Programme notes: Precarious Landscapes by Sami van Ingen
Works depicting terrains where battles of thought, memories and actions take place.
THE BLOW (20 mins)
The near un-focused camera makes the viewer to find focus in the space. One´s gaze can only wander along the patina of the wood and the rusty metal, and give one´s self to the inhale or rhythm of the Blow. The film was conceived after the grandfather died, when the house reviled itself as just a building, still full of memories.
STAGE COACH (7 min)
Wheels where paramount in the conquering of the west, they made possible the transporting of building materials to build towns and cities. Wheels – now in the form of the private automobile – have become a symbol of freedom and the last way to conquer “the big outdoors”. However getting out of ones the car has got more difficult and much scarier.
PERAMBULATIONS (10 min, silent)
In 1995 I made a trip with my grandmother to of her childhood island of Inis Mor in Ireland. To her it becomes a nostalgic pilgrimage to memories and to me a challenge of understanding and of documentation.
DEEP SIX (6 min)
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.
HATE (12 min, silent)
In 1959, Soviet film director Aleksandr Ptushko (1900 – 1973) directed a feature film titled Sampo, which was loosely based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala and which was partly filmed with two cameras simultaneously. The implications of portraying the repressed “Other” in Ptushko´s depiction of Kalevala are exposed. The stroboscopic effect of the film contrasts with the pictorial content that follows traditional narrative lines: the abduction of the fair maiden, the events lead to a disgraced and defensive suitor, who, once defeated, exits the set sulking.
NAVIGATOR03 (3 min)
Navigator03 is the third version of this work which combines Petri Kuljuntausta´s sound collage based on beluga whale sounds and some sequences of weightless figures I found from an old VHS-cassette.