Women Cinemakers meets
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang Lives and works in Montreal, Canada, originally from Seoul, South Korea
Films are silent. Quiet, still, and immovable until they are finally asked to reveal their original purpose - to be projected. Composed of 24 frames for one second, each image in each frame aims to be combined together, having a shared purpose for a superstructural medium, cinema, in which a given time and space in a particular film are carried. Disciplined and produced films since 2005, I have been a filmmaker. For me, cinema exclusively was for cinemas, inherited to be completed when running through projections. I had never thought that cinema would be a physical substance that consecutive still images were imprinted on its surface perpetually.However, one day, I had an opportunity looking at each film strip of found footage of 35mm Hollywood motion picture, which were mostly produced in the 90s. It felt as if each single object shot on the film surface was individually exchanging glances with me. With this experience, I started thinking that I could foster a totally different state of being films if I highlight more the physicality of the chemically generated surface of found footage in lieu of relying on the given moving-image that found footage had been produced for. I was aware that those footage had been given a fate that it would once have been produced for particular -mostly commercial- purposes, but had ended up abandoned. After its industrial death caused by the huge shifting to the digital cinema-making, motion picture footage have encountered an urgency to be re-studied by the contemporary eyes and analyzed under the name of expanded cinema for survival. Each film shot possesses an evanescent moment that only lasts much less than a second. Each single frame is meant to be mighty motion pictures, which should not be expected to remain stationary existence. However, for me, there still are a figure, a glimpse of landscape and cityscape, a stroke of a body of texts, and a figment of its imaginatively-all-made worlds on each surface of each shot, waiting for someone to individuate them again. I look at them as they were once alive but are now dead in my time. Since I have been chasing potentiated moments of cinema where invisibility can mutate into visibility within durational art form, this latent breath of found footage has been resonating with death and life for the fact that such a life is still being carved as shot on the 35mm surface. I started to consider this found footage to be capable substances on the verge of its reincarnation. I want all dead memories of the found footage to ghostly raise its rejuvenated shapes and souls while erasing their very initial purpose to be consumed commercially.I have wanted to create an expanded bridge toward a new language of cinema. I believe, therefore, this project is a long term attempt discovering differentiated possibilities of cinema not only as moving-image that solely exists in the virtuality but also as physical objects that remain to be affecting viewers’ nowness.