The Devil Had Other Plans
A post-horror experimental film/series in three acts: Act I - SHOCK, Act II - TURMOIL, Act III - HELL
* Available as a series, separate videos, or a 40 minutes film. Contact here for queries.
A gut reaction to the Coronavirus apocalypse, made in the first months of isolation and confusion in March-June 2020, echoing the shocking, eerie and surreal experience of the pandemic. Reworking the classic Zombie public-domain film from 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' by AI colorization, video processing, re-cutting and sound work. The attack of the outside and tensions within the inside were found in the horror film images, broken apart and reassembled to become a haunting kaleidoscopic nightmare.
The processed hybrid form of film, video and digital, becomes a stream of consciousness acting directly on the senses, echoing the Coronavirus pandemic channeling fear, paranoia and suspicion. The work brings forth the dark streams bubbling under this wave of chaos, and brings back horror-films' envisions of catastrophe, referencing also the idea of the home, domestic tension, inside/outside, the body, the 'other', and extreme mental states.
The Devil Had Other Plans (Act I) on Cinémathèque Française's channel :
Reviews:
CINESINFIN - un blog de Borja Castillejo Calvo:
https://cinesinfin6.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/the-devil-had-other-plans-acts-i-ii-iii/?fbclid=IwAR1gSUnnuMMCFFg2EjVOWl0PWLEtD-i1c4w5yUkMrQFs0rgogmX7GZhZR0E
A review by Tomáš Stejskal in https://www.aktualne.cz/:
"How to capture the anxiety caused by a coronavirus pandemic? Israeli video artist and editor Guli Silberstein found the ideal medium in the colored version of the famous horror film Night of the Living Dead, by which George Romero started the modern history of this genre in 1969.
The famous scenes from the house, where a group of Americans barricade themselves in front of fiery undead longing to eat them alive, are turning into abstract scenes with a strongly symbolic value.
It was difficult for Silberstein to choose a more suitable horror. The Night of the Living Dead was filmed with a black-and-white, documentary contact camera, touching on American racism and discussing that the greatest danger was ultimately the people themselves. The animation tools of the Israeli filmmaker have broken this groundbreaking horror into a disturbing audiovisual meditation, which, with the sounds of piano and fine electronics, digitally chirps about today's time when horror no longer takes the form of clearly visible monsters."
Image of Perception - experimental feature film (2021, UK, 64 minutes)
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A tribute to the pioneering, visionary film 'A Page of Madness' (1926, Japan, director: Teinosuke Kinugasa), reworked by AI colouring technology, digital processing, and re-cutting. Confinement, madness and love haunt an asylum (of the mind?), where a couple and their daughter become entangled in a troubled past and a complex present, as perceived through layers of moving-image making across almost a century.
Review and analysis:
'THE SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE PROJECT' - WAR, MEDIA & APPROPRIATION - 2000-2014
Full Research Paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal Screenworks:
http://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-7.3/the-schizophrenic-state-project
A project which started in 2000, at the MA in Media Studies program at The New School University in New York. It’s composed of a series of video works, which appropriate mass media footage of violence, war, and protest situations, in the context of my place of birth and growing up; Israel, Palestine and the region. The images are processed via digital means in diverse ways that re-contextualise the found footage, creating poetic videos that formulate media critique. The idea is to extract humanness in the images, highlighting the horror of violence suffered by real people, and at the same time emphasising video as a medium in which these images are delivered to us. It’s a long-term research, covering 14 years of work, forming unique experiences in the shape of video works merging content and texture, dealing with aesthetics, technology and humanism. The work aims to encourage empathy, humanness and sensitivity to the tragedy of violence, that seem to disappear in a post-fact world of clashing truths and “fake news”. Research questions: How can creative processing of news footage of violence, suffering and confrontation, illuminate the cognitive effect of the consumption of these electronically transmitted images? What are the realistic and surrealistic aspects of this experience? Do these images function as a mask or a revealer of the reality they document? Or maybe both? In light of new digital tools and ways of distribution, how can these video works provoke new thought, discussion and awareness regarding the content of news media images, their nature and their impact?
GULI SILBERSTEIN ART