Increasingly Powerful Sinais

Quiasma, de Tono Mejuto

In this edition of 2017, (S8) reserves, as usual, a special section in the program for cinema made in Galicia and / or by Galician people. This year Sinais section embraces several focus: besides the already traditional selection of short films of Sinais in Curto, a special focus will be dedicated to the filmmaker and film editor Diana Toucedo, and Xisela Franco will present her video installation Interior, exterior, durante.

It is obvious that there are creative forces in Galicia. Forces that, moreover, decide to take daring paths, giving way to experimentation and research. This special disposition to place themselves on the side of nonconformism and to be guided by the formal search turns the selection of Sinais into a sample of stimulating variety, in which demand overcomes all localism.

Diana Toucedo

As we said, this year the section embraces three ways. Diana Toucedo is the author in focus of this edition. Filmmaker, film editor and teacher, Toucedo has been developing a work that involves a reflection on film image for years. On the one hand, in works such as Corpo preto and Ser de luz whose strategy is appropriation and edition (in accordance with the theme of this year’s edition), and on the other hand, filming and rethinking history from the domestic and ethnographic scope in works such as Homes and Por que non cantades todas, or approaching the personal aspect in works as Imágenes secretas. Now she is working on her next feature film, Trinta Lumes. As a film editor, she is responsible for works such as Isaki Lacuesta’s La noche que no acaba, the animated film Chico y Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal with the film editor Arnau Quiles, and O quinto evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser by Alberto Gracia, who won the 2013 Fipresci Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival. As a teacher, she teaches at the Creative Documentary Master of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Toucedo will present several of her works in a special showing, in which she will also talk about her creative processes and projects under preparation.

Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego, de Helena Girón y Samuel Delgado

Sinais en Curto opens several interesting paths. Jaione Camborda (also screenwriter) will present his Rapa das bestas, a particular vision about the ethnographic film and experimental non-fiction, in which he filmed this tradition through the closeness of super 8, using black and white, in a film that was at Bafici. The artist and photographer Carla Andrade delves into a slow and special vision of landscape, in this case the Atacama desert, with her work El paisaje está vacío y el vacío es paisaje. Fuerzas invisibles by the film editor Marcos Flórez is also about landscape, but from a personal and emotional scope, with an impressionist formal exploration on color reinforced by his own soundtrack. This time Xurxo Chirro attends with one of his work of appropriation, Bomb Movie, urgent comment on the recent bombing of the United States on Afghanistan. After the international success of Sin Dios Ni Santa María, Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado show Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego, a film that starts from the volcanic tunnels of Tenerife to an underground story of resistance, which has already been at prestigious festivals like the one in Toronto, New York and Rotterdam. Quiasma, by Tono Mejuto, is a film that documents the creative process of the choreographer Javier Martín, with music by Oleg Karavaichuk (Oleg of Andrés Duque), with whom he collaborated while living: a study of movement and work with the body filmed in 16mm and in black and white. And as it is also a question of bringing to light new talents ​​and attending to those who show promise, Sinais en Curto will also bring O ollo cobizoso, the work of the young students of fine arts Lara and Noa Castro, who, before the age of twenty, give a sharp look to their environment, with an edition full of correspondences, resonances and visual ingenuity.

As regards exhibitions, this year Sinais brings the proposal, as ambitious as exciting, of Xisela Franco. Her installation, Interior, exterior, durante (made for the MARCO of Vigo, and that this time we can see at the Foundation Luis Seoane during the festival) documents the views from her window in Baiona during a whole day in eight hours. A picture that involves a fascinating reflection on time, domestic space and landscape through its interaction with sound, which includes the first years of cognitive development and speech acquisition of her daughter from birth to three years. A work that is not only a reflection on the ideas of interior and exterior, time duration and passage of time, but also on motherhood and its relationship with creative processes. As precursor of Franco’s immersive installation, we can also see, as support and extension of this idea, her self-portrait Vía Láctea (2013), in which her own nude body breastfeeding his daughter serves as a projection screen to a 16mm film painted by herself.

Mobileskino Workshop: Do8Yourself

Mobileskino returns to (S8), and this time with workshop that emerges from their latest projecto, Do8Yourself, where we will learn to create our own strips of 16mm film from digital material. The work of this group from Basel, Switzerland – where filmmakers, technicians, animators and sound artists meet- is guided by research and play about analog cinema and the possible ways of combining this technology with a thousand mechanical, electronic and digital devices. A work that blends digital technology with the audiovisual experiments of the beginnings of cinema in the nineteenth century, a conjunction that gives rise to Do8Yourself, a call to ingenuity and self-sufficiency.

The workshop is divided into two work sessions and a public screening. In the two work sessions the artists will teach the process and explain in detail how it works. The videos of each participant will be printed frame by frame in acetate, then the strips of material will be cut and perforated to become 16mm films and be screened. A soundtrack will be created as well, and the transferred to analog format. The final result will be edited as a film that will be seen on Sunday in a screening open to the public, where a string-powered projector and also a string-powered vinyl audio player will be used.

VENUE: Afundación, A Coruña. Cantón Grande 21, 23. 15003 A Coruña
SCHEDULE: Friday 2 from 10 am to 12 pm, and Saturday 3 June from 11 am to 2 pm.
REQUIREMENTS: Each participant should bring some video clips and photos to transfer to film. Although it is not mandatory, we recommend to bring a computer with editing software.
REGISTRATION: At the email address [email protected] heading “Mobileskino Workshop” in the subject line of the message. Limited places.
PRICE: 40 euros.

The year of the 8: looking back

This is the final countdown: in less than a month, the 8th edition of the (S8) begins. A number that marks a special date for the festival, that 8 that lies in between brackets as an homage to super 8, but also as a statement. A edition that will bring a celebration, that we will honor not only by working on a program where the cinema we feel passionate about is the protagonist, but also with some surprises that we will reveal when the time comes. By now, we can only say that this year there will be super 8, and that there will be enlightening encounters and appearances, because all the parkways lead in this edition to a particular utopia. To entertain the wait and warm up the enthusiasm, there you are this (exciting) video remembering the 7th edition.

Notes After Long Silence, de Saul Levine

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Nicky Hamlyn. 3 X 4 Projectors

Quadrants is the third in a series of occasional four-projector loop works. The first one, 4 X LOOPS (1974) arose out of work I was making using Standard / Regular 8 film, which when projected in its original 16mm width, before it is split into two 8mm lengths, yields four 8mm frames within a single 16mm frame.

The next step seemed to be to make four independent image sequences, hence the need for four projectors. 4 X LOOPS was the result. It was shown at the Festival of Expanded Cinema at the ICA, London, in January 1976. However, I felt I’d reached a dead end with this way of working, and didn’t make another such piece until 2012, when I was invited to EXIS festival in Seoul. Rings was made especially for that event. Like 4 X LOOPS, it also has a structure of four identical short loops that generate a repeating one second long pattern of twelve two-frame ‘shots’. (According to Werner Nekes’ theory of the kine, a shot must have a minimum of two frames). In both Quadrants and Rings, I am partly interested in an image rate of twelve per second, just around critical flicker fusion rate. Thus the work aims to revisit some of the basic conditions and principles of filmmaking and viewing, partly in order to engage with the way our physiological responses consistently override what we know to be the case, and to try in some way to foreground and explore these strong effects, which are comparable to the way one’s body involuntarily reacts when stepping onto a non-moving escalator.

Both Rings and Quadrants present a kind of quasi-movement, visibly made of discrete, static images that nevertheless generate apparent movement. This principle is derived from the way a lot of Christmas lights work, whereby a string of bulbs switch off one by one in turn, creating a move along the line.

Quadrants has an almost identical structure to Rings: four identical loops, each of four two-frame shots that repeat, thus an eight frame (1/3rd of a second) unit. As with Rings, the projector arrangement is fluid. Following 4 X LOOPS, which has a number of precise projector positions, I tried to do the same for Rings, but discovered that the in-between positions were often more interesting than the planned, set positions, so Rings is much more improvised than 4 X LOOPS. Quadrants will sit somewhere between the two. I like the fact that the film image in itself is fixed, but when presented in a performance situation in which projectors are re-aligned and the images superimposed in various ways, a unique experience, in some ways the antithesis of film, is created. The lack of synchronisation between the projectors generates unexpected conjunctions and interactions between the loops, whether superimposed or adjacent to each other, recalling in some respects Steve Reich’s early phase pattern compositions. Potentially flicker rates of higher than 24fps are also possible.

In each of the three four projector works the form of movement is very different: a regular flashing on and off in 4 X LOOPS, a linear serpentine movement in Rings and a simple rotation in Quadrants. In all three, though, the frame-by-frame fact of film is inscribed in the structures, and is reinforced by the whir of the projectors in the room. The repositioning of the projectors complicates and reveals, generates and dissolves the basic patterns of frames in motion.
Nicky Hamlyn