The route passes through cities. In Eginhartz Kantar’s Prelude, fireworks explode in abandoned offices, warehouses, and basements near Leipzig in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Leuna, Falkenberg, and Zittau. Former East Germany is also the setting for Lis Rhodes’ Dresden Dynamo, a mysterious glowing electric generator entirely realised on Letratone sticker sheets, down to the raw soundtrack.
Inger Lise Hansen captured fog-covered landscapes on various film formats in Oslo, Beijing, the Azores, and Newfoundland for her film Fog. The director describes its soundtrack as “sound fog,” made from foghorns, hearing test signals, and field recordings. Pasi “Sleeping” Myllymäki, who published the underground film fanzine “Maanalainen kaitaelokuva” (1979-82), concealed his face with a grey hood and captured the backwards way of life in Finland’s 76th largest city on Super 8 film, inspired by the visions of nuclear destruction in the blockbuster The China Syndrome
(1979, Sodankylä 2017).
In Viktoria Schmid’s piece RGB NYC, the “cinematic time” is made concretely visible: Manhattan street corners are seen through three separate colour filters, shot in sequences then stacked atop each other as mirages. One of the tactics favoured by the Situationist International (SI) was wandering (dérive) in a familiar city using a foreign map. Paris is different when navigated according to a map of Moscow. In Des Rives, Yann Beauvais slices his wanderings in New York to resemble the mechanical movement of car windshield wipers.
Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki’s recent expanded cinema work Warm Data drifts through the back streets of Toronto. Scales are warped as industrial landscapes meet the choreography of paper folds created with an overhead projector, guided by the soulful music of Kuupuu.
The psychogeographical journey ends in a mythical underwater city, in the ruins of the sunken Atlantis. The ecstatic music in Gerard Holthuis’s Marsa Abu Gawala is provided by Egyptian actor Abdel Basset Hamouda, who began his career as a mood-boosting wedding singer.
Mika Taanila
Screening duration: 74 min
Curated by: Mika Taanila
With thanks to: Miguel Armas, Mariya Nikiforova, Tytti Rantanen, Gerard Weber
MOVIES
Prelude (Austria, Germany, 2022)
The Forssa Syndrome (Finland, 1982)
Dresden Dynamo (United Kingdom, 1971)
Fog (Norway, 2018)
NYC RGB (Austria, 2023)
Des rives (France, 1998)
Warm Data (Finland, Canada, 2024)
Marsa Abu Galawa (Careless Reef Part 4) (Netherlands, 2004)