Paradocs
Laborat
Guillaume Cailleau In a cancer research center in Berlin, a film crew records experiments being performed on mice. The mice undergo a range of measurements and, in extreme close-ups, we see them being operated on, getting injections or being led under a scanner. The rise and fall of a mouse’s chest, a stretched-out mouse leg or a close-up of the red nose cause involuntary associations with pets. We don’t know whether it’s always the same mouse or many different ones: these lab animals are totally interchangeable. Discomfort is far too weak a word for the feelings evoked when watching these highly detailed recordings of vivisection: a strong stomach is certainly recommended. The analogue filming method gives the images a 1980s look; only the presence of ultramodern laboratory equipment reveals that this film was in fact made recently. The filmmakers, who avoid polemics and sentimentality, also show their own preparations as they try out different sound and image settings, making the whole thing an experiment within an experiment. The silent images are only occasionally interrupted by directions from the filmmakers, making the whole situation even more abstract, clinical and oppressive.
Germany, 2014 DCP, color / black-and-white, 22 min
Guillaume Cailleau:
Director: Guillaume Cailleau Cinematography: Michel Balagué, Guillaume Cailleau Screenplay: Guillaume Cailleau, Hanna Slak Editing: Hanna Slak Sound: Kai Nicholas Theissen Music: Werner Dafeldecker Production: Guillaume Cailleau for CaSk Films World Sales/Screening Copy: Light Cone
Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell:
Blitzkrieg (2008) Through H(i)J (2009)
Austerity Measures (2012)
Ming of Harlem – Twenty One Storeys in the Air Phillip Warnell When Antoine Yates entered a New York hospital with a large bite wound in 2003, the staff alerted the police because the wound appeared to be caused by something bigger than the pit bull Yates described. They were right: in his fifth floor apartment in Harlem, the police found Ming, an adult Bengal tiger. And in one of the rooms lived an adult alligator by the name of Al. Living outside their names / outside the languages that name them / these names that roar and gape / these sharp-toothed names. This poem written especially for the film expresses the sense of friction at the heart of the tale: the apparently irreconcilable realities of the giant predator within the walls of the apartment and the man, one imagines, reading the paper and doing the dishes. Filmmaker Phillip Warnell makes this friction palpable in a 20-minute section in the middle of the film. Yates also gets an opportunity to talk about his life and his bizarre cohabitation with his pets. In one of the final scenes, it suddenly becomes clear what he was looking for with Ming and Al.
UK, Belgium, USA, 2014 DCP, color, 71 min Director: Phillip Warnell Cinematography: David Raedeker Editing: Phillip Warnell, Chiara Armentano Sound: Hildur Gudnadóttir, Emmet O’Donnell Production: Phillip Warnell for Big Other Films, Madeleine Molyneaux for Picture Palace Pictures Screening Copy: Big Other Films Awards: Prix Georges de Beauregard FID International Film Festival Marseille
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Phillip Warnell:
The Electric Hare (1994) The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes (2008) Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009) I First Saw the Light (2012)
www.phillipwarnell.com