Programme 2 | Material Worlds

Cinema’s founders, Louis & Auguste Lumière, frequently balked at suggestions that they were engaged in a film “production” practice. Rather, they believed that their interests and motives belonged to a tradition of scientific research. After all, the medium is nothing if not a complex system of various technological processes and alchemical reactions, even now in this predominantly digital era.

 

To remind of this, the films in the programme focus and zoom in on the material nature of their own construction. Paul Sharits’s 3D Movie asks us to wear Anaglyph glasses to divide its millions of dancing, optically-printed film grains —red and pink, blue and turquoise— as they crawl atop one another in a sea of colour and un-resolvable information. Peter Rose revisits the Lumière brothers’ “actuality film” tradition, endeavouring to elevate the everyday to a hyperdimensional plane via kaleidoscopic superimpositions, juxtapositions, and re-framings.

 

Victor Van Rossem created his own version of Tim Macmillan’s “Time Slice” camera —a prototype for the process that led to The Matrix’s iconic bullet time effect— to engineer toward a fundamental theory of physics, a hypnotic spin through sculptural light fields that he created himself in his studio on 16mm film. Hy Hirsch’s Gyromorphosis arrived during the filmmaker’s extended interest in stereoscopic production, and exists now in this Pulfrich version, made possible by the film’s rotating choreography. A brief detour back into flat cinema brings us to Takashi Ito’s Wall — a spirited and aggressively 2D film that nevertheless evokes strong depth sensations from its constant back-and-forth pendulum pans, all painstakingly created frame-by-frame with stop motion (re)photography.

 

The programme climaxes with two films’ celebrations of the euphoric possibilities of colour. Brian Zahm’s Photosynthesis is one of the only recent films to be made specifically for the prismatic ChromaDepth format, and invokes 1960s perceptual art —as well as its maker’s 25 years of experience in exploring analogue and digital technologies— to probe the sensual enigmas of spatial colour perception. And Jodie Mack’s Let Your Light Shine is a literal fireworks display disguised as a three minute black & white animation, which the Diffraction 3D glasses allow to explode off the screen in every direction and hue of the rainbow.