Alright, as promised, we will now start with the unveiling of this year’s GEGENkino programme… and we kick off with something big!
One part of our 2017 programme will be an extensive hommage to the still too under-appreciated Finnish artist and filmmaker MIKA TAANILA. For the occasion of this hommage, which will feature a wide and varied selection of his works, Mika Taanila will personally come to our festival and will bring with him the Finnish psych rock outfit CIRCLE for their first show in Germany in over six years and for the German premiere of their collaborative SSEENNSSEESS performance, which will combine a live show by the PHARAOH OVERLORD offspring and a triple 16mm projection by Taanila. Instead of an opening band, we will show the film HERMAFRODIITIT feat. music and footage of Taanila’s former post-punk band SWISSAIR. Read about the interesting history of this film and Taanila early post-punk endeavours over at N&B RESEARCH DIGEST, and find out more about the event below or at the FB event page.
15 April 2017, 9pm – UT Connewitz
Tribute to Mika Taanila
With brisk nonchalance, 1965 born Finn Mika Taanila moves between classical documentary film, experimental video art, avant-garde, performative installations and musical projects. Using diverse aesthetic strategies of access in his works, he deals with promises of a future to come (honored or not), technological evolution as well as human engineering. At that, they are also always about the accompanying noises that are triggering and flanking these phenomena. In the short piece Optical Sound for example, a perfectly cross-grained soundtrack for the state of yearning for a weightless world of data is created by layering mechanical sounds of a discarded twenty-four-wire-printer, turning it into a magnificent techno symphony. In our three-day tribute, we want to trace Taanila’s working methods as well as the utopian revisions that his films tell, be it in form of a biographical portrait of nuclear physicist-electronic instrument maker composer-filmmaker-programmer-artist Erkki Kurenniemi, be it as a relaxed comment on the stumbling man-machine-encounter at the RoboCup tournament or as an optimistic survey of the elliptical “futuro house” and its equally volatile history—a prototype of a modern, mass-produced tenement made of plastic. The uniting topic of these, admittedly, very different works is the topic of disappearing, discarding, forgetting, of making people forget something. Representative for this is A Physical Ring, whose found footage material originates from a laboratory experiment of which no one remembers what insights it was once hoped to reveal.
About
Mika Taanila (*1965) studied Anthropology at University of Helsinki and holds a diploma in Design from Lathi University of Applied Sciences. Taanila’s films and installations were shown at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and at international biennials. He was honoured with the Finnish Ars Fennica Award in 2015.
About the event
German Premiere | Circle & Mika Taanila – SSEENNSSEESS
FIN 2013, 50’, no dialogue, live music by Circle, 2 x 16mm, 1 x file
Supporting films | Swissair: Hermafrodiitit
FIN 1986, 22’, OV/English subtitles, 2 x file), Verbranntes Land (FIN 2002, 7’, no dialogue, file
With Circle and Mika Taanila, rock music and film come together to a sensually and visually unique live experience. Located between rock opera and a theatrical audio-visual performance, the spectacular show combines blaring glam rock, improvised krautrock and chanson-metal with perfectly clocked 16mm film projections. Beside their musical range, Circle are particularly famous for their zappa-esque live performances: leather uniforms stand alongside spandex knickers, meticulously timed stage choreographies present pop iconography, celebrity attitude and rocker postures as decalcomania pictures and templates. In SSEENNSSEESS, Mika Taanila projects on a triptych of three screens with the help of four 16mm projectors and one video beam. The pictures of the loops derive from science films of the 1950s, which were made in the phonetics department of the University of Helsinki and which were digitally processed and alienated by Taanila. Verbranntes Land is a melancholic ode to bygone technology and its vanishing, generally, and to that of one image in particular: in a split screen composition, a VHS image is on view, vanishing gradually, with every run-through, in the process of cleaning. Swissair gathers super-8 material which Taanila shot for a music project of the same name with his co-pilot Jari Härkönen.
15 April, 21 Uhr – UT Connewitz – € 12 pre-sale / 15 at the door
When Things Occur
PS 2016, R: Oraib Toukan, feat. Lara Abu Ramadan, Hosam Salem, Khalil Hamra, Walaa Al Ghussein, Ashraf Al Masri, 28’, OmeU
WHEN THINGS OCCUR is based on skype conversations with photographers living in Gaza, with their local assistants and drivers. The conversational partners are responsible for pictures which were shared from screen to screen and, as a result, found their way into the collective picture archive. Being a photo reportage without any moving pictures, the film looks behind the pictorial materialisation of grief and pain – considers their digital embodiment on the hotographer’s harddrives and their media circulation. It examines how the view is guided inside digital spaces and how empathy leaps over. Apart from news agencies’ demands for sensation causing pictures, the film gives rise to further ethical questions, for instance about the functioning of the documentary significants while observing sorrow. What exactly does it mean to look at sorrow “from a distance” – how many meters or kilometers of distance are necessary for this purpose? What about properties and the political economy of pictures of war? Who is “the native” in a representation of war? Also, what is the daily routine of those exposing war?
IN THE FUTURE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN
PS/DK/GB 2016, D: Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind,feat. Pooneh Hajimohammadi, Anna Aldridge, Leyla Ertosun, Larissa Sansour, 29’, OV/English subtitles
The film relates – as implied by the temporal twist in its title – the story of an intervention into the prospective perception of a territory’s political history. A self-proclaimed “narrative resistance group” buries finest porcelain which originates from an entirely contrived civilization. The group’s objective is to interfere with history and to assert claims on their vanishing territories in the time to come. When the porcelain is excavated again, it will prove the existence of a fictitious people. Creating an independent myth, the work of the group becomes a historical intervention which de facto creates a nation. In form of a fictional video essay, moving images are combined with computer-generated ones, archaeological and political aspects are entangled with science fiction contents. Staged as a voice-over conversation between a psychologist and the group’s leader and being about myths and fiction as constituent elements of facts, history and the documentary, the dialogue reveals the philosophy behind the actions of the group.
Selma Doborac – IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER.
AT/BA 2012, 17’, no dialogue, English language version
“In IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER., the first-person narrator explores over the course of three brief episodes the experiences of four people, all of them related to one another; the events occurred during a bomb attack in war-time Bosnia in 1992. The story is told partly through descriptions of a remembered past inscribed into the filmic image in the form of a sequential textual trace, partly through a landscape that is featured in the memories as well as seen in the present, mediated by a mise-en-scène that attempts to find a visual structure, by means of continuous tracking shots, corresponding to the narrated past on location per se. From the constant back-and-forth between what is seen and what is read an experimental set-up of representation emerges, resulting, inevitably, in an unresolved overall picture, as the textual level not only occasionally constrains the visual level but sometimes, of its own accord, even obliterates it. While the titles in which layers of memory are couched (de)construct the notion of non-communicability, the landscape images encased in rides both en-title and give away the impossibility of making a likeness of (war-like) actions.” (Selma Doborac; Translation: Thomas Brooks)
Stephanie Comilang – LUMAPIT SA AKIN, PARAISO (COME TO ME PARADISE)
CA/HK 2016, feat. music by Why Be & Sky H1, 26’, OV/English subtitles
In LUMAPIT SA AKIN, PARAISO (COME TO ME PARADISE), Stephanie Comilang uses the backdrop of Hong Kong and the various ways in which Filipina migrant workers occupy its downtown Central district on Sundays. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone who speaks of the isolation from being uprooted and thrown into a new place. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she is finally able to interact with the women and feel her purpose, which is to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. The film is a documentary with a terrific score interacting with the science fiction elements in it. “Sci-fi [as a genre] always has the same sort of idea—that’s also why I wanted to make the film. It’s people who are within the society looking at these outsiders, minority groups, and excluding them because of some sort of thing. They’re scared of them. The minorities usually have some sort of power that the others don’t have, and they’re pushed to the side or the outside. That theme translates really well to the migrant, immigrant experience.” (Stephanie Comilang)
