Program 6

Short film program consisting of:

THE PERFECT SQUARE
QUEBRANTE
FOR HERE AM I SITTING IN A TIN CAN FAR ABOVE THE WORLD
HERE WE ARE

Total running time approx. 69 min.

The Perfect Square

For twelve years, Gernot Wieland worked with an animal trainer who taught birds to fly in circles or squares. The film initially concentrates on the birds themselves. The image, reduced to the birds flying in and out of the frame, suggests how one might perceive one’s own flickering consciousness and perception. The volatile quality of trying to capture flying birds in frame intensifies the desire to confirm whether the birds indeed fly in a circle. Whereas the indexical image captured by the camera is a testament to the difficulty of training the birds to do something on command, the title of the work itself invokes the intellectual purity of geometric forms, considered superior by analytic philosophy to describe the laws of nature. All this implies that beings that disobey a command could be a definition of an “other.”
The film also refers to an experimental investigation conducted by Kandinsky in 1923. He had assumed that there are direct correspondences between primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and forms (triangle, square, circle). It is by these means that The Perfect Square explores the question of how aesthetic and social norms influence and control our society and our artistic creation, as well as the western view of the world.
Maxwell Stephens

QUEBRANTE

A spell breaking, QUEBRANTE traverses the caves, ruins, and phantasmagorias of the Trans-Amazonian BR230 Highway, portraying its stones and its ghosts. Set in the tiny town of Rurópolis (Pará) – the very first one ever built on the Highway, to serve as a base for the workers constructing the road – QUEBRANTE follows Ms. Erismar, known in the region as The Cave Woman. The retired elementary school teacher was the one who discovered the region’s caves. She would enter the dark unknown holes and explore their expanses with only a candle in her hands and a lighter tied to her pants.
A huge nationalist propaganda effort, part of the progress and development project of Brazil, the Trans-Amazonian Highway was implemented during the civic-military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, and it is today still a warm scar of the wrecked dream of the country’s history.
QUEBRANTE is a conversation between the moon and the stones, and freely inspired by Robert Smithson’s project The Truly Underground Cinema (1971) and Maya Deren’s film The Very Eye of Night (1958).

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world

The experimental double-screen film addresses the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies for which the future becomes an economic resource to be exploited. Through a collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the film explores the links between financial speculation, speculative science-fiction, and the prediction and governance of the future.
Examining the fantasies conveyed by crypto-currencies, an invisible narrator recounts her intimate dreams and fears. She accompanies us on a dreamlike, poetic, historical, and futuristic audiovisual journey, and evokes the figure of the American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, a crucial figure in the history of Bitcoin but also a cryogenic patient since 2014. In the narrator’s dreams, after a future Great Depression, Finney integrates a part of society that has gone into suspended animation or subsidized biostasis in order to accelerate economic recovery.
Exploring the sensation of temporary floating through the figure of “suspended animation,” the film also evokes a historical epoch marked by a high degree of unpredictability and uncertainty, due to the acceleration and disruption of new technologies, as well as to the multiple consequences of the Anthropocene. Is humanity floating in uncertainty, or are we rather in free fall?

Here We Are

A housekeeper receives a film made by her daughter. Combining found footage of Thailand during the Cold War with present-day images of Bangkok, the film triggers a re-telling of her own story of coming to the capital.A housekeeper receives a film made by her daughter. Combining found footage of Thailand during the Cold War with present-day images of Bangkok, the film reminds her of anecdotes she heard from the woman she works for and it triggers a re-telling of her own story of coming to the capital. Here We Are seeks to portray the present by reflecting on the past, how the legacy of colonization has survived and been normalized nowadays.