Metrics and Rhyme
Pattern, measure, structure, correspondences, rhythms and combinations. This group of films join forces to think about the different expressions of these ideas in cinema. From the geometry in the composition of a shot, to the precision in the cuts, going through the ordering of the world in preconceived structures. The form as reason and guide, the own possibilities of cinema (and only of cinema) put in game, and turned also into a form to play.
It starts with the arithmetic and geometry of Metric Film, by the filmmaker Federico Lanchares, where the shot becomes a grid of infinite combinations. The shot thought almost as a scheme/diagram finds its rhyme below with Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant, by the animator Jodie Mack: the “found” pattern in the real world of motherboards and flower fields, in a single frame treatment of rigorous measurements. The world is broken down into schematic compositional lines, an idea that the American Paul Glabicki takes to its geometric extreme in his Diagram Film: a mixture of animation and real image, which also shows the infinite richness of layers, symbols and signifiers of his cinema. The emotional pulse of everyday surroundings is chopped according to inflexible straight lines in 1640, where Pablo Marín cuts and perforates slides of medium size of images taken in his neighborhood of Buenos Aires (zip code: 1640) adapting them to the size of 16mm film and editing them rigorously. Exile by Robert Todd is also another expression of that idea of schematizing the natural and what is found in the environment that surrounds the filmmaker: lines that cross the frame, shadows and elements of all kinds get in the field of view of the camera, “gridding” the landscape in different ways.
The idea of pattern, rhythm and repetition goes beyond the frame to be installed in the quality of cinema as a way of compressing time. Alexandre Larose in Saint Bathans Repetitions manufactures layers of moments that are overlapped in a complex multiple overprint pattern of the film. The gesture and the possibilities that the montage offers also build an idea of privacy in Looking for the Moon, by Moira Sweeney. A collection of actions, which finds its rhyme in 13 (recorded) apparitions of her ghost, where the Mallorcan filmmaker and illustrator Pere Ginard collects appearances of everyday “ghosts” that he orders in a structure of 13 chapters. The program ends with a work that captures both the spatial and compositional aspect of the session and the temporary one (and already announces it in its own title): As Much Time as Space, by Katja Mater, a film that runs through two projectors (with the temporal difference of the projected image: 8 seconds), building a game between both images, which complement each other and give rise to studied compositions through the movement of the camera, in a carefully calculated rhyme.
Films that rhyme with each other and internally, structures and metric combinations, for this edition in which we want to immerse ourselves in the algebra of cinema.