our film.

Shooting with Inese was amazing. We both did camera and sound, switching when necessary. We shared different roles without much discussion. I think assisting for each other on fiction films taught us how to communicate without words. After shootings we would discuss a lot the material we got and the story itself. I think we always understood each other really well throughout the shooting, as well as in the editing process and, most importantly, appreciated each

other's opinions. With Inese it was never about an artist's ego, but always about the film itself.

How has your history influenced the way you produce art?

The need to recognize, embrace, collect and store fragments of my life emerged as a reaction to the frequent changes and multiple migrations that marked my childhood. On the one hand I developed the role of a careful observer, as a survival mechanism that helped me understand my surroundings and integrate more easily, but simultaneously I was pushed to create, to gather observations and to search for various techniques of capturing temporality.

Implementing observationalethnographical techniques either in a film or through other forms of art (installations, graphics and photography) I find to be the most inspiring starting point, a process of simultaneous discovery, reflection and creation. The very choice of selecting a certain frame - a specific fragment of everyday life, I perceive as an instinctive, often as an auto-reflective action, where certain figures, spaces and situations mirror shadows - the doppelgäger of one’s

subconscious. Therefore, due to my experiences, I deal with themes that are the closest to me but still always quite mysterious. Most of my works are focused on exploring individual as well as collective expressions of identity and belonging, capturing socially constructed or imaginary borders, homes, memories, common narratives, beliefs, dreams and desires.

In the last decade you have worked using both digital and film equipment: how has your production processes changed over the years?

I only had the possibility to shoot on film while I was studying cinematography in Estonia. Unfortunately, after the studies this seemed a very luxurious dream, especially taking into account that I am mostly involved in documentary filmmaking. I remember when I first held a 16 mm arifflex camera and when I started shooting I could hear and feel the sound of film rolling. My heart started beating so quickly and my hands became shaky, so I had to stop for some minutes to calm down. I was really excited. I could feel time being recorded.

Shooting on film makes one very cautious and concentrated, one makes less

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mistakes and thinks a lot in advance. It is really important for a filmmaker to go through this process at some point. Film pictures, in my opinion, still have more soul , they breathe, they have texture and they are richer in shadow detail, they are more alive and “cinematic” than the digital medium. But I don’t mind that I cannot shoot on film, I find it safer to have space for experimenting and for making mistakes. I try to get the most out of what I work with. I am happy that I can shoot without a big crew and sometimes without a big budget, it makes me feel braver in perusing the idea.

for nine hours and that changed my whole view on the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. I thought he was the best filmmaker ever. I still think he is among the best. Among the documentary filmmakers that influenced me I wish to mention Viktor Kosakovsky, Pirjo Honkasalo, Michel Glawogger and Hara Kazuo. Also, I am a great fan of Frederick Wiseman and was greatly inspired by the Free Cinema Movement that appeared in Britain in the late 1940s. Its members produced some beautiful films like Reisz and Richardson's Momma Don't Allow and Reisz's We Are The Lambeth Boys.

We have previously mentioned the French New Wave, however, it would be interesting to compare to the cinema of Roberto Rossellini. Who among international directors influenced your work?

Thanks for sharing your time, Maša, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you?

I truly fell in love with cinema after having seen Bergman's and Antonioni's films. At the beginning of 2000, a small (illegal) art cinema appeared in Rijeka, which was the only place where one could watch "art" films and film classics. They would screen three films by one director in the row. There for the first time I watched Bergman's films continuously

I have a couple of projects that I am working on at the moment. Besides working on the Nostalgia project, I started another collaboration with a talented documentary director Sanja Marjanovi So far, working with her has been really pleasant. We are shooting a film about children growing up on the small remote Croatian island of Susak.

It’s quite a magical location and the story is very promising.

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sabine molenaar “

Sabine Molenaar's works are a whirlwind of provocative imagery, tantalizing storylines, and nonlinear structures. After sold out and awardwinning performances in Europe over the last year, she has prepared a cinematographic version of her virtuosistic play “That’s it”

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Sabine Molenaar's works are a whirlwind of provocative imagery, tantalizing storylines, and nonlinear structures. Former Peeping Tom dancer, she founded Sandman (BE) in 2012. That’s It, the first solo piece from Sandman company, aroused great interest in the contemporary art scene and won the award for Strongest female talent at Theater aan zee in Oostend, Belgium. After sold out and award-winning performances in Europe over the last year, she has prepared a cinematographic version of the play, in collaboration with the talented cinematographer Lisa De Boeck. That's it is a film marked by a stunning balance between dreamlike atmospheres and natural environments.

Sabine eschews traditional storytelling and opts instead for an associative, almost surrealist methodology: in an Art Deco room we see her body as a series of fragments dangling on the string of the inner sensation of self, and lacking the wholeness that the Self-Other relationship would produce. Sabine, we want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for That’s It? I've always been fascinated by dreams. As i remember many of my dreams and as well have periods of bad sleeping which makes me wander on the border of reality and fantasy I question sometimes what is actually real or how much are we in control. If maybe we are constantly looking in a haze. Or that we're all just projecting on our private screen what we are seeing, but that there's maybe something behind that screen. I am interested in the expansion of the time and that of space that often occurs in dreams, these disorders zones carry within them the seeds of all metamorphoses.

Both in the play and the film, the viewer is not asked to meditate on the action in progress decrypting a series of hidden symbols, but to follow the

logic of sensation. How did you get started in performing arts?

As a little girl i was already jumping and asking for dance classes so i started at age of five. When i was ten i continued with a classical pre-education for eight years and after that i finished 4 years at the Modern Theatre Dance at Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. After those twelve years of education, i quit dance. I didn't seem to get inspired by the possible paths that were to follow from there and i went for a long travel in Asia were i started to develop my interest for the yoga philosophy and practice. I see that period as very important 'reformatting of my system'. I learned to work with my body in a different way and more aware about transformation of energy and about what i would like to share. After a couple of month i came back with the wish to dance again but with my aims and visions sharpened.

I moved to Belgium and started working for Peeping Tom. A wonderful company in which i did feel artistically free and where your individual, authentic strength was supported and got the playground to deepen it.

In your film the isolation of the female figure at the center of the frame is a way of cutting it out of any narrative relation that would ascribe to it a fixed meaning. In this sense, the contrast between the interior architecture and the human figure assumes a fundamental role in your work : can you comment this particular aspect of the cinematographic version of That’s It? I was very lucky to have a residency, given by the 4Culture Association (Bucharest) Jardin d’Europe, Culture Programme of the European Union, in a studio of the amazing theatre of Bucharest: Sala Palatului. The whole atmosphere and the space inspired me for the dramaturgy and it gave the possibility for some stunning images. As I was working with different perception of time and space, for example,

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Sabine Molenaar / That’s it Subtitolos, Photo by Nauan Barros Photo by Lisa De Boeck, All rights reserved

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Photo by Paul Vernon

the immense empty theatre was helping to make the creature in a state of wandering around and being lost and the small elevator was creating a more suffocating situation.

All was emphasizing the surreal atmosphere in the dreamlike world in which the character is wandering around and entering different levels or states. So it was very inspiring for both camera and dance work.

The space just invited to have the onepoint perspective shot, which Lisa de Boeck likes to use as well, and as a result gave wonderful pictures.

It's an invitation for the viewer to surrender to this associative fantasy world.

In That’s It drama is stripped down to its essential elements, achieving an astonishing fluidity in storytelling.

Could you take us through your

creative process when starting a new project?

I quote my dramaturge Gina Șerbănescu (Romenia, Bucharest) that wrote about my performance with the title ‘The body as a state of mind’: “(...) the body presented in her performance is not the flesh-and-blood entity opposed to the immaterial soul or to the impossible-tobe-physically-perceived mind.

The corporeal reality is turned into a mode of existence that transfigures it into something very similar to a state of mind, in fact the body itself acts as such and therefore we can no longer fix our perception into the field of separations between the physical substance and the thinking/feeling one.”

When i'm working around a certain theme, there is several ways for me to get to some expressions. The sub themes will

make me come up with a (theatrical) situation or action or a certain emotion that i want to represent, which puts me in a certain state and the body will express a certain movement. It could be a very simple or small movement, but then it's all about diving in there and exploring it and tripping on it. Also i like using images.

Images that i search which connect or represent for me somehow what i have in mind and those images trigger movement.

But most important is that you really become that what you want to represent.

That's why it's so important for me to work with state of mind and then the body follows. If your mind is connected with your body you can dive deeper and project further.

We have recognized a touch of Francis Bacon in your surreal imagery. Can you tell us your biggest

influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I deeply appreciate Francis Bacon and I see why you link it to my work, because I use the distorted body in my work a lot to create this surreal imagery. Although I can't say that I'm influenced by him. I'm more influenced by cinema for example (eg Andrei Tarkosvky, Bergman, Lars von Trier, David Lynch) In dance, my biggest influence was Peeping Tom. They were the first one for me to like my unusual body and to offer me tools and a playground to research it differently and also to have a more intuitive approach of creation which i found was more organic and fitting with my own nature. And, even though I unfortunately have never seen a live show, i love the work of Pina Bausch.

We had the chance to watch at 42nd International Theatre Festival of la

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Photo by Terri Florido

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Biennale di Venezia Peeping Tom's internationally successful 32, rue Vandenbranden: how did your early work differ from what you're doing now? What progression or changes have you seen in your performances?

What i feel is that my direction goes more and more away from form.

Meaning, i never start by searching for a beautiful movement or form of the body, but always from a state of mind.

For me, the mind and body is 2 different things, but go hand in hand together. As i said, i like to trip on a certain state, which can maybe give small movement, which then later i pull to the extreme. It just important where it came from, then the rest will follow. For example if my mind has trouble to arrive in the state that i would need to be to do certain material, my body would have problems to achieve the movement, because i demand a lot from my body. I love to work with distorting the body because i like playing with this reality and illusion.

If you think you understand the image, to deconstruct it or to transform it in such a way that the mind is confused. I definitely like to confuse the rational part of the mind, because i believe then you need to surrender to a more intuitive approach. I try to apply it on myself as well as on the public.

You are currently preparing ‘Touch me’, which will premiere on the 17th of March 2015 at Festival Cement. Could you introduce our readers to this solo?

"Touch me" gives us a unique view into a dreamlike universe of a familiar, yet anonymous being. It seems it has come to terms with itself, but it continues to be conflicted with itself. In a bizarre series of images, burdened slowness as well as tranquil explosions of energy are depicted.

The many facets of “intimacy” are the guideline: the tenderness, the hardness, the vulnerability, the loneliness, but also the beauty and the solace of it. What does intimacy do to yourself, to your body, to your selfimage? And what happens if your intimacy clashes with someone else’s?

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"Touch me" sketches that quest in a chain of metamorphoses. Or the search(ing) itself as essence, in the fringe where you dance with your shadow, and where being naked flows seamlessly into being masked.

In no time atmosphere, image, time and space switch. A non-taboo play with form and content that is contagious and mind-blowing at the same time. This way, “Touch me� also shows the opposite of things, and flirts with the borders of illusion and disillusion.

Thanks for sharing your time, Sabine, we wish you all the best with your artist career. What's next for you? Have you a particular project in mind?

After the premiere i will be in Montreal to start a research project with a video artist from there, Olivia Boudreau. We are one of

the pairs of MIXOFFs taking place in the 2015 OFFTA and Ailleurs en Folie Mtl/Qc and will finish the project in Mons (BE) in september. But next to that and performing the 2 solos, i will again make a movie version of the new solo. Because i really feel the drive to continue with making dance films!

INDEPENDENT CINEMA WOMENBIENNALE/15

vinnslans collective “

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The hallmark of Vinnslans talent resides in their acute sensitivity, their absolute sincerity. The Icelandic company refuses the traditional kinds of dramatization, reminding us of Jan Svankmajer's approach to filmmaking, according to whom imagination should first consist in the pleasure of filming, like the creative freedom of the brush on the canvas. We are pleased to present Vinnslan (one of the directors María Kjartans) for this year's Videofocus Edition.

Vinnslan is a multimedia company, when did you first know that you wanted to create a film?

For the last 3 years, before we made Rof, Vinnslan had been creating performances, video art and installations, exploring the boundaries between the art forms and finding a way to create using all mediums equally. As Vinnslan members we all have our unique talents from different art backgrounds. I had been doing photography and a few experimental short films with my partner and Vinnslan musician, Biggi Hilmars who also work as a film composer. Vala Omarsdottir and Gudmundur Ingi Thorvaldsson are both directors and actors with backgrounds in films and theatre and Harpa Fönn Sigurjónsdóttir is a lawyer who creates documentaries and music. So using the film as our medium at this point came very naturally and is just one form or a technique to work with our concept.

We had been discussing doing an artistic short film, a visual sound piece, when Gudmundur Ingi told us he got this summer job, guiding people inside of a volcano called Þríhnjúkagígur (Three Peaks Crater). His stories about the colors and landscape down there were mesmerizing. We knew this was a place we had to see for ourselves. Iceland is one of the most active volcanic regions in the world, with eruptions occurring every 3–4 years on average.

This would give us the chance to capture many of the most amazing scenery

Iceland has to offer – a great mixture of nature, history and adventure. This was late August 2013 and there were only few weeks left of the summer season, as all the equipment had to be taken down before the winter. Thankfully, Gudmundur Ingi got an allowance to invite us to go down and check it out.

Going 120m (400 feet) inside a volcano in an open cable lift, that’s normally used to carry window cleaners, was pretty amazing. The colors and rock formations are out of this world and every geologist’s dream. The thrill came though when we were finally standing at the bottom seeing this phenomenon and without a doubt gave us the impression we were inside of Mother Nature’s womb. Lying down on the rocks and looking up at the raindrops falling nearly 200m at you was something else! We knew instantly that we had found the location for Vinnslan´s first film.

ROF is a surreal cinematographic journey. How did you come up with the idea for this film?

Vinnslan doesn’t work from scripts. For us it’s all about the process. We believe in improvisation, thinking on our feet, creating in the flow, throwing the ball between us and to make ideas happen in the flow. After our first visit to this unique location we knew our film had to be about nature in one-way or another.

We had all recently moved back to Iceland, hoping for some balance after a rootless live abroad, so it was easy to get all wrapped up in wanting to connect the dots again, finding our roots and making a film about man connection to nature.

Entering the Earth was such an important link in the process at this point, literally touching the ground where it all started, where life started and to remember that everything is made by nature and we are not separate from or above it, we are one.

This whole experience felt a bit like the journey of being born, having the guidance wisdom and unconditional love from someone and then wanting to

Photo by Paul Vernon

disconnect, cut the cord and walk away from this person who gave you live. Most of us in Vinnslan have a child, and Vala had recently given birth to her daughter so “birth” was something we could all connect to so without that being the narrative, we did use it as a guideline in the making.

small we are and how powerful nature really is. The film deals with this connection, between man and nature and the energy we are all made of. I suppose we had to remind us that we are supposed to be a part of nature, not above it. After all it’s nature that is the mother, we are just the babies.

The natural settings Vinnslan have chosen are expansive, while the stories that you film are very intimate. It is as if you were searching constantly for a confrontation between the exterior and interior of things. Can you comment this peculiar aspect of ROF?

What was the most challenging thing about making this film?

By entering this enormous cave and see it in the context with us, the human being (to put it in context, the ground space is equivalent to almost three full-sized basketball courts planted next to each other and the height is such that it would easily fit full sized Statue of Liberty into the chamber), we definitely sensed how

The most challenging thing I would say time. When we got the idea, there were only few weeks until the equipment to lower us down into the volcano would be removed for the winter. It was a gut feeling, we new we got an entrance to this magical place so we had to think fast.

Shooting a film inside of a volcano is not easy though, this is no Hollywood. It´s raw nature at its best. The volcano is not on a beaten track, no roads lies to it and there is about 1 hour walk, with the equipment’s on our back, camera, food

etc. to get to the place. And upon arrival there are definitely some gut needed, as we had to descend 120 meters/400 feet to the bottom of the crater in an open cable lift.

When you come down, you are in this gigantic hall. It is hard to imagine how big it is, as it was impossible to capture its real size on film, but its big. You loose completely sense over size.

Inside it is very humid. The strata filters ground water through the rock wall so there is like water constantly dripping down. You wouldn’t be expecting it to be raining inside a volcano. The ground down there is very uneven to say at least.

Big rocks scattered everywhere, you can’t find a flat ground so it became hard to get the tripods steady. It is also difficult to walk without slipping, but despite of all that and being wet and freezing cold, the actors, Gudmundur Ingi and Hera Lind were doing amazingly well and didn’t complain. Actually everyone was so

passionate about this project, I never heard anyone ever complain.

Volcanic passages continue down from the main chamber, to a total depth of about 200m/700 ft. The first scene in the film was shot in a narrow, dark passage in about 170 m. depth. Gudmundur Ingi prepared us very well and informed us about all safety procedures and of course we were all wearing helmets and harnesses.

We were only four of us who could go down as it is to narrow for more people to fit in the tunnel. We didn’t expect to stay very long, but after about one and a half hour the rest of the group, who stayed in the main chamber, became very worried and started to shout and scream trying to get an answer from us. As the size of the cave is so huge it’s hard for the sound to travel, so we didn’t hear their shouting’s.

When we came back around one and a half hour later tired but happy with the shooting it was very surreal to realize that in these circumstances, in the dark

tunnel, we had completely lost sense of time.

How long was the project?

The preparation, and shooting took us a very short time. As I talked about earlier, from the day Gummi told us about this place “Þríhnjúkagígar”, and until the shooting was all done there were only few weeks. We went down to the volcano for preparation 2 times.

Gudmundur Ingi first took me and Biggi down to the chamber, then he went back up with the elevator and left us alone down there, witch was ok, but then he shut off the lights! It was such an amazing experience. While the lights were warming up again you would se the green colors of the cliff being formed and then the yellow, and orange, red and purple, it was magical, like a rainbow forming in front of you. Biggi was singing, and clapping and the acoustics down there are amazing, its

like being in a huge church so he started working on the music and I on the imagery. In the following week we went back down there with the crew, did some experimentation and Vala and me started working on the story.

Few days later, the shooting was done in only one day, as you can hear this happened very fast so I believe we did pretty well due to the circumstances and the situation.

ROF has been realized by virtue of the collaboration of the Vinnslan group. Can you introduce our readers to this very interesting artist collective?

Vinnslan wich means “Process” is collaboration between friends who met in London. When we all moved back to Iceland at the same time we felt that something missing in the Icelandic art scene. We are artists collective as we all come from different backgrounds in

art and together we create and curate interdisciplinary art projects. We have produced several of our own interdisciplinary art projects apart from Rof, the last one was called Strengir, witch means Strings, witch is a mixed media performance piece set up behind the scenes in a Theatre setting.

As we started working in Reykjavik, we felt the Icelandic Art scene needed to be challenged and opened up so we created a new platform called Vinnslan event to encourage collaboration and co operation between artist in various art forms and for the audiences to influence a work in process. In only 3 years we have put up 8 of these events.

We have been impressed with how the film’s striking use of light and color depicts emotions, as well as the very beautiful positioning of figures within the frame. How did you develop your visual style?

I believe every artist develop their stile through experimenting and learning from each project they create. I have been doing photography since I was a teenager and I can say each project teaches me something new, brings something new to the palette.

Especially when shooting in nature, as it is constantly changing and there is always something unexpected. It´s like you become a hunter when searching for the right frame. Always with your eyes alert, looking for the perfect light, color and form. The walls of the chamber are covered with amazing colors and lava forms, so it wasn’t hard to find beautiful frames.

Regarding the positioning of the figures, we wanted to show the intimacy, what it means to be a human being, but also the magnificence of nature, the greatness of the Earth. We felt small in these settings, but powerful at the same time being able to expose this magical place

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to others in the world through the filmmaking.

Did any specific director appeal to you? When we saw ROF we immediately thought of Kieslowsky and Svankmajer...

I can only answer for myself when I answer this question, but no, not really, I cant think of any, apart from perhaps, Benh Zeitlin and his film Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I absolutely love that film and his approach to use visuals and sound in a new and interesting way.

I would rather say books did influence me, as I tend to read a lot when working on a new project. To name a few, authors like Shirley MacLaine and her book “The camino�, witch is a story of a journey and was both an intense spiritual and physical challenge for the author, and Anastasia,

by V Megre, tells the story of an incredible girl who lives in a forest in a close encounter with nature. And the Icelandic Nobel Price author, Laxness, specially his book Independent people, witch is a story about a farmer in Iceland in the determination to achieve independence in the early twentieth century. I really liked it as it tells us in details how it used to be living in Iceland this long time ago, and how much more connected to nature people used to be.

Thanks for sharing your time, Maria, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you? Have you a particular film in mind?

Coming up in May is Vinnslan 3rd birthday, so it will be a great party and a premiere of Rof in Reykjavik at the same time. We have also have started planning Vinnslan #9, witch will take place as a

weeklong residency in Húsavík, north Iceland.

And as we produced our largest performance piece last last year called Strings, we plan to develop it further and hopefully tour with it to Europe in the coming months. If we feel like it we will make a new film. Perhaps Rof will expand and become a performance, art installation or a theatre production who knows? When your projects are always a work in process, there are no strategies, all doors are open and everything is possible.

ABOUT VINNSLAN

Vinnslan (e. process) is a thriving Icelandic artist collective, who creates and curates interdisciplinary art projects. Vinnslan has has in it´s short time (since 2012) completely broken up and challenged the Icelandic art scene.

How? - By opening up a platform for emerging Icelandic artists of all artforms to work together – to collaborate, to share, to connect and to create! Vinnslan especially celebrates interdisciplinary arts, dialogues, collaboration and methods – visual, music, theater, performances, audio, photography, dance, installations, etc.

Already the Collective has produced several of their own interdisciplinary art projects, including Strengir mixed media performance, and ROF, a short film. Few times a year Vinnslan also opens up to other emerging artists, by organizing a week long multi- disciplinary workshop and residency for all forms of arts. Vinnslan has already put up eight of these week long residencies, and invited around 30 other artists and artgroups of all kinds each time to join and exhibit and perform their own work in a joint resulting exhibition and event called Vinnslan event.

ART CINEMA/FASHION

amie schow & emma kantor

Native Tongue, production still. In the photo: Aryanne Padilha and Gina Falcone

From the first time we watched Native Tongue we were astonished by distinct style of Amie and Emma blending baroque images and fantasy: the impression was overwhelming. Amie and Emma are eclectic artists, working with fashion editing, costume design and experimental cinema: as a filmmakers they love to keep the control of numerous aspects of their creation. In the last years Stigmart10 has supported the spread of fashion films, promoting filmmakers' cross-genre experimentation. Amie and Emma's film, realized thanks to a successful crowdfunding operation via kickstarter,seems to confirm contemporary fashion cinema as a crucial trend of the current decade.

We are pleased to present their work for this Biennale Edition. Amie and Emma, first of all, how did you get started in filmmaking?

A: I would say this project IS how I got started in filmmaking. Prior to Native Tongue my experience with filmmaking was strictly limited to the wardrobe department. I had done costume design and styling for a couple of short films and music videos but Native Tongue was my first time being involved with production and creative direction. It really all happened very quickly once the ball was rolling - when Emma moved to LA, what started as two old friends catching up on a couch suddenly became a glaringly obvious, seize the moment and collaborate NOW moment - and we barely pulled it off in the limited time we had! Every step of producing this film has been a learning experience for me.

Emma was a much more prepared in that department.

E: I began exploring filmmaking in high school. I was in the drama program and our drama teacher added a filmmaking class to his curriculum, which I immediately signed up for. My parents weremovie buffs and I think I always

wanted a way into that world. When I was a kid acting seemed like the obvious entry point, but after a few years of Drama classes it became clear to me that I was terrible at acting, but much better at helping people find their truth on stage or in front of the camera. I majored in film in college and it was there, in Santa Barbara, that I learned the ins and outs of getting your small, passion projects made.

Native Tongue deals with the story of a modern day explorer: we daresay that the nature of the film is ritualistic and initiatic. Could you introduce our readers to this aspect of your work?

A: Well, we wanted the character we refer to as “the hunter” to represent the modern world. so to speak. The girls represented our tribe of natives; living off the land and thriving in their natural habitat. The hunter is eager to catch the girls, though we never are quite certain the reality of the hunt, as the whole thing seems almost like a dream - the girls appear to him as if in another plane.

They’re always just out of his reach. But we tried to keep the narrative loose and open for interpretation.

E: The questions Amie and I asked ourselves when trying to create a visual world for Amie’s collection were extensions of the questions she was trying to answer in the construction of Native Tongue. What if Columbus had never discovered the Americas? What if native tribal ‘Americans’ had been living nomadically for 200 more years, with no interruptions, no forced removal, no enslavement, no relocation to reservations. Amie created these beautiful pieces of clothing that used natural, raw materials - leather, wool, the hide of a stingray - but could conceivably still be worn by a nomadic people that lived in harmony with the natural world in the 21st century. And yes, there is something ritualistic, something ineffable happening in the narrative. The second

looks that come into play halfway through the film are the ritual garb these women wear as they call on the spirits of the natural world (through an epic dance party with a killer view) to help them will this intruder out of their homeland.

Could you tell us a particular episode who has helped the birth of Native Tongue?

A: There were a few separate instances that eventually revealed a common thread that inspired the creation of Native Tongue.

Native Tongue, before it evolved into a fashion short, was the name of my thesis collection made during my senior year of fashion design school. When first approaching the task of making a collection of clothing I thought hard about a question often asked of me in school: “It’s your first collection as a new designer, what do you want to say?” Undeniably, the way people

dress gives you your first inkling as to who they are. What you choose to wear, what you choose not to wear - fashion is the physical representation of a universal language which we all inevitably speak. In this way, fashion has great power. As a form of expression, as a method of storytelling, fashion is history and modernity rolled and cut and stitched into one. With these thoughts floating in my head I took a critical look at fashion trends and what was “in”. At the time, Native American inspired “trends” were all over the market. I found multiple instances of bastardization of Native American culture and imagery in current fashion, and cries of outrage from the Native American community in response.

The “Native American Trend” is a prime example of the misuse of content in the apparel industry and the power, and resulting responsibility, fashion has in our

society. With this in mind I saw my collection as an opportunity to try and create something not just bold and new, but culturally aware. Native Tongue is my attempt to make a respectful homage to the beauty so prevalent in all facets of Native American culture, and to the materials and movement of traditional regalia. Putting my own twist on it and playing into my design point of view, which is very modern and avant garde, I chose to explore the “what if?� in this collection.

These clothes are my rendering of what current fashion might look like had people native to the Americas never been colonized or assimilated.

Rather than lifting traditional patterns and textures from the surface of these garments, as done in recent trends, I tried to reference Native American heritage indirectly by combining traditional elements and materials with modern

design and technique. Next came the film.

Lucky to have such a good friend also working in a creative field with similar interests, Emma has been one of my main go tos for brainstorms and a good honest opinion for years - the girl is wicked smart.

Like I mentioned, after years of long distance friendship our paths crossed briefly in LA, and during one of these late night brainstorming sessions we realized our chance to finally collaborate.

I had a collection fresh off the runway, Emma had recently graduated film school and was eager to direct - we were both intrigued by the new genre of fashion film.

The rest was obvious. She helped me flush out the story I had begun to tell with the collection and breathe life into the narrative aspect of the clothing. Things sort of just fell into place from there. Ok wait that is an understatement - there were many moments of “how the hell are we

going to pull this off” - but they were all qualmed by the overwhelming and exciting feeling best described in one of our mutually favorite movies Almost Famous: “it’s all happening.”

Fashion cinema is a new genre gaining popularity in the current decade, just think of the increasing number of festivals 89celebrating it.

While the partnership between fashion world and contemporary art is a matter of fact since the 60s, your works goes beyond this formula, blurring the boundaries between narrative and non-narrative cinema.

In a sense, we daresay that the winning formula of the contemporary generation of fashion filmmakers, is the fact that they have assimilated the lessons of the great experimentators of the last decades, like William Klein and Alain RobbeGrillet. What is fashion cinema for you?

E: Amie and I both come from the school of thought that it is necessary to engage in a conversation with the world and

culture you exist in through whatever means available to you. Fashion and film are two of the most versatile ways that human beings engage in a dialogue with one another about what is important, relevant, and exciting to them in their present cultural moment.

Naturally you look to the artists who came before you when looking for inspiration.

Along with William Klein, photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gregory Crewsden, and Steven Klein, people who really tell stories in their images and give a sense of momentum, have been hugely influential. It almost feels like cheating when you have 24 frames per second to tell a story compared to the single frame they used A: As a designer you work for months, years even, on a piece of clothing to get it just right. And for me, I do it knowing that it will all be worth it when I see a real person making real memories in my garment - that perhaps my garment has inspired them or given them a special kind of confidence that will make these memories into pieces of their life story.

With fashion film I get to help choose the story. When it comes to sharing your work with an audience, film is the most comprehensive way to share a feeling with somebody. Fashion film is a very exciting genre to those of us in the fashion world who want to say more with clothing for this reason - it’s our own little bubble to go wild in.

Native Tongue has been financed through a successful crowdfunding operation. Could you take us through your crowdfunding process?

A: Ah, the roller coaster ride that is crowdfunding...first of all, side note, I had no idea how hard it is to make a clever little kickstarter video until this experience. People make it look so effortless, and maybe it’s just me - I see a lot of awesome videos that make wanting to donate a no brainer, but when it came time to write a script and sit in front of the camera I felt about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike - I am super camera shy.

Emma did some major long distance directing and a lot of editing, and eventually with some clever tricks we did

alright I think. It worked anyhow! I think with crowdfunding it’s important to be as honest as possible, keep it as short as possible, and offer worthwhile rewards for those who donate.

Your use of color is not merely aimed at achieving extremely refined composition: your cinematography seems to be deeply influenced by the emotional potential of color : could you better explain this aspect of your shooting style?

A: First of all, let me just say how lucky we were to get to shoot where we did. The Ranch (El Rancho Cienaga Del Gabilan officially, but referred to by those who know it as “The Ranch”) is one of the most beautiful and inspiring places I’ve ever been. I’m super lucky to get to go to the ranch a few times a year, as I am good friends with the owners.

The ranch is a different color season to season, so we waited until August, the driest part of the year, to obtain a color palette in the location that matched that of the clothing and overall mood of the

piece. Then when we color corrected the footage in post, we de-saturated the first half of the film, gradually building to full saturation at the film’s finale. We wanted the color to reflect the pace of the film, the growing intensity of the chase, and the triumphant finale.

E: Color is so important for designers and filmmakers. I always marveled at how the mood boards Amie has on the walls of her studio look remarkably familiar to the mood boards cinematographer’s work with. And that’s what color does, it creates mood and emotion. One of my favorite stories is how Stanley Kubrick demanded that his production designers make a green-felted table for the massive roundtable in Dr. Strangelove.

The movie was being shot in black and white, so why did it matter that the table was green? Kubrick wanted the actors to feel like they were at the world’s most important poker match. It was very important for us to find scenery that complimented Amie’s color palette, so we ended up finding three distinct trees that helped to enhance the different looks of each of our girls for their tighter beauty and detail sequences.

We have quoted William Klein, however your work reveal many references to classical painting too: would you tell us your main influences in filmmaking?

E: I think first and foremost everyone’s main influences come from their own lives and their direct experiences. Amie and I grew up in Northern California and the landscape there is remarkably unique. At first we were talking about shooting Native Tongue in the desert in Joshua Tree, which logistically made sense because Amie is based in Los Angeles.

Luckily, however, our good friends own this incredible 11,000 acre cattle ranch in Central California and once we got permission to shoot there, the geography of the ranch became hugely influential.

The landscape on the ranch is incredibly grandiose, to the point where, when talking about certain establishing shots, I think I threw some names out like Terrence Malick and Stanely Kubrick. My cinematographer may have laughed at me, but he certainly delivered. When it comes to more direct influences for this brand new medium of fashion film, we looked to some other filmmakers who were telling visually striking, narratively

rich, and oftentimes enigmatic, stories.

Filmmakers like Floria Sigismondi, Stephanie di Giusto and Melina Matsoukas. Wardrobe does not just mean clothes for those women, it’s about the person you can become in the clothes, the mood and the story the clothes create, and what can be said without dialogue.

And classical painting is definitely the great-great-grandmother to the type of storytelling you’re seeing in fashion film, just look at something like Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’.

Camera movement is one of the tools in the filmmaker's arsenal that can bring a visionary touch, just think of Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. Your DoP Orlando Duguay used a Steadicam in this project. Could you comment this stylistic choice?

A: Steadicam is sexy, and Orlando is the man!

E: Steadicam is incredibly sexy! It makes the viewer feel like they’re dancing with the girls and floating through their world.

Orlando was handheld every time we filmed the hunter because he’s bringing the chaos and tumult of the outside world

and he lacks the natural grace and oneness with nature the girls possess.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Amie & Emma. Are there any collaborations on the horizon?

A: I hope so! For now though it’s difficult because Emma is living in Brooklyn and I am in Los Angeles. I am working freelance as a stylist - photoshoots music videos tv short films etc. - and squeezing in collaborative shoots with local talent in my free time. Hoping to make more fashion films soon!

E: I’m still concocting a plot to kidnap Amie, bring her to Brooklyn, and force her to work on another project with me! I’m thinking something totally different from the natural, exterior world of Native Tongue. I want to shoot a fashion film on old VHS camcorders and do something kooky, like a home video mash-up of a twisted little girl’s birthday party in an abandoned building. Something messy and urban and glamourous in the way everyone wishes they had the nerve to be.

But my heart is truly in California, so chances are we’ll be meeting back up in LA sooner rather than later.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA WOMENBIENNALE/15

yuan liu

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I initially wanted to make this film to showcase my favorite instrument and my favorite drummer whom is one of the most technically advanced and free minded jazz musicians. I wanted to get up close in there, showing the drum set and how it is played from all different angles that you normally couldn't see from the seat of the audience- they are always putting the drummer in the back :) So what kind of stage should it be? why not a milk jar.

I was really influenced by "To Kill a mockingbird", and Martin Arnold's additive editing revision of the Scout and milk scenes in his works. I was recreating a scene like that in my living room and invited the drummer over for a Halloween dress up. Be Scout. And see what happens to the milk jar.

My film often touches on gender studies also. Who is the one that inspires? The man or the woman? When is inspiration needed from the lens of a egoless view of this physical world. Did the woman's initiation of the day dream and her end action of taking the milk stage away set the over arching event of the milk drumming world? Or is the whole surreal event a delusional episode? What troubles

or inspires us is ever more complicated than what is in front of us- books, milk jar, table, air. To watch and to initiate the surreal visual experience is an artistic pursuit that goes along with a bigger universal process- to learn and contribute and naturally drift within our physical and real context.

Yuan's approach to cinema: a letter to the sub-conscious... interested in magnifying surrealism in visuals in a free form... a mathematical contemplation on the social cache behind the individuation process of a quixotic way of life...

This is not my statement- but pat of why I try so hard to make cinema for American musicians here in nyc is that they are not getting paid for what they deserve and can never afford videos with higher production value, I want to come in and make these videos that compliment their music, but also for the lack of better words, to give away as a package full of understanding, recognition and confirmation of their help in shaping other artists' ideas.

Yuan Liu's cinema reveals a powerful surrealistic vein. Her works, whether they are video installations or music videos, are marked by a strong effort to explore the sub-conscious through the use of refined cinematography.

For this Videofocus Biennale we have selected her work Scout's Day Dream.

Yuan, could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

Most videos I make are music driven. I was a classically trained musician at an early age and began improvising in middle school and I have since been collecting data on how sound, harmony and compositions work. With each sound file I work with, I research the mechanism behind the piece and I brainstorm imageries on the go. My ideas often come to me when I am in action, and less when I am still. I have to interlace my actionpacked days with the quiet desk time under the moon to script out my ideas with texts, illustrations and hand-written cards to my creative partners. As a director and oftentimes my own production designer and producer for these music video projects, like in Scout’s Day Dream, I take my mission very seriously: I want to make videos for very devoted instrumentalists and improvisers and I hope for these videos to stay relevant to my creative community over a considerable period of time and yet I hope for them to act on their own as a unique holiday gifts dedicated to a time that never was.

I learned from my Reed College days in molecular biology labs that there would be no virtue making the right choice if you knew for certain that it was the right one to begin with, you have to think and dream to raise a valuable question, then you can be an accident investigator and use fragmented but detailed information that you have collected revolving around your project and write down the principal structure and form of your experiment.

You then can mix all your masteries and all your first attempts together and put them into action and analysis. And that is how I work when it comes to video making also. I keep experimenting and thinking

until that very electrifying second of imagery that screams intentionality behind each mental activity that I have just conducted right before, that’s when I stop brainstorming. That second of imagery is never the “correct” treatment, because there never is going to be a “correct” treatment. There are however the good moments that speak the matching mood, color, texture and vocabulary that compliments the music, that those moments at the same time does not exclude the newer uncertainties to come upon the video’s completion. My thoughts often travel freely from these different theoretical, and physical realities, and it is only through the constant looping through that I taste satisfaction for all the roles of filmmaking- the freedom you have, the respect for the craft, the response to something natural and supernatural, the poetic remark of your muse and the process of seeing where you allow this art form lead to.

I love surrealist movement and I am influenced by it. I love it because I am in the middle of understanding it. To me, It is not that surrealist artists obsess with the otherworldly thinking, the surrealists artists I am influenced by believe that too much evidence of another world would condition mankind to a much too melo mode of thought and behavior. They want to understand at such a speed that would bring balance and justice to their mind as a human, but also imagine as much as they can from the perspective of all the sentient beings other than humans. So they think fast and act fast as a way of life. I see a parallel between this way of life and the free minded musicians desire to improvise atop their highly technical abilities and their innovative ideas behind the sounds.

In Scout’s Day Dream, A big part of my process of collaborating with filmmaker friends and musicians alike is an introspection on our friendship and an open dialogue about our different views of our consciousness, and the missing pieces in our consciousness. The missing pieces in all of our consciousness is perhaps sounding like a pessimistic view, but what if we start to view the missing pieces

themselves in an isolated setting and gives a magical life to it. What if we choose to view that, those missing pieces, once acquired, momentarily even, don't make us higher, or better or more powerful, but it will make us more natural. “The missing pieces� is an action in its own context without our anthropomorphic expectations in the way of it, to search and understand and adrift towards its magical realism, I hope, would make all of us as natural and collectively sustainable as we could be.

As far as the storyline of my experimental cinema, I often take into account the basic peculiarity of human nature, that it is the mystery and crisis that keep us think on our toes and confront our problems directly, we can then rely on our abilities to create, and not fall back to some other purpose and reason to fearfully equate life as passtime. Until I reach a new degree of self determination, my life and work will remain as bewildering and paradoxical as it gets naturally, and why not, then, to accept that as a good platform to create cinema experimentally and very personally. From experience, I can say

that making experimental cinema is a much needed wellness practice for people who have had a lot of dynamic changes in their lives and I encourage more of it.

Creating videos are not easy or simple for me aside from my passion and a strong sense of direction in my philosophical mission. I am so fortunate that I have a lot of amazing friends who are willing to lend me their skills and talent. And sometimes when all things fall too much into the uncertain vortex I just have to trust that the years of measuring and performing lab experiments and musical instruments gave me a really good sense of intuitive eyeballing for space and time, so I keep going with the project even though it feels like it will evaporate into nothingness. I know that these moments are nothing to be proud of much, but those are my simple pleasures and comfort blanket at cutting down my anxiety during production.

Your cinematography is marked by the choice of rarefied spaces

reminding us of contemporary avantgarde theathre pièces by the Raffaello Sanzio Socìetas, and courageous shot composition as well: for example, in Scout's Day Dream you frame your subject from all different angles, allowing the viewer to catch details he normally couldn't see from the seat of the audience, and operating too a cubist decomposition of the space.

How did you develop your shooting style?

I love theatre set designs. I worked for Caiguoqiang, the internationally artist known for his gunpowder explosions and his art direction of the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympics. His sense of artistic balance found in his installations can not be decoupled from his early years of theatre design training. I love creating a "vibe" for the music piece at hand. Not that I have ever executed well enough to accomplish it, but I would like to focus on creating this

“vibe” of the music in the truest sense- a visual environment that the sound can grow within it at this particular moment in history, my hope is to be able to enter this said environment and get lost in it and begin to feel for the increased entropy of the future.

For Scout’s Day Dream, my subject is the drum solo. I remember pondering this at the very first moment of the project, the drummers are often in the back in most performances, how un-fun that is, for how much I love the drums personally. My subconscious told me right away, create a pretty stage for it, why not a milk glass like stage?! I immediately got so excited seeing in my mind the round cymbals being framed by another perfect circle as the milk rimples out of the rim of the glass. There is something so non-organic looking and manmade about those perfect circles you know, but the layers after layers of different sized circles in a single frame somehow re-

introduce an organic looking image. I was also searching through my memory chamber of seeing other people play or remembering when I myself played, the interesting and long packing- up- after-agig dance of drummers with all these objects big and small‌ the geometrical shapes of cylinders, circles, triangular lines.

What if my story of the drum solo in the milk glass made people look at this involved instrument in every possible angle, I must then shoot from above the glass.

The cinematographer of this experimental piece is my close friend Russell Cramer.

We have teamed up and delivered many music videos together. On a form level, he is coming from a more classic and traditional filmmaking background. I wrote the script with his talent and technical abilities in mind. We were looking at classic US films from 40’s and 50’s for inspiration, and particularly the works of cinematographer James Wong Howe. I

prepped the set and costumes accordingly to compliment our decisions on the black and white approach, the incorporation of the period pieces and the beauty of the hard light. My script called for a retro aesthetic, yet we needed to use green screen technique to isolate the drum performance and put that into the milk glass. Since the subject we want to highlight was revolved around a drum solo, we adopted repetitive editing to reemphasize the free improvisational noise aspect of the drum solo.

When I imagined again about the drummer being filmed from an overhead perspective, I decided on the spot that I wanted the scene to spin in a circle. I could only have realized that shot and make it compelling when Russ knew how to approach that decision technically as an experienced cinematographer- he asked the gaffer our friend Tom Chaves to walk around the

drummer with the kino in different ways.

That way when I spun the same scene in post repetitively and reversed, the light source would seem as if it was coming from the same window consistently matched with the previous wide shots. The funny thing is, everyone thought I had somehow got my hands on a mini crane for the overhead shots, but actually Russ and Tom brought the jib to the second floor of my house right above where I shot most of the scenes, to shoot through the sky light, otherwise we wouldn’t have had enough vertical distance. My friend Mike Keane whom also has an amazing color studio called Brooklyn Media House lend me his talent with the final post production edits that essentially made the story read on the screen. I am very grateful for my amazing team of friends whom taught me the craft well and what I am the most excited about is that now as I got better at it, I find myself working with my elbow grease while my bizarre ideas well taken on set of their

personal projects- this mutual exchange and respect is what keeps the creative community stronger.

Scout's Day Dream is dedicated to Kevin Shea, talented drummer. When did you come across his music?

When I was around all my friends at the New England Conservatory of Music after I moved to the east coast, I went to see music every night at the school and attended master classes that were held by the school. I heard Kevin’s name mentioned from one of the professors there and a few of the drum students there. Even though Kevin wasn’t an alum at NEC, he was appreciated by this instrumentalist think tank as a true artist/rocker/academic all-in-one type of rare soul and was regarded as a very influential and indemand-drummer in the jazz world today for his serious chops, intelligence, originality, humor and philosophy that

shines through his performances across different type of audiences. “You should really check out Kevin Shea’s performance... his concepts you will completely appreciate.” people said, and sure enough, they were right.

It really took someone as quixotic and as fun as Kevin for me to try this type of layered cinema for the first time. Since this project, I have deepened my understanding of my work- I meticulously and mathematically contemplate a musician’s life before making visuals that work with their music. I analyze their music and art as a whole but focus on a small angle and expand our audience’s possibilities in understanding the musician’s social cache behind their individuation. It is perhaps there is an agreed understanding of this aspect of my work that allowed Kevin and I to be good collaborators. He appreciated layered thinking. Since our first video collab back in 2011, all our friends are now

friends with one another and we share the same creative community. For example, in this project our friend Ron Stabinsky, the mastermind behind the piano scoring of the piece, composed the original score yet he managed to insert his improvisation in reaction to Kevin’s drumming solo, it is a rare treat for music lovers to experience.

They both now play in a jazz group “Mostly Other People Do the Killing”. This band just put out a note-for-note recreation Miles Davis album “Kind of Blue” called “Blue”. It is mind-blowing to hear what the original drummer Jimmy Cobb from “Kind of Blue”’s positive feedback validating MOPDTK’s proficiency. Living in Brooklyn and witnessing the highest level of performance in jazz really gave me the urge and thrill to make videos. I was always interested in the drums, and I played some too, since videos I made with Kevin I have put out a few videos where I also scored with my own drum solos and casio SK5 bend synth, and one of those pieces was selected for a

sound installation on hemispheric speakers at Brown University via MEME program. I can never express enough gratitude to these musicians and music educators whom inspired me to improvise and create constantly as a new way of life.

Your cinema is rich of references. In Scout's Day Dream you have been deeply influenced by "To Kill a mockingbird". Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I love old movies, I love learning about Americana through the old America classics. When I moved to the US by myself at age 15, I was a student visa holder, and I just learned like a sponge that soaks up everything new. The immersion experience itself taught me how not to be afraid of any new art form as a way to express myself and my cultural background. In this case in Scout’s Day Dream, I was reacting to it.

The silence, quaintness, the perfect clean lawns that was so exodic to me in America 40’s movies, there is a sense of repression of post war America that reminded me of certain philosophical undertone resembling of the Confucius teachings of family loyalty and a way of relating the present moral problems with the past political events.

The pleasantville look is perhaps a visual representation of a deep introspection in a silent way. I grew up in the backyard of Confucius practically, and also many other important philosophers after him. In my hometown, we practiced calligraphy, ink painting, martial art and etc we were expected to master all “six” scholar and martial skills and memorizing numerous classic texts at a very young age. Although no one agrees with all of his teachings that are now outdated, my childhood friends and I still are influenced by his way of describing the contradictory pairs of forces: there is the ying and the yang, there is the good and the evil, there is the art and the muse, there is the dream and there is the awakeness and so on…. I named this piece the daydream to address what he often not advocating. Yet in this daydream, there is

the male and the female, there is the nonsense and there is the order, there is the artist whom was there by the way of daydream, is the spectacle performance in the milk glass the center of our attention or is the strong contrast of the drum solo against the vintage smell of the stillness we recreated the new subject of the story?

What is the mundane reality of Scout from “To Kill A Mockingbird” before she were forced to go to the church that day and what if that is experienced by someone from our present day dressed in a way that Confucius would have never approved? I leave a lot of things open-ended for everyone to rethink performance, audience, gender, art, inspiration, attention so we can redefine and look at power and struggles within these contexts in a new way.

My ideas and taste for video art were influenced by a long list of visual artists who are extremely hardworking, unique and charismatic. This is a short list of them whom shaped the very beginning of my creative attempts whom I happen to personally know and love : I am influenced by a fine artist and educator in Colorado, Sandy Lane. Her installations were wellresearched and her art is provocative yet personal. Gea Philes inspired me to start drawing, writing and producing storytelling on a level so brave that I still am today shocked of this phenomenon of her mentorship to me. Her illustrations are powerful and brilliant and she casted me a couple of times and those videos received great feedback from today’s internationally renowned filmmakers. Saira Huff, an amazing designer/tailor/musician and her hand-made leather runway pieces and her active advocation in encouraging more hand made wild encentrencities. She taught me to be extremely detail oriented with creative projects and to not lose hope because I can make anything by hand and by myself.

The fact that I am as influenced by refined photography produced by the cutting edge production houses as I am by a found object on the street, is directly influenced

by Saira.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Yuan. What's next for Yuan Liu? Are there any new projects on the horizon?

worthwhile that your team has allowed me to reexamine my work and myself here, I can not thank you enough for this experience.

I am made a 7min experimental cinema for composer/viola player Jessica Pavone and it is coming out this month. I am brainstorming a sequel to a jazz action noire for the new record "Blue" which is a not-for-note recreation of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" I mentioned earlier that Kevin Shea drums in. For the ongoing big project I am writing a script for a documentary focusing on the history of Genomics. Good that I live in New York, I can go to New York Genome Center for lectures on the topic and I have access to some amazing non-profit facilities to shoot some interviews to start.

Hopefully my friend Dominika Michalowska will be convinced by me be the amazing editor for it. Lastly, I believe that every project will be exponentially more

Interview republished by courtesy of Stigmart10 Videofocus Team.

All rights reserved

FASHION CINEMA WOMENSBIENNALE/15

julie hong

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We are honoured to host for this year’s Edition the work by Julie Hong, a talented fashion filmmaker artist: her exquisite film "Fashion in motion" has been recently honored with the first prize at the Elle Canada Film competition. As Mark Gould writes, surrealist art is desire made solid. Surrealism might be a subjective practice, but by definition it is also a hyperrealist one. In Julie's cinema each shot is carefully orchestrated to work within the overall structure, achieving a perfect balance between surreal and clinical cinematography. Julie, how did you get started in fashion cinema?

Thank you for featuring “Fashion in motion” and recognizing the thought put into the work. Fashion is a wonderful, artistic industry. An important aspect of presenting the art of fashion is through audio-visual storytelling, which is the part that intrigues me the most. Artists are always inspired by other works of art- I am no exception, and when I see other peoples’ compelling works I am inspired to create my own artwork with theirs.

For a while I’ve been interested in capturing moments, but now I am interested in creating moments or heightening the aesthetic of the particular moment. In that sense maybe the work is closest to hyperrealism- although- I am not sure if I consider the work, or my personal style, associated with any “- ism”s.

I read somewhere a while ago that Michael Chabon commented on Wes Anderson’s style as - “not realist, surrealist, or magic realist” but “fabu(list)”. Wouldn’t it be great if I could join that circle of fabulists!

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you

come up with the idea for Fashion in Motion?

I was inspired by a wide array of digital presentations. The digital platform offers a new dimension and exciting experiential opportunities that just cannot be physically explored on print.

I just thought it would be fun to see photo editorials in magazines come to life and to have movement. Hence the title: “Fashion in Motion”.

Fashion in Motion has been realized thanks to the collaboration of the talented DoP Howard Wan and Peter Paik (Camera assistant), who did an excellent job using a flexible and professional tool like the Red Camera to create a seductive atmosphere. Can you describe your collaboration process?

Thank you for recognizing them.

Howard is a very talented cinematographer and it was a very fun collaboration. We have been very lucky to have attended the same University (Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada) for Media Production (also known as RTA for Radio and Television Arts). He was a known DOP in the program with a background in creatives and telling intriguing visual stories. We had chatted previously about collaborating and the perfect opportunity came up. I feel very privileged to have had him on board.

Your film is dominated by a strong presence of white: besides the reference to the white of paper, this choice seems to heighten and alter individuals' experiences of space and time. Could you introduce our readers to this peculiar concept of your work?

It made sense to keep the background as minimal as possible to emphasize the movement of the models and their presence. I wanted the theme of each model and his/her outfit to be realized,

Subtitolos, Photo by Nauan Barros

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Photo by Paul Vernon

thus the blank space played a role of a canvas to house this collection of themes.

I love good art direction and sometimes this means an ornate mix and match of designs, but some other times it can also mean simplicity at its purest.

weight of its importance in all aspects of life is equally substantial. Rhythm and good pacing is something that is intuitively good to us. For this particular project it made sense to heighten and maximize that.

The rhythmical element is extremely important in your work. By definition cinema is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity, however rarely in mainstream or narrative cinema we assist to such a joyful dance like in your film. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?

I think “Fashion in Motion”, using the same BPM and using the same theme of white background, transitions from highenergy dancing mannequins to a calmly standing doll seamlessly. In this way, the musical rhythm is extremely important but the visual rhythm and the art of editing is also very instrumental.

I appreciate your kind words.

Even before I knew the outfits, or the song, or the models, I knew I absolutely wanted this to be a rhythmical piece, both visually and audibly.

Let’s speak about influences. We have mentioned William Klein, yet your style is very far from the visual imagery of the American-born French photographer and filmmaker. Have any artists from the older generation in-spired you?

The rhythm certainly plays an important role in “Fashion in Motion”, but the

Truthfully I don’t have any artists from the older generation in particular that inspires me. I have many artists in my book of inspiration that I love to draw from for different projects and different approaches, but not one to definitively source from. If I must drop names, I am obsessed with the filming style of Wes Anderson (symmetry, colour coordination, a level of sophistication, and some light humour) and Karl Lagerfeld (portrayal of class and elegance, simple and stylish, well colour coordinated, and interestingly narrated) but they are not from the older generation.

I am inspired by many things, and from the most unconventional and unlikely places too. God is the ultimate and the oldest artist and he inspires me with the beauty of nature every day.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Julie. What's next for Julie Hong?

By the end of the summer I will have completed my Master’s degree in Media Production which is very exciting- but the journey towards achieving this degree is far more exciting than the degree itself because I am learning new things and extending my capabilities. Right now I am exploring the ways fashion can be presented on digital media platforms by experimenting with bullet time technology, which is something I have never tried before.

Outside of my learning zone, I love collaborating with designers, art directors, and artists to realize the potential of audio-visual exhibition. I am also staying in touch with local designers for future collaborations so that’s something to look forward to!

In the long run: I hope to keep making and sharing things that are pleasing to people and to me.

m

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA WOMENSBIENNALE/15

jaclyn slimm

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Multimedia artist and eclectic personality working as designer, photographer, singer and ballet dancer, Jaclyn Slimm embraces surreal aesthetics. In her work, she invites the viewer into a dreamy filmic mystery marked by a sheer visceral, decorative quality of baroque excess. We are glad to present for this Videofocus Edition "Phase Break," an experimental video for acclaimed electronic ensemble Mahogany's single, realized through her unique visual and aural imagination.

Jaclyn, how did you get started in visual arts?

I began ballet at the age of three and have kept the discipline since. I joined a theater group, entered art fairs, won several awards, and, beginning my visual inquiries in parallel to dance, completed my undergrad a year early.

While collaborating with the photographer Douglas Mellor in Philadelphia and working in fashion in New York City, I met my musical partner, Andrew Prinz, who encouraged me to start working in video and music and invited me to join Mahogany. We immediately began intense selfdocumentation while traveling out of Philadelphia and NYC by rail to Montreal, Austin, and Seattle, creating our first collaborative effort, "Keystone Sonata," at the behest of SXSW in 2012.

In Chicago, we composed and assembled "Phase Break," also commissioned by SXSW — so in fact, scenes captured in all of these journeys are laced together in the work.

"Phase Break" features a psychedelic scenario taking the viewer through a roller coaster of characters and emotions. We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for "Phase Break?"

As our first collaboration, it was inherently an exploration. A 'phase break' is a neutral

section of catenary (overhead wire) on electric railroads which exists as a 'coastthru' area between substations to avoid short-circuit. We began to explore this idea of free momentum and inertia as a necessary part of forward progression, as we have both always experienced a divinity in wanderlust.

We built the song with an intense amount of versioning. Andrew first laid down pure sine wave tones and minimal electronic percussion, then adding Arp synthesizer.

From an immense amount of multitracking, the arrangement emerged: essentially four sections revolving around the root key of C major, though the third section moves to Eb major. It was also within interest at the time to work in Renaissance-era tuning, so the composition is actually tuned around a 419 A instead of today's standard 440 A. This gave us access to smoother transients and warmer upper-order harmonics.

To meet the growing demands of our rapidlysprawling concept, we wrote lyrics and vocal melodies; Andrew notated a traditional score for cello, sequencers, wavetable synthesizers, bass, and live percussion. I began my work extemporizing with electric 12-string guitar, a shimmering, resonant instrument that has more in common with piano or harpsichord, really.

Between the neutral "break” periods of travel, compositional aspects, and sitespecific choreography, the video we accrued aligned serendipitously with the flow of production. We sought to describe a world not necessarily connected to the digital now and to present a scenario outside derivative contemporisms.

How did you develop your visual imagery?

I knew I wanted to show “Phase Break” in a way which featured both me and Andrew.

Previous Mahogany videos rarely featured Andrew, which had always shocked me. I wanted Mahogany listeners and anyone viewing the video to feel Andrew’s presence

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Subtitolos, Photo by Nauan Barros

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in a way they hadn’t from the earlier Mahogany works, which typically feature a more narrative theme.

Aside from the aforementioned imagery brought together during travel, scouting locations together led to more development. Forging through the elements became key. One standout morning in the middle of January, with heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain, we agreed nonetheless that we should trek to the city center to create a dance sequence inside Chicago’s gorgeous Amtrak Union Station. At completion, travelers gave us a standing ovation, which was unexpected but certainly welcome.

The previous "Keystone Sonata" video had concluded with a shot in Union Station, too. Being inexplicably drawn to certain places became a facet of the wanderlust; the episodic continuity, an outgrowth of intuition, and coalescent insight.

"Phase Break" presents a stunning balance between order and chaos: each shot is carefully orchestrated to work within the overall structure, yet at the same time the whole piece is marked by a vivid and unpredictable atmosphere. How did you achieve this balance in your work?

Perhaps the balance stems from the free, generative aspect in the compositional premise of the music, though after recording, we would then engage in deep critique and self-examination, redacting elements we felt were even slightly cursory. Andrew knew when he was producing the track that it needed to 'break out' into each successive section to dovetail our intentions.

The music became the first step on a reciprocal staircase of inspiration; the next section of video work would then play out. The performance aspect

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Photo by Paul Vernon

seemingly placed itself beneath the textural layers and motion which makes up the perceived “chaos.” Cued by form and observing synchronous elements, a cohesive distillation took shape.

Stylistically, the film owes more to the psychedelic fantasy world of the 60s than to the surreal imagery of Jean Cocteau. Who among international artists and directors influenced your work?

We have an abiding interest in classic, artist-driven avant-garde — Duchamp, František Drtikol, Xenakis, Věra Chytilová, Tarkovsky, Lang, Man Ray, Jeanloup Sieff — as well as visual technique and optimistic spirit expressed in collectives, firms and movements like Superstudio, UFO, and De Stijl.

Andrew and I have always been highly similar in our attraction to a certain indescribable color gamut, a love for whimsical, daydreamy, psychedelic edge layered upon hard, modern graphics, and often-overlooked beauty — overgrown infrastructure, post-urban metamorphosis, abandoned areas — environments full of latent potential.

We have also always been attracted to, and inspired by, the Mod and Psychedelic scenes in London and France, and of course the cinema and music of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. I love Roger Vadim’s films. Peter Whitehead’s “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London” documentary is important to me because of the pace of the filming versus the pace of the club and nightlife being cut together for the viewer.

How did you conceive the choreographed dance sequences for "Phase Break?"

To research the character and hone my fundamentals, I was taking classes at the Joffrey Academy. I developed the choreography for the third movement of the song based on the lyrics I was writing, and presented it to Andrew as he shared the current mix of the track.

You are also a 12-string guitar player and singer. Music has always been a fundamental part of your life, the starting point of your artistic research and practice. Could you introduce our readers to the multidisciplinary nature of your art?

The struggle of perfecting anything is the real unseen craft. My approach has always

been to absorb from my idols and mentors.

If I like something, I'll accept it in my own fashion. I am most interested in having the end result be beautiful, organized and wellresearched. It's not about “having fun” while creating, but giving everything before letting it go into the world, where it can be reviewed quite microscopically. This also means that one must have an authentic grasp on the mission inherent in the work.

Thanks for sharing your time, Jaclyn, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you?

Thank you. Andrew and I are currently at work on a series of videos to accompany songs from Mahogany’s EP recording 'Electric Prisms.' A full-length double album and feature film 'Frontiering' is now in production as well as other projects in development.