Master 2019, graduation magazine, Shifting Perspectives

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA

2019

Shifting Perspective

The master Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy is a two-year international course for a select group of filmmakers and artists with several years of experience under their belt. They are offered time and space to research and experiment in an open-ended trajectory in which thinking and making are one. The programme privileges questions over answers, process over product, experimentation over mere execution and long-term effects over short term gain…

During the Artistic Research Week, the graduates present their research and the projects related to it – proposals, films, installations…These lectures, performances and workshops contextualise the projects and raise questions for further development.

More information about the course: www.masteroffilm.nl

INTRODUCTION / SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

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ROBIN COOPS

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JAN-TIMO GESCHWILL

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PETER HAMMER

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ALBERT KUHN

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BORA LEE-KIL

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STEFAN PAVLOVIĆ

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GIORGIA PIFFARETTI

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YAFIT TARANTO

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10 YEARS A MASTER

BY STANISLAW LIGUZIŃSKI

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COLOFON

MASTER OF FILM 2019

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INTRODUCTION

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

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INTRODUCTION This year’s Artistic Research Week is dedicated to the eight graduates of the 2019 Group who have joined the Master’s programme two years ago from all over the world. They came with the desire to rethink and rework, in and through cinema, their position, their practice and the questions that their practice raised. Now, some 22 months later, many of them found their method, and set out to use that method in concrete projects. Their research projects and interests, however different – from feminist politics via media technology to archival practices – all circle around the need to shift perspective. Turn the camera a little to the right or to the left, zoom in or zoom out, look underneath or from above: changing one’s perspective means seeing different things, or seeing the same things differently. Change your view on your working method and you realise process is more important than product. Stop taking your body for granted and you see how society has imprinted its rules on it. Step away from behind the camera – literally and in spirit - and find that that same camera can create and not just record intimacy. Rethink your position as a director and find that improvisation gives space to all. Or interrogate media’s production of meaning and truth and you allow for imagination to come to the fore again… It’s no surprise then that this year’s graduates chose the title of Shifting Perspective for their Artistic Research Week.

This year it’s also 10 years ago that we started with the Master’s programme. Since then some 100 filmmakers and artists have had the desire, and the guts, to share with us their questions and their practices. In fact, Shifting Perspective is not only applicable to the research projects of the 2019 Group but also to this anniversary. After all, what we set out to do was to try and shift the perspective on filmmaking towards research in and through cinema, because of our conviction that filmmakers have developed and are still developing tools that offer a unique understanding of the world around them. In order to see if, and how, some of the central ideas and notions underpinning the course are still relevant in our alumni’s artistic practices, we’ve asked another alumnus – Stanislaw Liguziński – to interview several of them from different years. Their interesting reflections you find in the article at the back of this magazine: 10 Years a Master - alumni’s take on the notions that shaped the ‘Artistic Research in and through Cinema’ course.

A multi-disciplinary artist working mainly in opera and audio-visual concerts, Robin Coops (the Netherlands) has always been interested in issues of control. How are we controlled by the political, technological and social systems that we live in, and what ways can we find to question and mitigate that control? In his research, Jazzing Frames, he asks these very same questions but then in relation to his own role, as director. How as a director to find the balance between having and losing control? Using the metaphor of jazz he proposes to opens up the space for improvisation – for himself, his team and ultimately the spectator. The work in progress film TOUCH serves as a frame and test case for a different way of working.

Jan-Timo Geschwill (Germany) used his time at the programme to research the complexity of forces that traverse and make up his subjectivity, in order to critically reflect on the relations between identity, society, technology and media.

Given that it is in technology and media - and particularly VR - that his artistic interests lie, he criticises the idea of VR as an empathy machine and experiments with creating the experience of a self portrait in VR, The Puppeteer.

Trained as an investigative journalist, then stretching the limits of the Danish TV-field by synthesising fiction and journalism, Peter Hammer (Denmark) now proposes the need to go even further. Under the heading of Forensics of Imagination he pleads for a more exploratory cinematic practice that seeks to subvert master and dominant narratives while interrogating the production of meaning and truth. Deep Gaps is a project exemplifying that interrogation by giving space to the unexpected, the seemingly irrelevant, the coincidental, the contradictory... It’s also a project that in a playful manner allows for addressing what one may call ‘a crisis of imagination’.

than filming intimacy)? And is it possible to use the camera to build a relation not dictated by power? Looking for Horses – an encounter between Stefan and Zdravko, at a lake between Bosnia and Montenegro - is the project that allows Stefan to work on all of these questions.

Giorgia Piffaretti is a Swiss audio-visual artist interested in questioning our familiar way of looking at what surrounds us by creating circumstances to make the familiar appear no longer familiar. The process of ‘defamiliarisation’ of the everyday allows us not only to establish a new, more conscious relation to it, but also works to help us question our own subjective perceptions of the world. Using her own work and her personal (research) archive as her material, she has found in a newsstand near the border between Switzerland and Italy a perfect device – literally and metaphorically - to share her practice of shifting perspective in order to investigate the hidden side of the visible.

After 16 years working at night as VJ, with material ripped from personal archives, television and film, Yafit Taranto (Israel / the Netherlands) swapped night for day and embarked on a research journey focusing on revisiting her working method and her long term-interest in the theme of death. Discovering the value of process and collaboration, her research in and through cinema, brought her out of cinema into performance, while she understood her interest in death to be in fact an interest in life. Hence her project Fun Fatales, which revolves around modes of female freedom. Through the Eye of the Needle is a performance that weaves together, like a VJ, images, stories, perspectives and sounds into a quilt of untold female histories.

Mieke Bernink Head of the Master’s department / Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy

MASTER OF FILM 2019

THE GRADUATES AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS

Bora Lee-Kil is a South Korean filmmaker and writer who attributes her storytelling interests to the fact that she grew up with deaf parents. Moving between two language worlds – the world of signs and silence and the world of spoken and written words - her work aims to give voice to what and who is not heard within the socio-political context of South Korea.

Her research (Re)writing history through gesture and body movement takes this interest a step further, by analysing the body as a ‘silent’ carrier of history and memory. Pledge of Allegiance, Black Paper and Our Bodies all reveal different facets of the body as a political medium.

Albert Kuhn is a documentary filmmaker from Barcelona whose work and research focuses on the relation between the personal and the political. Within the broader context of his research, under the heading of Future Nostalgias, his film proposal Dreams For A Better Past uses (the editing of) his father’s home movie material to discuss the perception of time – his grandfather’s, his father’s and his own – and the need to open up a space for a different perspective on history (and on May 68 in particular).

Growing up with four languages and then losing them all to his stuttering, Stefan Pavlović’s (the Netherlands) attention is drawn to different ways of communicating and creating proximity – through poetry and through filmmaking. How to connect through the camera? How to film intimately (rather

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Robin Coops

ROBIN COOPS

JAZZING FRAMES

Robin Coops is a multi-disciplinary artist based in the Netherlands.

He studied directing at the institute of performative arts in Maastricht and finished his Master’s at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, in close collaboration with the composition department.

Interested in the tension between control and losing control, he explores how we are guided by, or able to manipulate political, technological and social systems and how we can move freely in the given circumstances.

In his work he uses technology to research the tension between the analogue body and the digital machine. Genres like horror and tech-noir are used as a device to emphasize these themes.

In his work he puts different disciplines into a dialogue to create a single unified composition. The results are films, performative installations and audio-visual concerts. www.robincoops.com

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Creating interdisciplinary works has always been a natural path for me. As a young boy, I played the violin, took acting lessons at a youth theatre school, played in bands and began making my own surrealist films. After my education at the theatre school in Maastricht and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, I began to focus more and more on opera productions and audiovisual concerts. The collaborations became bigger and the concepts more advanced.

Over time, I lost the intuitive touch which I had as a child.

Being a perfectionist, and having critical people around me, resulted in me over-thinking all my projects and actions.

My thoughts and feelings were out of balance with the results.

I became a slave of my own concepts.

ness. The fact that jazz itself already implies a set of rules and a practice of improvisation, helps to structure the work and experience. I’m using the word frame as an equivalent for this set of rules in my audio-visual works, it is simultaneously a boundary and a creative tool. Jazzing frames, then, means creating the space for improvisation within the frame of the work and eventually reviewing the frame itself. I invite myself, my team and my audience to this process instead of determining a single interpretation. It is not about losing control but embracing multiple possibilities that the frame provides.

I made several experiments to research my method. The photos show a small selection of moments constituting this journey.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

How to create circumstances resulting in the loss of selfconsciousness and the rediscovery of a childlike intuitive response? How can I open up the frames I impose on myself and my collaborators, to exploration? How to become a performative director who thinks through making?

Introducing the metaphor of jazz helps me to regain playful-

PREVIZ - Digital rehearsal space. A previsualisation film exploring how PREVIZ can be a platform and device to generate rather than execute ideas.

LIBRARY - Constant reframing. The work started by making burst photos, followed by constantly making new selections and combinations of the pictures.

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THE PLAGUE - Participatory filmmaking. An experiment based on a method called Viewpoint. I made the filmmakers ROBIN COOPS

into performers and composers of image, movement and sound. The filming process became a performance in itself.

Performers: Marleine van der Werf, Giorgia Piffaretti, Peter Hammer, Bora Lee, Stefan Pavlović, Robin Coops.

SKIN - Reframing existing material. An experiment in deconstructing existing material and trying to build a new vocabulary.

The original footage is from the documentary Mondo Cane by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. The skin became the basic theme of this operatic sci-fi experiment.

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TOUCH - The mind-map as a script. This mind-map consists of 10 scenes, including different cinematographic

TOUCH became a short surrealist horror film about the fear and the desire to lose control. A photographer becomes his own subject when he meets a mysterious figure. He’s being seduced by this animal-like creature, but with his desire to get closer also his fear grows. The music and movements in the film guide us into a nightmare in which our character slowly loses control over his own body.

The film poses the question ‘where does my skin end and yours begin?’ How to preserve one’s autonomy in the presence of the other?

TOUCH: Director and editor Robin Koops Cinematographer Joris Bulstra Art-director Maze de Boer, Desiree Brands Costumes Martijn Kramp Composer Henry Vega Sound Design Roel Wildenburg Choreographer Alessio Reedijk Make-up artist Alina Stefan Assistant make-up artist Jolien de Doelder, Yasmin Bakker Special props Rolf te Booij Production Andrea van Bussel, Kristina Daurova, Lotte van der Stap Gaffer Koen van Bergen Light assistant Merlijn Willemsen, Sophie Schut Focus puller Kasper Stegeman, Indy Hamid Grip Auke Verhoeff Character A Maarten Heijnens Character B Fons Dhossche Dancer 1 Giorgio Lepelblad Dancer 2 Celine Moza Dancer 3 Antoine Coppi Dancer 4 Esther Murdock Dancer 5 Joshi Murdock

MASTER OF FILM 2019

experiments. This circle became the basic script for TOUCH.

Special thanks to All the crowdfunders (see film-credits) Camalot Hendrik Muller Fonds Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude Stichting Bekker-la Bastide Fonds

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ON THE EDGE

JAN-TIMO GESCHWILL

FACETS OF A SELF PORTRAIT IN VR

Jan-Timo Geschwill Jan-Timo Geschwill is an artist living in Amsterdam with his partner and two young children.

He was born in 1981 in Ahaus, West-Germany, close to the Netherlands. Being the child of musicians, he grew up in an artistic environment. In the aftermath of school and civil service he left the small town and moved to the city of Berlin. Following a short and firm intermezzo into the study of musicology and philosophy at the university he became involved in the German film landscape.

Soon he moved to Hamburg and explored commercial productions from different positions in the production chain. In 2009 he moved to Amsterdam to return to his desire to study. Jan-Timo Geschwill received a B.A. in Design from the Utrecht School of the Arts in 2015.

www.timogeschwill.com

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MASTER OF FILM 2019

my conditions; your rules; our future Encountering reality through subjective experiences makes me understand and conceptualise the present. I tell the story of a confrontation and negotiation between the individual and the collective, of the relations of power between the individual and the institution, as well as of the encounter and the tension between the artist and the spectator.

Against the backdrop of experiencing diverse Histories, I reflect critically on the conjunction between society, identity, technology and media. This leads to a process in which I continuously challenge myself to question assumptions, to unveil hidden projections and demystify universal understandings.

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On the edge The artistic research project On the edge revolves around understanding how the enthusiasm about technology, and in particular virtual reality, connects to different contexts; specifically film and art.

I am mapping these questions critically as part of my research into the idea of a self-portrait in Virtual Reality. This research led me on a personal journey to frame my ‘self’ - a journey which unfolded many unexpected layers. Politics, ethics and power were just a few of the layers I encountered.

I never try to objectify the resulting understandings. Instead I seek a personal expression and articulation of those experiences which can then serve as the foundation for my story.

Following the experience of the birth of my second son and my mother’s suicide I immersed myself in a landscape of memories while simultaneously being absorbed in the present through my two children. But where do past and present meet? How do I guide these past traces towards the present and how do I want to guide them from now on?

JAN-TIMO GESCHWILL

My relation with History was always confusing. I never fully understood how my diverse family histories, merged in me and permeated my story. What role plays my forefather, the priest Johann Ludwig Schneller, who in the 17th century in the south of Germany, followed a call of God and went to

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the near east where he founded the Syrian Orphanages that currently serve as a place for refugees from Syria?

And what about my Polish-Jewish great-grandfather Martin Schultz, on my mother’s side, who survived the death camps of the Third Reich? How do I relate that to the story of my grandfather Rudolph Geschwill, on my father’s side, who was an officer in the Wehrmacht? How do I make sense out of these different and opposing Histories?

How does the revolutionary attempt of my parents to leave everything behind and unite victim and perpetrator inform my existence? Which projections and positions does History contain and conserve? When are virtual realities actualised and refreshed?

As I advance through this quest, the encounter with these past worlds accentuate the feeling of powerlessness towards the different layers of History. Powerlessness - a complex notion with different meanings. Depending from which position it is articulated, it creates different stories. Yet it also serves as an expression of a subjective experience. A feeling of confusion. An anachronistic habit of a self-projection of historical suffering and guilt. Blurred subjectivity which I try to encounter with creativity and poetry.

What is a self-portrait in Virtual Reality?

By focussing on the medium of VR I had to look into form and technology, coding, data and networks, interaction and immersion. VR is considered to be a new medium. Its core idea is to mirror the human sensory motor system through computer powered processes. It is a new canvas, a new tool in and through which a portrait, a memoir, a sculpture can be molded. It’s a new way to express oneself. VR can create the possibility for the spectator/participant to experience the portrait or even to become one with the portrait.

The Puppeteer

Concept & Idea Jan-Timo Geschwill Unity Developers Marlon Sijnesael, Sergi van Ravenswaay 3D Design Jens van Kampen MoCap Operators Barry Mertens, Ronald van Alphen Performance 1st iteration Marjolein Vogels Special Thanks

Nienke Rooijakkers, Jason Malone, Anton Eliëns, Eyal Sivan, Kristina Daurova, Áron Birtalan, Sergio González Cuervo, Kimberley Smit, Ward ten Voorde, Maria van Heijningen van Heidemann, Bob Kluivers

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How do we relate to notions of body ownership, of the Self - and Others - as a Self, in VR? How much am I self-determined? Am I a marionette or am I the player of the marionette and how do those perspectives differ? When I think of how to express the Self in a self-portrait it is inevitable to think of the Self as something dynamic. These dynamic aspects of the Self can be experienced in the medium of virtual reality. With movement as the facilitator of that dynamic expression of the Self.

From an artistic point of view all those research questions are support structures for my practice. They help me to map different perspectives and to enlighten the broader question of the self-portrait in virtual reality.

With the support of Cinedans VRLAB, Beamsystems, IDlab and Goleb Dance film LAB

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Peter Hammer

PETER HAMMER

FORENSICS OF IMAGINATION

Peter Hammer (1981) is a Danish filmmaker. His work centers on imagination as a critical mode of emancipation from dominant narratives, taking cues from coincidences and encounters.

He began his career as an investigative television journalist in 2005, researching foul play and chasing crooks. In search of more playful pastures he moved into freer forms of programming, creating genresubverting documentaries and live performances, often synthesising fiction and journalism. Along the way his propensity for an open, exploratory cinematic practice became evident.

He holds a Bachelor of Journalism (Danish School of Media & Journalism), and before joining the Master of Film programme (Dutch Film Academy) he was an award-winning director and creative producer with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. www.forensicimagination.com www.hammer.film

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TO RE-IMAGINE A PRACTICE What is it to understand one’s own unknowns, the limitations and potentialities of knowledge? In the practice of an artistic field such as cinema a lot remains tacit.

I’m working to create a theoretical framework and a language in which to understand how my own practice is operationalised, how it exists and constitutes itself in a particular way, thinking through making through thinking.

What is the relationship between incredible and uncredible? Who determines the veracity of information? What constitutes the integrity of the image, of a character, of the betrayal of a relationship between the spectator and the filmmaker and his protagonist?

My background is in broadcast journalism which constitutes itself more as crafts than arts. In my experience the news

industry in particular is self-righteously opinionated about truth and fact and claims dominion over ‘reality’. That doesn’t leave much space for exploring outlandish ideas by someone like Jacques Ranciere: “A fiction is not the invention of an imaginary world.

Instead it is the construction of a framework within which subjects, things, and situations can be perceived as coexisting in a common world and events can be identified and linked in a way that makes sense.

Fiction is at work whenever a sense of reality must be produced.” (from Modern Times, 2017) To me becoming critically aware of that construction of fiction holds an emancipatory potential. In this sense imagination is a form of protest.

“Redistributing the narrative field by telling another version of a crucial myth is a major process in crafting new meanings. One version never replaces another, but the whole field is rearranged in interrelation among all the versions in tension with each other.” — Donna Harraway

MASTER OF FILM 2019

FORENSICS OF IMAGINATION I call my theoretical framework Forensics of Imagination.

It’s an explorative practice, a research method for the understanding and interpretation of phenomena, encounters, and objects—and their probable and potential connections. It actively seeks to subvert master and dominant narratives by considering any trace a meaningful evidence of something. Forensics of Imagination aims to interrogate the production of meaning and truth.

Giving image to encounters (mapping).

AA-WORDS In Danish there is no adequate translation for crime scene.

Instead we have gerningssted (‘site of deed’) or åsted (‘on site’, referring to any site on which something has happened, is happening or will happen - ‘the site in question’).

The å- is interestingly arcane and antiquated: originally spelled aa the only other word I know with this use of it is aasyn which translates to ‘face’ or ‘countenance’ (mostly used in the Bible) or ‘the act of looking’.

The words aasted and aasyn share the notion that something important remains hidden from us. It’s a defamiliarising gaze, potentially an impossible one: the aasyn of the world, nature or god—that sees beyond the real. By evoking this awareness, the mundane may come to seem foreign and strange, its hidden imaginative content be awoken.

Orphaned evidence. The situation of the review produces a new aasted.

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Superimposed strata of narrative produce new propositions of meaning.

PETER HAMMER

PROJECT: DEEP GAPS (WORKING TITLE) Deep Gaps is a project that places itself solidly in the domain of Forensics of Imagination. The story begins with the unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. One main suspect, Victor Gunnarsson, was later murdered himself under mysterious circumstances.

The man convicted was perhaps innocent.

The complex is comprehensive and convoluted. It spans three decades, at least two continents and a large cast.

Seen from the perspective of a journalist or anyone interested in great stories it’s a treasure trove. I’m not immune to that. But there are other reasons that mean more to me.

A collection of conspicuous coincidences, reflections, mirages emerge. They don’t necessarily hold a concrete significance seen from a police investigation point of view but speak to me nonetheless: Two main suspects look alike. Victor Gunnarsson was released; the other one, Krister Pettersson, was convicted and later acquitted. Were they confused in the dead of night?

On the night of the murder Palme went to the movies watching the Swedish comedy ‘The Mozart Brothers’ set on the production of the opera Don Giovanni in which a masked Don Giovanni kills Il Commendatore.

Victor Gunnarsson was known as a Don Juan.

He was a right-wing extremist who loved America and hated Prime Minister Palme for his ties with the Soviet leadership. At the time of the murder Gunnarsson claimed to have been at the movies himself, watching Rocky IV in which the all-American boxing hero beats Soviet champion Ivan Drago portrayed by Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren.

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The newly appointed head of the Palme investigation is named Christer Pettersson, namesake of the prime suspect.

Both Palme and Gunnarsson were murdered with two gunshots point blank.

This sort of reflective oddities in the ongoing research process itself. A chance encounter; next to a meeting with our producers in Copenhagen we find the Stockholm-based author Stefan Lindberg having lunch by himself. He recently wrote a novel about Gunnarsson. He’s thrilled to learn about our project. Lindberg himself has just had a chance encounter with a young man who looks like Gunnarsson, speaks in the same dialect, and just happens to be an actor. In the Swedish police files we find Gunnarsson claiming an alibi, a female friend he calls Santa Cruz. Later, at the airport in 0ºC, the only man not wearing a thick coat walks towards us in just a t-shirt with a large print spelling Santa Cruz. Other encounters aside from the project begin occurring.

Forensics of Imagination in this context holds both the formal, legal and procedural meaning of forensics in which objective traces can be assessed — and pursued by imagination — and a specifically subjective mode in which imagery — traces of imagination — can be pursued forensically.

Deep Gaps (working title)

True-crime documentary-fiction project in development Creators Peter Hammer & Søs Hoffman Producers Dorthe Riis Lauridsen & Anders Toft Andersen Executive producer Piv Bernth Production company Apple Tree Productions / Copenhagen, Denmark www.appletree.dk

A CRISIS OF IMAGINATION?

In Danish no-one uses the term ‘imagination’, it’s either ‘fantasy’ or ‘resourcefulness’. Semantically both those terms lack the visual property of imagination: the image. (For the sake of argument, image here also means time- and soundimage.)

I believe mass media is teaching its audience to not see.

Like one consequence of the influx of social media is putting media in place of the social; a consequence of the mightiness of commercial visual culture is putting images in place of imagination. It’s a perversion of sorts; “only kids without wi-fi are ever bored.” However, the magnitude of available content only poses part of the challenge; the one I’m getting at is the constitution of that content.

In my own experience, critical journalism generally uses the image as an illustration when it can’t narrate it as ‘visual proof’ of a central allegation. In more commercial genres the audiovisual is made further subservient as a vessel for a message — or simply a distraction from the time you’re donating.

The immediate objective for any broadcaster is to fill its slots and maintain a decent viewership. This renders the individual project less consequential. That means experimentation and ‘the new’ are often feigned for marketing purposes and broadcast’s ‘aired and forgotten’

antics. Perhaps at least this last part will change with the surge of streaming and its long-tail logic. I hope it could mean a new attention to lasting qualities. On the other hand, the sheer amount of content being commissioned by the big players and marketed for the sake of dominion is discouraging.

In a cinematic paradigm that cuts on the line of dialogue, the pause is a radical gesture. If the invisible time-space in the cut between shots has no room for alternate meanings, in a way there is no need for the audience. If the interpretation of an image is preconditioned out of fear that the audience will lose track, that image is robbed of its own agency.

In the words of video artist Omer Fast, the work itself must become a crime scene: “I like to think of viewers as detectives or puzzlers. The work is always incomplete prior to their arrival and they need to look at the evidence, establish a chronology, figure out motives, a logic, an interpretive theory for making sense of what’s happened. The crime scene is an appropriate metaphor, not least because of the artist’s inevitable mistakes and omissions, but also because of the deceptive nature of the medium as well as the gaps and distortions involved in any transmission. This leaves the artist with the primary responsibility of covering tracks and making sure the crime scene is perplexing enough to entice questions.

One way or another, it has to be a bloody mess.” (from Present Continuous, 2015) Again, I must infer the superiority of the notion of aasted over crime scene.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

“Only stupid children are ever bored” was a popular response among parents and educators when I grew up, “use your imagination.” These adults meant to evoke our capacity to un-bore ourselves without interfering with the sanctity of grown-up time.

Imagery. Visualising evidence of the imaginative.

PROJECT: NOTES FROM THE UNREAL (WORKING TITLE) This research publication is a book in which through narrative writing I share my process, theories, imagery and actual images from my research of Deep Gaps, the many odd encounters with The Unreal surrounding it as well as the conceptual formation of Forensics of Imagination.

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Albert Kuhn

ALBERT KUHN

FUTURE NOSTALGIAS

Albert Kuhn (1986) is a filmmaker from Barcelona. He graduated with a Bachelor in Journalism (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and studied for three years in the Cinema School of Catalonia (ESCAC). His work focuses on the relation between the personal and the political.

His film Abdala Lafdal (2016) has been screened in festivals internationally, and his interactive project Vertical / Horizontal (2015) received mass media coverage in Spain. He has also worked as assistant director and producer for artists like Jordi Colomer, Iván Argote and Marcel·lí Antúnez. www.albertkuhnbosch.com

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A REPETITION [This text is the first chapter from the research publication “Future Nostalgias”]

With regards to watching the tapes in a row, an editor told me: “I don’t think that is an experience any human being should have”. She was right to the extent that when I finished, I felt bad for having condensed all my childhood into a few hours. What was really disturbing, however, was that nothing really strange happened. I had expected such an experiment to bring some insights about my family history and me.

Instead, the images were only a support for memories that I already had. Why did I think that in these tapes there was something to be found out? What remains relevant, though, is the gesture of watching the tapes in one go.

I always had the feeling of having a bad memory. Compared to some of my friends, who can recall many details about their childhood, I could barely remember a few moments.

I had hoped that the tapes would trigger some hidden memories. That was not the case. Nonetheless, three shots were very telling. A few seconds among 21 hours.

In the first shot, my father, the cameraman, zooms out and finds himself in a mirror, shadowed. In the second shot, my mother looks at the sea and I, still a baby, sit next to her. In the third shot, my mother is reading on a terrace, and I am also sitting there. In the end, my father zooms in at me and I look at the camera. Now, to move on, I need to go back.

In 2011, when I was studying cinema in Barcelona, I made a short film called El Retorn (The Return). It has always meant a lot to me since it was the one time that I worked in a different way. Usually, I would pick up a political issue and develop a story around it. I used to test different cinematic approaches for such a purpose, but the message remained the same: different versions of David against Goliath. But with El Retorn it was completely different. Something burned in me and I had to get it out.

I did not know how, so I moved in the dark. I wrote a very simple script, with no dialogues, and it resulted in a melancholic film echoing Antonioni’s Trilogia dell’incomunicabilità.

It was not easy to explain it in words but I liked what the film conveyed. I felt I had worked honestly, whatever that meant, and I could re-watch the film time after time.

So, imagine my surprise when I found the similarities between the three shots described above and three other shots from El Retorn. The characters from El Retorn seem to behave just like my mother reading a book or looking at the sea and my father hiding in the shadow, only visible through the mirror.

For me it was not just a matter of coincidence. I wondered what my gaze was. Maybe I was simply repeating someone else’s gaze, namely my father’s? The question transcended the making of El Retorn. No doubt I had inherited my political approach from him, so maybe also in the other projects I had done I was simply repeating an approach that was not mine?

Was it my gaze? Was it my politics? A feeling of repetition and determinism arose.

Some insights are to be drawn from this experience. When I made El Retorn, I let my unconscious take the lead. Prior to the encounter with the images that my father had filmed 25 years earlier, watching the film was a return in itself. It worked as a melancholic balm that would calm some of my anxieties of a given moment. That is how melancholy itself works; the eternal return to some unfathomable lost harmony, the acknowledgement of which produces Victor Hugo’s “la bonheur d’être triste”.

At the same time, that unconscious way of working allowed me to reach a very neat image of an obstructed drive: the impulse to go back, to reconnect with a lost past. However, it is the conscious reflection upon it, six years later, which gave the 21 hours’ exercise the possibility to become movement and initiate a change. In other words, while El Retorn was the longing for an impossible return, contrasting it with the shots filmed by my father allowed me to start breaking the eternal repetition of my habits.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

The 1st of December of 2017 I woke up at 5AM and watched, non stop, the 21 hours of home videos that my father had filmed during the childhood of my brother and me. Watching these old tapes gave me a deep feeling of an absence being created (or at least manifested) by the act of filming: the absence of the presence of my father when he filmed. Filming in such a way, I felt, created the conditions for nostalgia in the future. In other words, the absence that the act of filming created in the past was the reason for my present nostalgia.

A desire to go back to the time of the images, to a feeling that maybe was never there.

Lastly, I wonder what would have happened if I had watched the 21 hours of home videos spread over a month, instead of in one go. My suspicion is that I would not have recognised the similarities between the shots of my father and the ones in my short film. Because they belong to different tapes, I probably would have watched them on different days and would not have connected them. I would have watched, and thus seen differently. I believe it was the gesture of being almost one full day in front of my old me, which created an opening that allowed me to see these images from that perspective.

In other words, it was an experience that “no human being should have” that allowed mw to start breaking the predictable, the repetition.

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ALBERT KUHN

PROJECT: DREAMS FOR A BETTER PAST I find a picture of my father when he was a baby in the hands of his parents, they are smiling. It’s March 1944 and my grandfather is wearing an SS officer suit. The image feels like an original sin.

I wonder what the relation is between this image and my father’s political activism during the 70s in Berlin. Furthermore, I wonder how this past echoes with me today, and with my relation to the world of images.

The information is limited and my father’s memory leaves room for improvement. So I try to approach the past by asking my father to read out loud, in front of the camera, some of the letters that my grandmother wrote to my grandfather when he was in prison after World War II. My father plays along for a while.

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MASTER OF FILM 2019

But then he gets tired of it, stops and says: “I am on strike.

This is a neverending story”.

Faced with an ungraspable past, I take this no, this wall, this impasse, as an opportunity to imagine, speculate and create my own understanding of what (could have) happened. Reenacting old dynamics in front of the camera is an intervention which allows me to access that past.

But a question emerges: how far (in time) do I want to go?

Dreams For A Better Past inscribes itself in the frame of films revisiting May 68 to check how that period resonates today.

In The Intense Now (Salles, 2017), for example, the revolt is seen as a moment of synchronicity between personal and political will. And in A German Youth (Périot, 2015), the German students are portrayed as part of a generation whose political subjectivity is determined by the coming of age realization of their parents’ crimes.

How to approach May 68 without falling into nostalgic idealisation and how to consider one’s subjectivity beyond a reactive logic, are the themes of Dreams For A Better Past.

The core question of the perception of time affects both themes. While the usual experience of time as a horizontal phenomenon - as a linear succession of events - pushes us to feel nostalgia for the past and explain our actions as a consequence of previous episodes, vertical time - as a merging of past, present and future - opens the space for (re-) creating our own understanding of what happened and thus possibly having a different presence in the present.

Cinematic editing and reenactments are wonderful tools to deal with vertical time, blurring past and present. By intervening in the home videos that my father filmed in the 90s, when my grandfather was still alive, and by staging scenes for which I do not have any images I will appropriate May 68 from my perspective, from my subjectivity.

Script and direction Albert Kuhn Editing Diana Toucedo

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Bora Lee-Kil

BORA LEE-KIL

(RE)WRITING HISTORY THROUGH GESTURE AND BODY MOVEMENT READING THE SILENCE AND MEMORIES OF OUR BODIES

Bora Lee-Kil is a South Korean writer and filmmaker who believes that being born to and raised by deaf parents has given her the best gift of storytelling. She dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and traveled South East Asia for 8 months. This experience inspired her first film, Road-Schooler (2008) which also resulted in a book, Road is School (2009).

Following this, she studied filmmaking at Korea National University of Arts. Glittering Hands (2014) is an award-winning documentary based on her stories of growing up moving back and forth between two worlds – one of silence and one of sounds. Her recent feature film, A War of Memories received the jury’s special mention for the Mecenat Award at the Busan International Film Festival in 2018. She also won the Korea Emerging Women’s Culture Award in 2015. www.boraleekil.com

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Suffering first from Japanese control and then from the invasion of the Western world, South Korea had to devote itself to the fate of the community as a whole rather than to that of individuals. The country united and rebuilt itself under the ideology of nationalism and collectivism, thus overshadowing any focus on or space for the individual. As the economic situation stabilised after the 1970s, Koreans entered a transition period in which people started to recover their individual selves. As they’d never had a government interested in anything other than the economy, however, they united around the family as source of meaning and support.

Korean collectivism as an ideology of community based on the family; a community in which the logic of nation and family are inseparable. In Korea, there’s no place for the individual; an individual is his family.

I have always been interested in memory, and within this particular social-political context, in the memory of those whose voices do not resound in the official, patriarchal language - the voices, for example, of women and deaf people. Their memories, their experiences are irrelevant, do not exist. They are different, not part of the national collective memory.

How come these experiences are excluded from our collective memory, why are they merely personal, individual? Why are they silenced? What does their silence imply?

As a child of deaf parents, and as a woman, I experienced that silence too. The language taught in school and society didn’t allow me an understanding of my experience. So I understand what it means not to be heard. Which is why, in my work, I focus on revealing people’s silences, and, more recently, on the memories and language that are inscribed in their bodies.

I started my research into the ways in which history and experience are inscribed into the body by focusing on my own body - as it is the easiest to approach and the most familiar, although I actually never looked at it. I started to ‘read’ the socio-political history in the movements of my body, seeing that the ideas and mechanisms of state and society have become my body’s memory. I examined, in film, how the state is present in my individual movements and gestures and how I can understand the working of power by taking a closer look at how I use, regard and move my body. At the same time, the silence, and the hidden, personal memories that cannot be spoken about and thus have no place in the collective memory, are equally inscribed in the body. The body thus is a space and expression of multiple forces and histories.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

My first language is sign language. My parents spoke with their hands and facial expressions, not with their lips.

I learned it from them. Later, as I grew up, I came to learn spoken language. The Republic of Korea, otherwise known as South Korea is a totalitarian and patriarchal society. Being like others is a virtue. Being different means being excluded.

Thus my parents weren’t called deaf but “disabled” to emphasize that, in the eyes of Koreans, they are physically defective. My parents’ language isn’t a “language”, in the eyes of the outside, but a “gesture” denoting their shortcomings. To me, however, the words of gestures and facial expressions are more important than spoken or written words.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE Single channel video | 3min 54sec | HD | Color | 2018 Wherever you go as a Korean, your body remembers Director / Editor Bora Lee-Kil

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BLACK PAPER Single channel video | 59 min 45 sec | HD | Color | 2018 When I was young, my teacher used to assign us the task of filling a piece of paper with very small letters. It was both a way of learning and of punishment. It’s called ‘Black Paper’.

BORA LEE-KIL

Director / Editor Bora Lee-Kil Cinematographer Sojin Kwak Assistant Director Ken Tanaka

RESEARCH PUBLICATION: MY EMBODIED MEMORIES Book | Work in progress | Color | English | 2019 The book documents the research into the way in which the body is a political medium. Using three projects - Pledge of Allegiance, Black Paper and Our Bodies - it discusses the historical and political contexts that the movements and gestures which my body remembers, are based on.

The book also acts as a proposal for Our Bodies as an ongoing research and film project.

Author Bora Lee-Kil Desiger Louis Hothothot Proofreader Andrew Jensen, Michael Dale Morgan

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OUR BODIES Screening version: Documentary | Work in progress | HD | Color | 2019 Exhibition version: Single channel video | HD | Color | 2019 I had an abortion. My mother had abortions.

My grandmother had abortions, too.

Why can we not share this experience?

MASTER OF FILM 2019

Director Bora Lee-Kil Featuring Imsoon Jeong, Kyunghee Kil, Bora Lee-Kil Cinematographer Sojin Kwak Camera team Sojeong Lee Editor Stella van Voorst van Beest, Bora Lee-Kil Location support Community Media Center in Daejeon Thanks to Agnese Cornelio, Áron Birtalan, Sangkuk Lee, Ken Tanaka

POST SCRIPTUM On April 11, 2019, the Constitutional Court of South Korea ruled that the current criminality of abortion is incompatible with the country’s constitution. By 2020, the South Korean government must revise its laws on abortion. Nevertheless, talking about abortion is still taboo in Korea.

Agnès Varda talked about women’s bodies and reproductive rights in her short film Women Reply (1975) and again in her film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). It’s now 44 years later and the (female) body is still a contested site, a space imprinted by power and politics. My artistic research focuses on reading that space and the process of reproducing the social-political through the body and the need to try counter or to rewrite it.

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Stefan Pavlović

Eye see too, in You

STEFAN PAVLOVIĆ

Friendship beyond Language

this is from me to you, from here, for all the way over there, and in-between.

— you see too, with your eyes. and i see that you see, with my eyes. i see too.

Stefan Pavlović (1989), filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. www.stefanpavlovic.com

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BEGINNINGS He says he can recall his first memory.

He says he thinks he can.

He was about to turn four years old when they lived in Montreal.

They: the mother, the father, the sister and him.

He is me.

He is being bathed by his mother in a metal bucket, shower curtains closed, the whole world only right here, steaming.

Tufts of dark brown hair appear from under the shower curtain, floating towards the drain.

His mother opens the curtain to the image of a wet floor, covered with more hair, and his little sister holding scissors, looking.

Her face covered with bits of hair.

She says her hair was too long, it covered her eyes and ears, she couldn’t see or hear.

The next thing he remembers is being alone in the bucket. Somehow the water feels sticky now, or maybe the feeling of alone is what’s sticky.

He gets out of the lukewarm water to look for his sister.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

Nude and wet he passes his parents in conversation. They don’t mind him.

There are not many places his sister could be.

He finds her at the dinner table with a plate in front of her. (who put her there?)

She doesn’t see him. He looks at her eating.

She takes a tomato from her plate and gets up.

She walks over to the wall and sticks it behind a painting on the wall, showing a large horse running.

It smears a little, the squashed red fruit. She walks back to the table.

He feels he just witnessed something he shouldn’t have.

With a pacifier in his mouth, (where did this come from?) he walks over to the balcony.

Still naked, he looks down and hesitates. He throws the pacifier over the railing: it hits a motorcycle parked down below.

Four is a good age to do this. Almost four. (why did no one witness any of this?)

In Montreal he spoke four languages - in the way a four year old ‘speaks’. the Yugoslav language - [his mother tongue], Dutch - [they would return next year], and English and French at day care. Unclear where one language ended and the other began.

When the pacifier fell down the balcony, hitting the motorcycle, all four languages went with it and snuck into that little piece of plastic that had just been in his mouth a moment ago.

A stutter shaped the way he could and would communicate.

Words he had practiced, all of sudden wouldn’t come out anymore, came out cut up, bundled together, un-finished, stuck somewhere in oscillating infinity.

STUTTER I know I will stutter before I do, there are certain letters I can try to avoid, some I cannot.

My articulation gets hijacked, not necessarily to be taken somewhere else, but more kinda like movement and pause at the same time; a leak of sound.

— I hear myself before I speak, with my body first, then with my ears, while I speak, and while I look at you; I hear my thoughts afterwards, reflecting on what I said, as I look at myself in you.

I read that the stutter is a glitch between these two types of self-hearing.

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STEFAN PAVLOVIĆ

LANGUAGE

THE INTIMATE CAMERA

Each encounter relies on language, a certain type of language, which requires you to be in some sort of mode of understanding.

For me, intimacy is connected with the present moment.

Being able to give attention to each other, without feeling the passing of time, almost outside time.

My practice came about from my trouble with speaking.

Stuttering as a child and a teenager made me feel voiceless in a way, and removed me from the common modes of understanding and being understood - always distanced from.

I look for new language, for new ways of encountering, and have found two, for the moment: the poetic, written word, and the camera.

Both allow me to be a bit more in control of my own proximity to my surroundings and other people.

Language being what is in between you and me; the camera, also, what is between you and me.

Throughout my time at the Master’s programme I have experimented with the relation between these two languages, text and image.

How they can overlap, provoke each other, clash or support each other.

How can text become part of the image, or become an image itself?

This resulted in subjective use of subtitling in my film.

I use it as an afterthought, a present commentary or some in-between form.

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So my question is: Is there such a thing as an intimate camera?

Can we look together?

Can the camera, standing between you and me, be a vehicle for friendship through which we practice togetherness and intimacy?

I wonder whether we can go beyond just ‘capturing’, and push the camera into a space of creation, a move I call: from filming intimacy to filming intimately.

You might ask, why use the camera as a tool to practice intimacy with and through.

Which is a valid question, since the camera can be a dominating, aggressive, egocentric device.

Cinema in its totality, is a very authoritarian art form: we ‘capture’, we ‘shoot’, we ‘edit’, all actions of power, all from positions of a presupposed hierarchy.

These questions lay rooted in the film project I have been developing during this Master’s programme, they are inscribed in it, through the film I am asking these questions.

Is it possible to use the camera to build a relation that is not dictated by power?

If not, at least does the camera allow for a different exchange of power?

LOOKING FOR HORSES (DOCUMENTARY FILM PROJECT / 60 MIN) I meet Zdravko at an artificial lake between Bosnia and Montenegro, while visiting my mother.

On one side of the lake, in Montenegro, my grandmother lives.

On the other side, in Bosnia, my parents have their roots.

And in the middle, on the lake, Zdravko and I become friends.

Zdravko lost most of his hearing during the war, and an eye from when a battery exploded during work.

The isolation he must feel moves me, and makes me think of my own experience of being unable to connect and develop a sense of belonging.

I have to disturb the scenic silence of the landscape by screaming at him, in a language I don’t speak well, in order for him to hear me. And he really wants to hear what I have to say.

Over time, and through the camera, we find our own language and way of communicating, beyond just verbal language.

We look for the wild horses that live around the lake, but never find them.

We find a lot of other things though.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

He takes me onto the lake, we fish and look around.

I bring him his first hearing aid, and he teaches me how to shoot a gun.

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Giorgia Piffaretti

FAMILIARSCOPE

GIORGIA PIFFARETTI

QUESTIONING THE FAMILIAR WAY OF SEEING THE EVERYDAY, TO ENGAGE WITH NEW LAYERS OF MEANING

Giorgia Piffaretti is a Swiss audio-visual artist. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the HKB (Hochschule der Künste Bern), where she mainly worked with video, reflecting on the relation between reality and images. In the following two years, she continued working on independent and collaborative projects. Moreover, she was involved with a group of artists in the organization of a shared Atelier as well as living and cultural space (Schwob-Haus, Bern).

Moving across fine arts and film, she participated in several exhibitions and independent film festivals. Her projects are based on an archival praxis, including different media objects, pictures, drawings and moving images. g-p@gmx.ch

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An optical instrument used for viewing details in common elements, such as images, objects or situations and reconsidering the relevancy of what at first sight could appear banal. Its mechanism works with distance (as it first creates a defamiliarisation to the observed object) and subjective projection, allowing a shift in re-considering what is perceived. More than an object, it is an attitude that just needs to be activated.

The relation between inside and outside, the exchange between subjective perception and the external world, is an essential drive in my artistic practice. It steers the desire to investigate the hidden side of the visible, and play with the invisible but nonetheless imaginable. An object, a place, or something external and tangible are the starting points for a project, triggering and provoking my imagination, and therefore a creative process. In that sense, it is important to point out that in my practice I focus on observation, instead of on inventing something out of nowhere or developing a project from a pre-existing concept. The crucial aspect which characterises my works is recognising a potential in the unspectacular and in everyday experiences.

The starting point is the moment in which the familiarity of an object is questioned, creating the possibility and the necessity to re-establish a new, conscious, relation with it.

Changing positions brings one to oscillate between the familiar and the no-longer familiar, initiating a movement that generates a space ‘in between’ where new connections can be created.

That’s why my method is based on a constant process of positioning and repositioning towards the observed object.

This constant movement might explain the desire to work with my own personal archive as a source of reflection, and

to re-contextualise the meaning of images, objects and anecdotes, as they are profoundly familiar and therefore especially eligible for defamiliarisation.

This process of defamiliarisation happens by investigating how such ‘inside’ (familiar) images, objects and anecdotes occupy a place in the ‘outside’ world.

Can they offer an alternative and subjective entrance point to address bigger phenomena or history?

Can they become part of a larger context or specific circumstances and thus enable various connections to be traced or imagined?

I see the personal archive as a way of communication, a micro-world that reacts and creates a bond with the outside world. By taking a personal and human-sized scale, my attempt is to tackle the question of how we create meaning with our subjective observation of the world: what kind of elements inform us and how?

In that context, filming plays an important role, since it reflects and accompanies the process of researching.

Instead of an execution of a task or a representation of an idea, it is first of all a direct consequence of observation.

The framing is the result of focusing on a certain aspect in a specific moment, that is analysed afterwards in the process of archiving and editing. Rather than being focused on the aim of the final production, filming is a record of a situation - allowing unexpected elements to become relevant or creating the conditions for new encounters - and a way of thinking through framing and reviewing.

In that sense, filming is an action to develop a certain understanding, which needs to go through a specific process of distancing and reconnection. Looking through my own archive of recordings, I gain an experience of the process, discovering my intentions and positions, and imagining dimensions of the recorded images. This invites the spectator to engage with this development of unfolding layers of meaning, taking part in the thinking process and reconsidering the initial perception of what is observed.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

* familiarscope /fˈmɪlɪəskəʊp/ noun noun: familiarscope: plural noun: familiarscopes

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A NEW STAND

GIORGIA PIFFARETTI

BETWEEN OBSERVATION, PROJECTION AND IMAGINATION

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(proposal for an installation / development of a series of video essays)

The case study of this research revolves around the newsstand of Gaggiolo (IT), built a few meters away from the Swiss-Italian border. I’ve known it since I was a child, when I started visiting it routinely to buy Italian magazines. This ritual became more and more sporadic since I moved away from Ticino, the Swiss-Italian canton where I was born and raised. Last year, with more distance, I started to notice its peculiarity.

Besides its closeness to the border, and the elliptical futuristic design from the 1950s, this newsstand seems to have remained the same forever, while at the same time all the newspapers and magazines are daily renewed, and the composition of their display is built up again and again. I started to see it as a live installation that is being composed and disassembled everyday, preserving its image, but updating its content. From that moment on, a process of observation and interaction began, questioning the familiarity of my previous way of perceiving it. By filming there and collecting material related to it (pictures, notes, drawings, imaginative interpretations of it), I came to transform it in a device with multiple functions, that allows one to see and reinterpret its features from different perspectives. The display and narration/ montage of the collected archival material invites the spectator to dive into this experience.

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MASTER OF FILM 2019

Yafit Taranto

YAFIT TARANTO

FUN FATALE AND OTHER AGENTS OF CHANGE FROM VJ-ING TO CINEMA AND OUT OF THE CINEMA AGAIN

Yafit Taranto works with video material ripped from personal archives, television, films - weaving a tapestry of images, sounds and stories to reflect upon society. Her work revolves around personal forms of subversion and individual emancipation from the dominant power structures in society.

She meets with the spectator in the context of expanded cinema and performance. Her background in VJ-ing and volunteer work at elderly homes are now merged into a new practice in which she facilitates transformational processes.

She exhibited her work in the Van Gogh Museum, the Jewish Historical Museum, Frascati Theater and many other festivals, theatres and cultural events.

Yafit Taranto is part of WIP (Work in Progress), a collective of multimedia makers such as artist and audio designer Yehudit Mizrachi and the choreographer and poet Branka Zgonjanin. www.yafittaranto.com

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As a VJ, I was sewing images during long nights. I rearranged stolen moving images I ripped from my favourite films and TV shows and stitched them to the rhythm of the music. I wove a tapestry from visuals that were not meant to belong to each other, projecting this collage live in a club setting.

When I came across the phenomenon of vidding I recognized a method of appropriation and self-empowerment that inspired my research “ Vidding is an art form that happens through editing - a field historically open to women, as it was thought to be related to sewing. In the case of vidding, editing is not just about bringing images together; it is also about taking mass-media images apart. A vidder learns to watch television and movies fetishistically, for parts; to look for patterns against the flow of narrative structure; to slice desired images out of the larger whole”.

An Editing Room of One’s Own: Vidding as Women’s Work - Francesca Coppa, 124 Camera Obscura 26:2 (#77), Duke University Press

dancing crowd. I decided to leave the nightlife in favour of the daytime, so I could finally encounter other makers, the spectator and the world.

During my Master’s research, I investigated my working conditions and process. What do I daily need as an artist to flourish? My previous working conditions as a VJ were rather radical: I was gathering materials on my own, and then later, I would operate at night, equally alone. What are the working conditions I want to design for myself in my new practice?

‘Working conditions’ are important components of my research. From my experience during the Master, I learned that where you work, when, how and with whom makes a huge difference on both a professional level and a personal level. Part of my practice during the Master was therefore to experiment with working conditions and the principles of creating a community.

I discovered the power of working together and developed a workflow that includes long-term collaborations, co-creation and encounters. This workflow is an open-ended process; the outcome depends on the encounter I aim to achieve with the spectator. Another essential part of my new workflow is inviting my collaborators and the audience to get out of the traditional cinema settings and meet.

Just like a generation of female vidders before me, I edit existing material to create new narratives and more specifically I want to reveal the hidden constructions of society by repositioning and juxtaposing images.

The ‘now-ness’ and ‘live-ness’ of a performance grant the possibility of having a dialogue with the spectator. Performance is a transient form of art; it can evolve and progress.

Each performance lays a foundation for the next one, resembling the workflow of a VJ. The conversation I evoke with the public is part of the work process.

During my years as a VJ I worked in isolation, I hardly had any contact with the DJ or the public at the club. My VJ station was on a balcony above the dance hall, away from the

The project Fun Fatale revolves around modes of female emancipation from the patriarchal order. The possibility of liberation that exists in every situation by a change of

MASTER OF FILM 2019

We are all connected by rarely visible, transparent silver strings. You can catch a glimpse of this web, mostly on sunny days. I have seen it myself, but only for a fraction of a second when I looked from the right angle. Those strings bind us together like a butterfly flapping its wings, affecting a storm in some faraway place.

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perspective, small actions or grand decisions. Fun Fatales operate within society, bending the existing structures to claim their freedom.

YAFIT TARANTO

The same strategy is used in the project Through the Eye of the Needle. A group of women is brought together in a performance around sewing machines. At first glance it may appear to be a sweatshop in which women are bound by classic roles and professions, but behind their machines their separate voices, sounds and materials become an orchestra of united movement. The traditional cinematic experience is challenged and bent as images, stories,

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perspectives and sounds are woven together and projected.

Set as a performance in a non-cinematic location, actors, creators and spectators are invited to meet and interact to create the outcome together.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

LAST KISS OF THE TARANTULA SHORT STORY “ For she who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.” Oscar Wilde My surname is shared with a place, a spider, a dance and a Hollywood director that almost killed his muse in a car while shooting a trilogy.

My VJ name was VJ Tarantula, as my surname is Taranto. It is also a gulf in southern Italy where the Tarantela is originated.

The Tarantela (the dance of the spider) was traced back to the 14th and 15th century where the epidemic of ‘tantaism’ broke throughout the region of Taranto and slowly spread to other parts of Italy.

According to legend, once bitten by a tarantula, the victim, referred to as the tarantata — who was almost always a woman of lower status — would fall into a fit in which she was plagued by heightened excitability and restlessness.

Eventually, she would succumb to the condition and die.

The only cure, it seemed, was to engage in the frenzied dancing ritual of the Tarantella. Townspeople would surround the tarantata while musicians would play instruments such as mandolins, guitars, and tambourines in different tempos in search of the correct healing rhythm. Each varied beat would affect the tarantata, leading her to move in erratic ways in line with the tempo. Once the correct rhythm was found, the victim — dancing the Tarantella until exhausted — was thought to be cured, having ‘sweated out’ the venom!”

It is curious to notice, that the Tarantula spider miraculously attacked only women of the lower class (mind you, during the middle ages), and the only remedy for this dangerous situation was to gather musicians with the rest of the village and to dance ecstatically. I dare to conclude that the ‘Tantaism’ was merely a medical excuse for legitimising women to dance their happiness and sorrow away.

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ALUMNI’S TAKE ON THE NOTIONS THAT SHAPED THE ‘ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA’ COURSE

MASTER OF FILM 2019

10 Years a Master The international MA ‘Artistic Research in and through Cinema’ was created in 2009 as a space for filmmakers and artists interested in exploring research questions emerging from their artistic practices. It was founded upon a strong conviction that filmmakers have developed and are still developing tools that offer a unique understanding of the world around us. In the course of the last ten years, the Master’s programme became a testing ground for close to a hundred film professionals from all across the globe who strived to understand what methodologies, questions and motivations have been driving their work.

The goal was not to transplant theoretical frameworks from other disciplines and cast the practice against it but to condense and critically assess the expertise of film practitioners, making cinema itself a tool of research.

Researching your subject through practice, you allow your experiments to frame the meaning of the concepts you operate on. As we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Master of Film, we decided to brush the key notions, that the course was founded upon, against the grain of our alumni’s practices. In order to do that, we asked our colleagues who graduated from the course between 2011 and 2018 to speak about their relationship with Cinema, understanding of Artistic Research, Methodologies they uncovered while reflecting on their own practices and their Subjectivity as makers and researchers. In doing so, we wanted to see if there is any common denominator between the former students - a lasting vocabulary of the course. Simultaneously, we welcomed it as a research opportunity to learn from our own trajectory and redefine those pillar notions through the praxes of the researchers that carried them outside the school and developed through experimentation.

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Question

What is your take on the notion of artistic research?

Eliane: Freedom and excitement - that’s what I think when I hear the word “research”. There’s a continuous line in my practice where discoveries provoke questions, which initiate the process of making a new film. The research I’m involved in is constituted by that whole process, with its results and intermediary steps. It’s as much artistic as “practice-based”, founded on reflection on the practice itself and a dialogue with my collaborators and the world. It goes beyond the boundaries of my field, seemingly unconnected or useless things gain relevance when seen in the scope of research.

I see my works as living entities with a voice and will of their own while they are still “in progress”. This is one of the pleasures of doing research - it’s adventurous and brings

unexpected outcomes because you have to deal with these unruly entities.

Agnese: I’d call what I’m doing research through artistic means but I wouldn’t equate it with scientific study. In science, you tackle a very specific subject under particular conditions and use a set of parameters to render your research relevant.

Taking those little steps you look for universalities, results that will progress the body of knowledge within your field. What I’m interested in is not universal but particular. I collect impulses - ever-changing phenomena that stay in constant flux. Similar to Eliane, I see the images and materials that I work with as living organisms - their meaning, impact, and relevance are fluid and change over time. Depending on when you access them, you will notice different things, so it’s hard to establish parameters that would stick.

Bogomir: I think the whole point of Artistic Research is precisely not to impose the same parameters as other disciplines like Anthropology or Social Sciences. If you start with this rigid set of parameters you will only see what they

10 YEARS A MASTER

Researcher’s Profiles

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Momchil Alexiev

Bulgarian artist and a filmmaker. After working within film, performance, and installations, he moved on to producing 360-degree films and VR experiences. His focus is on expanding the notions of cinematic space and immersive film. Founder of the VR Lab BG in Sofia - a platform for VR, AR, and MR professionals - and a Sundance Institute fellow.

Emilio Reyes-Bassail

Filmmaker and sound artist based in Mexico City. His work revolves around questions of memory and time. Constantly experimenting with different mediums and forms, his body of work comprises radio pieces, video art, film, experimental literature, sound installations, illustration, and music. Currently, he develops the artistic research course at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

Áron Birtalan

Hungarian artist with a background in music, experimental arts, and role-playing, who creates games and rituals in everyday environments. Working together with players and their imagination as an artistic medium, he explores the nature of human interaction by creating collaborative experiences, called Transformation Games. Through his work, he encourages people to tap into a playful territory, where art, games, and magic mingle. Áron is also active as a musician and co-runs a children’s fantasy camp in rural Hungary.

Eliane Esther Bots

Dutch filmmaker / visual artist and art educator. In her work, she explores the notion of intimacy, treating it as a condition for the encounter between people. She is currently working on her long-term filmic research on the influence of conflict and migration on narratives of people involved in them. The Channel, her latest documentary, focuses on (former) interpreters of the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague and their role as ‘intermediary’ between speakers and listeners, witnesses and accused, court and attendees.

Julia: I see myself as an interdisciplinary artist and a researcher. At the same time, I also think that artistic research is essentially different from its academic counterpart. It requires investigation and stretching of your own cognitive boundaries but in addition, it embraces the beauty of the image, a satisfaction deriving from creating something unique.

As a maker, I create my own visions of reality, within my own spectrum of knowledge, using filmmaking and image-making tools such as speculation, provocation, observation and composition.

Momchil: I actively embrace the frame of Artistic Research and the way of working I established in the Master. It’s a bit

more difficult process to sustain once you leave the institution, however. In VR you’re in this paradoxical position that even if you wanted to be the artist only, you inevitably need to engage in research since there is no established way of doing things. For me research is a process of procrastination - instead of proceeding with work, you need to put your poetic drive on hold and reflect, go back, write about the things you’ve done. You do something and reflect, take another step and reflect again. Meanwhile, you need to be careful not to bury the emotion and poetry under the intellectual layer. There’s a certain conflict within me between the artist and the researcher, the poetic-emotional register and the intellectual side. I need to synthesize the researcher and the artist in me into the creator all the time to resolve that tension. Artistic research needs to go beyond dry scientific methodology and engage with the soft tissue of the phenomena around you - not only with the science of them, but also feelings, our inner selves, and simply being here and now. I like to see artistic research as a process of combining and merging qualities of the two, not excluding elements of either field.

Agnese Cornelio

Italian artist with a background in communication sciences and theatre direction. Her theatrical practice intertwines fiction and documentary work. She makes performances based on contemporary plays as well as documentary theatre projects. Her ongoing research project Free to Work is a multifaceted attempt at understanding changes in the practices and perception of “work”. It combines filmmaking, appropriation of archival materials and performative arts.

Bogomir Doringer

Born in Belgrade, he studied sociology before coming first to the Rietveld Academy and then to the Film Academy. He is currently doing an Artistic Research PhD at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with the ongoing research project I Dance Alone where he observes clubs’ dancefloors from a bird-eye-view as reflections of social and political change. He frames the collective and individual dynamics of these dancefloors under the working concept of the Dance of Urgency. His observations are presented in the form of lectures, publications, workshops, installations, and films.

Maria Molina Peiró

An audio-visual artist and filmmaker from Spain. Her body of work includes films, video art, and new media Installations. Her films and installations often use metafiction, post-production and geo-tools to unfold layered realities that connect humans, technology and nature. Her current research focuses on humanity’s struggle with its temporal and spatial limitations, and the resulting changes in our relationship with technology, nature, time, and the understanding of life itself.

Julia Sokolnicka

A Polish experimental and documentary filmmaker, writer and researcher, with a background in philosophy, based in Amsterdam. She’s an author of music, dance videos and visual concepts for theatre and commercials. As a researcher, she moves between social philosophy, video, and performance. She continuously collaborates with other artists on projects in the field of theatre, dance, performance art, and video art while developing her research projects Digital Nomads and Social Choreographies.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

are calibrated to capture. In my practice, I tend to observe my subject first to see what is particular about it and set my own parameters from that experience. Only after you’ve framed something you can decide what you want to keep in the picture and what to leave. Otherwise, art would only serve as a mode of presentation. In my case, I research my subjects through making cinema and curating exhibitions.

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Áron: In this manner, I don’t really separate my research and my practice, nor do I differentiate them in terms of results, i.e. one being a text and the other an event. I work through a practice of facilitating playful experiences for people, so they can reimagine the world around them. The experience can be delivered as a game, workshop, ritual, text or an audio guide but it’s always framed as a practice operating on artistic, social and political levels. I don’t use the “artistic” component to legitimize my practice or put it on a pedestal.

It’s a mindset. With its consideration of aesthetics, compositional techniques, perspective, framing, editing and performativity, art provides you with a great vantage point It allows you to understand experiences within a given situation differently, express it, and establish a common ground for communication.

Question

10 YEARS A MASTER

What is the role of the audience in your artistic research practice? Áron: New inputs are constantly being provided through a constant influx of players and changes within the internal structure of the games I run. I see my practice as research because it facilitates responsibility - the ability to respond to the world around us. It can help us understand our place, potential and the agency within a given situation.

At the expense of authorship, I’m interested in sustaining a conversation with players who are in an equally informed position. It’s about facilitating research discoveries and creating opportunities for everyone involved, so we can develop an ear to listen, to find responses to the challenges ahead.

Julia: Academic and artistic research translate differently and have a very different degree of consideration for the audience. Both fields are driven by the same sense of urgency - trying to capture a sign of time - but the art that I’m

interested in has much more room for dialogue. It is a practice of noticing things at the intersection of disciplines that might not be visible or accessible to others.

I’m usually using myself as a tool to mediate between individuals who have expertise on a given topic with others who might be interested in it. I constantly work on the designs of platforms of communication between those two groups. In my case, the insistence on dialogue comes from the tradition of solidarity, grass-roots work, and activism.

Bogomir: In artistic research, you always need to be aware of your audience. By adjusting elements of your work, i.e. using music or not, you frame the conditions of their reception.

Lately, I played my dancefloor footage filmed from a bird eye view to spectators without sound and noticed how much more analytical they become when they’re not overwhelmed by the audio. In moments like this, you notice how much we are trained as spectators to analyze and categorize. Without realizing it we scan the picture, assess it and decide which elements or characters to follow, who is important for the narrative and who isn’t. If you use those artistic/cinematic codes, you can have the audience analyze your work and research intuitively. Humans are actually perfect surveillance devices, technology simply replicates what is in our nature.

Question: The Master facilitates the research in and through cinema but the projects are executed in various media. How is cinema present in your practice? Does it help you set up that rapport with the audience you mentioned?

Julia: I come from a generation that grew up in Eastern Europe being conditioned as spectators primarily by cinema.

I am also trained as a filmmaker and it makes me think a bit different than art school graduates do. I’m always going to be influenced by cinema, the same way as when a sculptor decides to use a video, you clearly see that she treated the screen as a sculpting material. However, as much as I like seeing my films on a big screen and I enjoy the element of projection, I don’t think that cinema happens in cinema anymore. When you say “cinema” it evokes all the connotations to film industry, festival circuit and worn out narrative templates. What cinema means to me is a particular set of expectations and spectatorial practices that I can play with. The spectators shaped by cinema expect

There’s a tension within me between the artist and the researcher, the poetic emotional register and the intellectual side.

I synthesize the researcher and the artist in me into the creator in the process of making.

— Momchil Alexiev

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The point of art is to transform material in such a way that it creates meaningful connections with the universe.

quality - beautiful image and crisp sound - but in turn, they reward you with a special degree of attention. It doesn’t mean that I always go for the pretty picture. I often choose raw aesthetics but also challenge myself to bind spectators to the screen and evoke that heightened focus through the work itself, without immobilizing them in the dark room. My audience of choice would be set in more intimate conditions - in the gallery, in front of the TV or the computer. It’s time for cinema to allow reactions and interaction on its own terms, not like it’s done in gaming and VR. To work towards that, though, I first need my audience and myself to understand the language of cinema.

Bogomir: I’m from the same generation and when I was a kid, cinema was the most dominant and easy-accessible art form. I see it as the most powerful medium that has the capacity to move you in an unmatched way. Even when I work on transmedia projects in space, I use cinema both as a reference and a conceptual framework adapting such notions as editing and framing to different circumstances.

For me, cinematic reference also sets the bar high in terms of quality and intelligibility - the images I make need to look good and they need to resonate by themselves - without additional aid from the accompanying text.

Eliane: As my practice developed, I realized that cinema is a relational medium to me. Through cinema, I get to relate to a very diverse range of people and question my surroundings.

It gives me space and necessary focus to observe life carefully, in order to isolate its parts into a film or other object. The frame of cinema makes me establish relationships with my characters that are barely possible in life - the time we spend together is characterized by heightened focus and attention, where everything they say is of the essence and of interest to me. Coming from visual arts I know that this complex relationship could possibly be facilitated by another medium but once I tried animating my drawings and saw them coming to life, I didn’t feel I could continue in any other way. Cinema translates even to my seemingly unrelated activities. When I work on text, I compare it to editing and when I’m in conversation with my students, I feel like we are trying to create a joint narrative.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

— Emilio Reyes-Bassail

Agnese: I was working with concepts deriving from documentary cinema before the Master because I come from the tradition of documentary theater that chooses to work with non-actors who bring their expertise on everyday life to the play. When I compose images I always start with performers and subject the camera to what they are doing.

I collect impulses, ever-changing phenomena that stay in constant flux. They are like living organisms. Their meaning, impact, and relevance are fluid and change over time.

— Agnese Cornelio

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That’s why I’m vitally interested in the vast cinematic tradition relating to rehearsals. On the other hand, I refer to film archives as repositories of images that inform life. While looking at those images, I primarily think about the way they are constructed from the position of the maker, questioning the social and ideological circumstances of their production. What am I looking at? Why was it shot like this? It applies to images in films but also to images I encounter in the real world. Áron: I’m definitely more interested in how cinematic practices could inform the experience I facilitate for players than how the experience could influence cinema. If you work with participation, there are so many notions built around interactive cinema or participatory theater that they can suffocate what you’re about to discover. In the cinematic experience, there is an inherent asymmetry between the maker, the audience and the material. The camera can easily turn players into performers and it creates a rupture in the experience - a differentiation between the inside and the outside. It’s such a strong paradigm that I needed to cut off any references to it in order to explore the specificity of my own practice of working.

The decision not to allow any external eye into the space of a game (be that a camera, or an audience) also has to do with me taking a direct stand against treating the experience as a commodity. Not everything is ‘up for capturing’, and I like the idea that the only way to get into the game is to play it.

Nevertheless, I’m now at the point where I recognize what I’m doing for what it is, and it allows me to revisit notions coming from the cinema. I sometimes try to assume the position of an editor to tackle the configuration of the experience or think about the ways of channeling the attention in terms of framing. These concepts are really enriching as long as they don’t serve as an external theology of the work but are put into practice immediately. I can also see a potential now, of bringing the camera into the experience, but only as a diegetic tool - one that is acknowledged, becomes a part of the game and facilitates communication within it.

Maria: Cinema is my main frame of reference, it’s in my spine. I always think in terms of narrative, how it could fit the concept. I also think from the basic terms of cinematography like light and shadow, tempo and rhythm. So, even if I don’t work in cinema, creating different kinds of outcomes, I always work through it.

Emilio: From the very beginning, I saw cinema mostly as a way of conducting research that would allow me to combine my interests in fine arts and music. Applying to the Master I wanted to learn how to make films and to understand how memory works. I managed to combine the two into a single thing. You could do projects about memory in other media and if I was a sculptor I’d probably find some aspects of the subject reflected in sculptures but cinematic elements are deeply embedded in the way we recollect. For example, trying to recall your first kiss, you might remember it in slow motion.

Speaking about the editing process I often equate it with memory - you select certain elements and organize them to create a narrative. The more you work within a particular medium, the more parallels like this you find. In the end, it is the point of art - transforming the material in such a way that it creates meaningful connections with the universe.

Question

Are there any constant elements in your practice?

Specific methods that you’re consistently using?

If not, how do you develop a method suitable for a particular project?

Emilio: In my case, the process of refining methodology was all about finding ways of working that would give me a better understanding of the subject of memory that I’m trying to research. I started rationally by looking for the best ways of materializing how the memory works. However, the further I got, the more I was relying on instinct. It doesn’t mean that there was no reason for proceeding in this manner, but the rationale of those choices would only become apparent in the subsequent reflection on the results. What constitutes research is precisely that process of reflection on what

My role as an artistic researcher is to address the inexplicable tensions that I spot and create circumstances for the audience to notice them.

— Julia Sokolnicka

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Cinema is a relational medium to me, I get to relate to a very diverse range of people and question my surroundings through it.

— Eliane Esther Bots

you’ve done. It’s hard to do when you rush into production, delivering one project after the other but if you take one step at a time and reflect on it afterwards, it will eventually inform the next step. That’s what I call a method. Áron: The Master of Film provided me with the space to build a practice that is sustainable. I let it grow organically by framing experiments that inform each other and keep progressing. Throughout the course of my research, I developed methods to create playable games. I can do it fairly easily now, so there’s definitely an element of advancing craftsmanship both in game design and my guiding of the experience. I developed a recurring structure of the experiences, structural points that I want to hit. If I broke down the timeline of each game, the playtime itself usually takes only between 20-25% of time. The rest consists of the workshop, debriefing, warm-ups, and breaks. All these elements are known to the players and crucial for the experiences to work. The aim of that is to create a space that gives the player as much agency, transparency, and the opportunity for articulation over the course of the game.

After all, time and attention are the two most precious resources we work with, so making room for them is paramount.

Agnese: In terms of methods I’m indebted to Stanislavski and his approach to physical action. His is mostly known for his take on the psychology of the character but what I found especially interesting is his idea of given circumstances. It’s a set of conditions that influence the actions that the character undertakes. It helps you trigger memories by recreating circumstances in which a given event or action occurred. The physical reenactment triggers the tactile, bodily memory that is not entirely conscious and hard to tap into otherwise. I come from the theater and it constitutes the core of my methodology but the camera plays an equally important role in the process. Those practices and gestures that emerge within given circumstances need to be captured exactly as they emerge when there’s only a glimpse of opportunity. There are some similarities with cinema verité - the truth or authenticity captured in an instance on film.

However, the truth I’m interested in is often a total construction, a synthesis of the remembered and culturally imposed fantasy.

Julia: There’s a certain methodological commonality in my

work. I bring my expertise as a documentary filmmaker, an interviewer and an observer to the table - analyzing the situation through my lens. I position myself as an onlooker who needs to be open to what can be seen, instead of seeing reality as a symptom of the methodology. Whenever I deal with a subject I like to read and get the basic understanding of the field but I need to keep myself at bay not to become a specialist, keep my point of view and mojo going. In this sense, I also build a different rapport with the audience - showing phenomena instead of explaining. My role is to address the inexplicable tensions that I spot and create circumstances for the audience to notice them.

Question

Research practice is often associated with the use of concepts.

Does conceptualization happen at any stage of your work? If not, how do you reflect on your practice?

Julia: When I coin the concept to work with, I do a brief reconnaissance to flag the field but I don’t try to get the full summary of its history and branches. I treat concepts in a speculative way. They set up the horizon that I later explore with my tools. In this way, I’m trespassing, playing with technology and desecrating scientific methods of speculation. Áron: The material you’re working with, will always inform you and your method. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re working with clay or experienced-based forms, you always

Humans are perfect surveillance devices. If you use artistic/cinematic codes, you can have them analyze your work and research intuitively.

10 YEARS A MASTER

— Bogomir Doringer

need to recognize what your material is. This is where the concepts may help, they can aid the process of developing an understanding of the material. I like to build a “cosmology” of my practice. I give things names in order to push it forward, to create new openings and facilitate communication. For example, I refrain from calling people who engage in my experiences participants but address them as players. This differentiation has a serious impact since it frames their engagement - they’re not only participating by choosing from a given set of options but actively co-directing the outcome and overall course of game. Be that as it may, conceptualization always comes after the experience itself as an act of articulation. I name things that are already there. If you get entangled in too many concepts, you become their hostage. Concepts are not the only way in which knowledge and experience are articulated. The things that are said, seen, felt, and expressed in the games, leave a footprint, and inherently inform future games. Hence, the same way as the concepts are being refined over time, here the knowledge is being accumulated within the experience itself.

I want to provide the audience with some sort of metaphysical synthesis bringing things that lie below and above us into the temporal and spatial scale of humans.

— Maria Molina Peiró

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Eliane: The awareness of what I’m working on and the possibility to verbalize it is essential to me. It gives me the opportunity to share not only the work itself with the public but also all the findings and discoveries that were made in the process. That knowledge of the methods, challenges, and structures of my research feeds back into my work as an educator.

Bogomir: At some point, when I came up with and started using the term Dance of Urgency, someone asked me where I took it from. I looked around and realized it was coined within my practice. In that notion, I managed to capture something about dance and its relation to the state of political urgency, art, expression and club culture that wasn’t given a name before. The dance of urgency is a dance that arises from the emotions that occur in times of personal and collective crises. Such a dance empowers individuals and collectives, uniting them and enabling to perform as political bodies when necessary. Taking the interdisciplinary approach, I was able to extract expertise from dance culture and it suddenly started to look not only like an original

Question

It is a widespread conviction that researchers are after objective truths and artists follow subjective impressions. How do you retain and express your subjectivity in the artistic research practice?

Maria: I’m currently working on a documentary film that falls at the intersection of many fields. It deals with Rio Tinto - a mining area in Spain with some of the oldest mines on earth dating back to 3000 BC that is also considered by NASA to be the most similar in its chemical composition to the planet of Mars. They are currently testing remote robots and other space equipment there. With that area being close to where I was born, it becomes a story that combines my personal memory, a memory of the earth reflected in geology and the seeds of our possible future as space colonizers. Moreover, the story has multiple symbolic layers because Rio Tinto was also a departure point for Columbus’ journey to America, a site of the first ecological protest in history and the birthplace of one of the oldest branches of flamenco - Fandango - that originated among the workers lamenting their living conditions. Working through cinema and narrative I can synthesize all these

different elements that don’t belong in the same field. It won’t be a sociological, political study alone but instead, it’s aimed at providing the audience with some sort of a metaphysical synthesis - bringing things that lie below and above us into the temporal and spatial scale of humans.

Agnese: I want my working process to be transparent. It’s a more fair position towards the audience to reveal where you stand as a maker. Transparency is the biggest affirmation of subjectivity, it flashes out the particular. I always try to find a way to show how I approached the subject, and how far I am from it. It’s not strictly about saying where you’re coming from but highlighting those elements of your background that influence the way you deal with your topic. I try to make my personal entanglements visible.

Emilio: There’s this sentence by Kierkegaard where he says something along the lines of subjectivity being the subjective truth, but one that cannot be mediated through reason.

Subjective truth needs to come from a leap of faith. Without being certain of your method or an idea, you invest it with belief, trust your guts and see what it brings. Of course, if you analyze the notion of subjectivity it has a lot to do with where you come from and how you relate to your environment as well. I don’t believe in this romantic idea about all people being essentially different from each other and art coming exclusively from the inside. At the same time, I think that you need to affirm being a fool to a certain degree. Trying to do something no one else has done, or plenty have done but not in the same way, without any certainty, is a part of subjectivity. That is what I’d like to teach in my course. It’s about finding ways to discover your own mode of working. All film professionals should have their own personal relationship with notions related to filmmaking.

Framing should mean something different to you than it does to me because as a filmmaker I offer you my way of looking at the world by framing it for you.

MASTER OF FILM 2019

contribution to the field of knowledge production but one that is backed by 15 years of practice and subsequent reflection on that practice. That gave me the confidence to dare to create new definitions.

Julia: I’ve been thinking about subjectivity a lot because I’m very active in the art world. I considered how practices of the industry influence our work and condition its meaning and how the works feed back into the industry. Among the

I see my practice as research because it facilitates responsibility - the ability to respond to the world around us.

— Áron Birtalan

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scariest, least useful and degrading notions in this context is one of the “individualist star artist”. It should perish. Intuitively when you hear “subjectivity” in the art context you associate it with this idea of a genius who is about to show you the reality, since he/she has a special way of looking at things. This approach creates an unhealthy competition where artists speaking about the same subject are pitched against each other so that one can win. I hate it since it goes against everything that we’re doing as people, artists, and thinkers.

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My idea of subjectivity is very much connected to the notion of community. There’s a reason why I stand where I am - at the intersection of different disciplines, interpretations, and bodies of knowledge. I’m practicing now in the Netherlands which is the country of consensus, influenced by very particular design ideas, and distinct social and moral politics.

We’re also in the middle of the refugee crisis and a very weird moment for information and propaganda when the media landscape and the concept of the image itself are shifting.

Given all that, I can’t pretend to be doing my own little thing without knowing it and being influenced by it. You need to be aware that by creating images in these conditions you get involved in the network of communication. You need to know where you’re speaking from, what channels and media you’re working through and who you’re talking to. What I work on and how I work comes from certain traditions, circumstances, and decisions that altogether create the subjectivity. I’m gonna use the example of my group at the Master. Although we were very different from each other, I think we all come from the same subjectivity. Subjectivity in this sense is something that we create together as a group, that is being born out of shared experience and communication. It’s different from intersubjectivity that I perceive to be a function of the process.

Subjectivity is embedded in the outcome, in the work.

Interviews were conducted and compiled

by Stanisław Liguziński.

Researchers 2011 Bart Juttmann, Bogomir Doringer, Kasper Verkaik, Kay Schuttel, Lisette Olsthoorn, Reinier Noordzij, Taatske Pieterson Researchers 2012 Alice Spitz da Rocha, Janneke van Heesch, Joep Kuijper, John Treffer, Julia Kaiser, Sam Yazdanpanah Ardekani Researchers 2013 Channa Boon, Claire van der Poel, Edwin, Ginta Tinte Vasermane, Jovana Tokic, Pedro Collantes de Teran, Reinilde Jonkhout, Ruben van Leer, Yael Assaf, Yassine el Idrissi Researchers 2014 Agnese Cornelio, Anca Oproiu, Jack Faber, Jelena Rosic, Luiza Fagá Ribeiro do Valle, Margot Schaap, Maria Ångerman, Noël Loozen, Sonja Wyss Researchers 2015 Bálint Túri, Bram Loogman, Ellenoor Bakker, Momchil Alexiev, Namfon Udomlertlak, Nina Jan, Olivier Delebecque, Pablo Núñez Palma, Rosanne Pel, Signe Tørå Karsrud, Vladimir Simić

Researchers 2016 Anastasija Pirozenko, Dawood Hilmandi, Dorian de Rijk, Eliane Esther Bots, Fedor Limperg, Gwendolyn Nieuwenhuize, Julia Sokolnicka, Mariia Ponomarova, Matteo Canetta, Mikko Keskiivari, Stanisław Liguziński Researchers 2017 Alex Perry, Daniel de Oliveira Donato, Emilio Reyes-Bassail, Gustavo Lorgia, Jad Youssef, Kristina Daurova, Lisa-Marie Vlietstra, Louis Liu, Maria Molina Peiró, Sophie Dixon, Wietske de Klerk Researchers 2018 Ana Bravo-Pérez, Áron Birtalan, David Wasch, Deniz Ozman, Diego Arias Asch, Francesco Ragazzi, Sabina Mikelić, Sam Ashby, Stephen Graves Researchers 2019 Albert Kuhn, Bora Lee-Kil, Giorgia Piffaretti, Peter Hammer, Robin Coops, Stefan Pavlović, Jan-Timo Geschwill, Yafit Taranto Researchers 2020 Alberto Delgado de Ita, Federico Sande Novo, Juan Palacios, Magdalena Szymków, Marleine van der Werf, Mira Adoumier, Misho Antadze, Omar Breeveld, Sarah Fernandez, Sophie Wright, Victorine van Alphen

MASTER OF FILM 2019

The Master of Film would like to acknowledge all the alumni as well as current and former students who contributed and still contribute to the development of our programme and the field through their continuous engagement in the artistic research as makers, researchers, teachers, and propagators:

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Artistic Research Week | Shifting Perspective (Master of Film Graduation Show) is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 28 June– 7 July 2019 Generously supported by festival partner Keep an Eye Foundation Master of Film, Netherlands Film Academy Director Netherlands Film Academy Bart Römer Programme Director Master of Film Mieke Bernink Coordinator Master of Film Kris Dekkers Programme Coordinator Sabien Schütte Mentors Sander Blom, Wineke van Muiswinkel, Eyal Sivan Curators Eliane Bots, Mirka Duijn

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We are keeping an eye on talented young artists.

By providing grants and awards we are assisting the brightest musicians, artists, designers and filmmakers to develop their talents, create new opportunities and above all, to achieve their creative goals. www.keepaneye.nl

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MASTER STER OF FILM

Many thanks to

©Nederlandse Filmacademie, Amsterdam 2019 Markenplein 1, 1011 MV Amsterdam +31(0)20 52 773 33 filmacademie@ahk.nl www.filmacademie.nl www.masteroffilm.nl

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ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA