Embedded Files
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 Devil Had Other Plans
A post-horror experimental film/series in three acts: Act I - SHOCK, Act II - TURMOIL, Act III - HELL
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."
Matter & Light (2019, 7 minutes, UK)
Matter & Light is inspired by the painter Turner and by French Impressionism, with most images filmed in Margate in the UK and at the Bay of the Somme in France.
It deals with contemporary environmental issues affecting an overflowing, falling-apart world, using low compression and self-produced imagery to achieve a melting painterly look echoing sustainability and poetry. The work experiments with making video art that continues ideas developed in the field of painting. Painterly traditions are applied to moving digital form to reflect on the current world.
FIELD OF INFINITY, 2018, UK, 5'22''
Inspired by both Italian Renaissance paintings and contemporary news broadcasts from Gaza protests at the border with Israel - the work processes human gestures and figures in landscape into a dark and colourful scramble. The work aims to open up an array of reflections, including concerns about the political image, image of the political, the politics of the image, and the image of image.
Awards:
Best experimental film - Calcutta International Short Film Festival 21.12.20
Best experimental film award, Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival 26.6.20
Grand Prize - Festival international Signes de Nuit, the Italian version in Urbino Italy 30.11.19
Best experimental film award - Venice Film Week 3.9.19
More screenings:
Experimental superstars - Cultural Center Novi Sad Serbia, New Wave Film Festival China, 27th ART FILM FEST Košice Slovakia, FILE - Electronic Language International Festival Brasil, VIDEOEX Switzerland, Montreal Underground Film Festival, WRO Biennale Poland, Experiments in Cinema, New Mexico USA, Oodaaq Festival France, Revolutions per Minute Festival, Boston, USA, Festival Tous Courts, AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, Alternative Film/Video 2018 festival, Belgrade, Serbia, FIVA Festival, Buenos Aires / Argentina, Southampton Film Week, UK, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic, The Unseen Festival, Denver CO, USA
STUFF AS DREAMS, 6 min, UK, 2016
Family and nature images that may have been a dream or maybe not, and panicked news reports from scenes of terror that may or may not had taken place, are intertwined in a painterly collage, breaking-up and collapsing into itself, exploring both personal and public perceptions of what seems an increasingly fractured world of 'fake news' and 'post truth'.
Awards:
Best experimental film, Short Movie Club, Minsk Belarus, 23.7.17
Best experimental film, New York Film Week, 11.7.17
Best experimental film, Sydney World Film Festival, 26.6.17
3rd place award, International Videoart Festival of Camaguey, Cuba 9.4.17
MACHINIC PHYLUM, 2015, UK, 4'00''
A symbiosis of human and nature forms, by direct manipulation of video code, purposely damaging it in ‘glitch’ process, creating rich explosions of colour and form. The images, a little girl in a flower field, Earth from space and bits of satellites, become vibrant substance, where the girl and the environment interact in mutual consumption, reflecting poetic perception of existence, echoing childhood sense of endless open planes of possibilities.
“The machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation”.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus".
Screenings:
'In Reality' Close-Up Cinema London, London Short Film Festival, Swedenborg film festival London, The Short Circuit 'Going Natural' Brighton, Festival Images Contre Nature Marseille France, Montreal Independent Film Festival, Oopdaaq Festival France, Proceso de Error Festival Columbia, Experimental Superstars Novi Sad Serbia, CODEC festival Mexico City, Without Words Film Festival, Metz, France, 'Altered States' Coastal Currents Arts Festival, Hastings & St. Leonards, UK, 'Summer Cinema', Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK
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