Cinema Can Do Cinema Hopping – A Day’s Pleasure

Was would it be like if one could tear down the walls of a multiplex and wander back and forth between the films? Two antagonistic, yet complementary programs running in parallel with the audience moving between the auditoria with just one ticket. Secretly leaving the auditorium thus becomes part of a silent performance. The program by is inspired by two Charlie Chaplin films from the Arsenal archive.

Program Cinema 1:
In the titular film by Charlie Chaplin, everything begins as a nice outing then quickly becomes a catastrophe. In this program, I’m showing films that generate a sense of vertigo – through confusing camera pans or the presence of bodies when feelings follow the movements of light. In this spiral, latent and repressed feelings are revealed: the processing of trauma and the search for a new language. They use the most simple of elements – color, form, sound and movement – and transform the audience space into a three-dimensional space that can be experienced in physical terms. The hermetic reality of cinema exerts pressure on the audience space: it entices, envelops and carries us away. One day can quickly turn into a long night in which we process what we’ve experienced.

Program Cinema 2

A Day’s Pleasure
When Charlie decides to go on an outing with his family, things quickly go awry. First they get stuck in a traffic jam, before Charlie is forced to spend the day on a pleasure boot. Life begins to sway and vertigo sets in.

I Change, I Am the Same 
A short, hilarious film about a woman and man who continually find themselves in various states of undress and keep putting on the other’s clothes.

Matata  
During a photo shoot that reconstructs the era of King Leopold’s rule in Congo, a young model experiences a transformative journey through dream images and meets characters who help her understand her identity and the history of the country. Rhythm, color and movement steer the film away from stereotypical images of Africa and towards a new future.

Grandmamauntsistercat    
Compiled from archival material from the educational film studio in Łódź, the film tells the story of a family through the perspective of a child grappling with ideological systems and binary gender roles. Originally created for educational and propaganda purposes in Communist Poland, these films are transformed into an autofictional place of memory, while sexist visual material is reconfigured into a tool of freedom and resistance. 

Gestalt
Four-dimensional quaternions, a group of fractals, are made visible through projections into the three-dimensional space, although the underlying mathematics form the focus here instead of 3D modelling software. The visualization is based on the formula xn+1=xnp−cxn+1​=xnp​−c, whose variables were manipulated over a period of over two years and the images rendered accordingly. 

Untitled Sequence of Gaps
Untitled Sequence of Gaps consists of a montage of footage of different materialities created via various techniques and uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-induced loss of memory through reflections about light beyond the visible spectrum – about what is felt but never seen.

Fugue
A schematic figure carries out movements before a background grid which leave traces of light on the film emulsion while illegible texts are projected onto its uneven body. The film draws on contrapuntal composition techniques to examine the relationship between image, sound and movement by making use of the movement studies of the early 20^th century.

Errant Gestures
Movements, including unintentional ones, become gestures of communication. Feet move through the city, hands open doors. Everything narrates an expression. This experimental found footage film points out how gestural forms of expression are rooted in and become legible through culture.

Hände 
A fascinating work of avantgarde cinema in which physical expressiveness and abstract forms are staged as a dance of hands. Human movements are isolated and mechanized – in an era of alienating industrialization.

Back and Forth
The film shows a simple classroom captured with a mechanical moving camera. People occasionally appear, while the camera movement accelerates until everything blurs and only energy, light and movement remain. A radical “blend of form and content” (Jonas Mekas).

Die Sprache der Dinge
Tokyo’s high-tech amusement parks and artificial world, precisely calibrated acceleration and carousel machines: how does the language of people and the language of things – here in relation to the industrial development of high-tech amusement parks – behave with respect to the calculability of unbridled affects?

Endarchiv
Endarchivstages performative erasure processes in radically changed environments in 1989 and 2019.

Zerzura
How we perceive “nature”? It is a “thing” that we humans are outside of? Or are we all part of a network in which neither center nor periphery exists? Can a combination of sounds and images invite us to see nature as alike, capable of feelings and able to take action?

Curupira, Bicho do Mato
This film is a portrait of the Brazilian myth of the curupira, the protective spirit of the forest, which is created via a special arrangement of captivating jungle noises. The viewer becomes a still observer as well as part of the immersive experience of nature in the cinema.

Somniloquies        
Crossing the boundary between the inner landscape of dream and the human body – the dream diatribes of songwriter Dion McGregor are connected to flowing visual forms and sounds in immersive fashion. The fine line separating gentle observation and the invisible representation of physical transformation is challenged.

Stadt in Flammen
An explosive film in which the film emulsion creeps over the image like viscous lava and schematic parts of a soap opera tear open and disintegrate. Similar to ancient paintings, the scenes jump and become detached from the surface, creating a bubbling sensation.