EMAF AWARD

Emily Wardill, Night for Day

The EMAF prize is awarded to a poignant work that explores the power of cinema as a tool to time travel, and to create imaginary kinship across generations. Emily Wardill’s Night for Day is a haunting film that enfolds a myriad of narrative strands to unpack the dialectics of utopian thinking, and the concrete realities during and in the aftermath of a revolution. Almost as a counterpoint to the precision afforded by current image technology, Wardill expertly employs light and shadow as a filmic device that points to the opaque and fractal nature of historic narratives as well as present realities. She integrates excerpts from a fictional diary, glitchy footage of films and recorded theatre performances dealing with (mostly female) automatons to create sometimes harsh breaks within the narrative fabric and to work against the illusionary pull her own images possess. Through the film’s constructed mother-son relationship, Wardill questions the notion of commonality as visions of a past political utopia and the present technological utopia come into dialogue in these discordant times.

Special mention

Simon Liu, Happy Valley

Several of the films in this year’s program contend with stories of political struggle, and the jury would like to give special mention to Simon Liu’s Happy Valley for its heartfelt portrayal of the beauty of everyday life in his home city, after the 2019 protests. What happens to a city after such an intense collective experience? What remains? and mostly how does one create new experiences when any sense of ‘normal’ is impossible to get back to? A collage of surreal and material observations of the city, set against a soundscape of 80s Hong Kong pop songs and soap operas, it evokes a deep sense of longing for a common experience, and is a celebration of a survival instinct that is fundamentally human and universal.

Dialog Award

Ana Vaz, Vera Amaral, Mário Neto, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The winner of the Dialogue award is a work which circles around the camaraderie between a teacher and her students. Centered on Wallace Stevens poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the collaborative film traces their journey in locating themselves in the world. Comprised of a series of inquiries, the film is a remarkable exercise in unschooling founded upon intergenerational rapport and curiosity, where they jointly explore ways of seeing beyond sight. By doing so, filmmaking becomes a performative and sensory practice that involves the entire body. The film’s evocative soundscape and use of multi-vocality adds to the layered texture of the film that is underpinned by the present discourses of care and generosity, as we witness these young filmmakers investigate the relations between the visible and invisible, the sensible and insensible facts that will constitute how they view the world.

Special mention

Suneil Sanzgiri, Letter From Your Far-Off Country

The jury would like to give special a special mention within the section of the Dialogue award to a work that evokes the power of communication through letters that connects the protagonists of emancipatory struggles in India through almost half a century. In Letter From Your Far-Off Country Suneil Sanzgiri explores how historic events can be turned into performative gestures which then inform present and future tactics in fighting oppression and censorship. He follows the images and sounds of revolutionary moments by bringing different sources such as analogue video, 16mm footage and digital renderings together thereby not only destabilizing a linear historic narration but also blurring the boundaries of experimentation in cinema.

Media Art Award of the German Filmcritics (VDFK)

Marian Mayland, Michael Ironside and I

Abandoned spaces of adolescence in films and series from the previous century. The light is still on, technical devices switched on, control lamps flashing, PC keyboards are waiting for input. The protagonists are missing. A narrator has investigated what has become of them since they left these film spaces. From the present off-screen, he speaks of sexual assaults, career endings and a suicide. His own youthful enthusiasm, on the other hand, has encapsulated itself in the inanimate, technoid facilities. A new space is discovered, a door opens – into a space that is also just a film space. Coming of Age as Coming of Film misfires.

The VdFk jury commends a complex essayistic examination of film and television history. In the flowing montage of found genre images, traces of toxic masculinity become visible that do not permit nostalgic transfiguration. Nonetheless, the author’s cinephile sensitivity remains the fuel of (self-)reflection.

The EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics is given to Michael Ironside and I by Marian Mayland.

From over 2600 submissions 31 films were selected for the International Competition. They are as diverse in content as they are formally independent, and yet reveal some common issues and thematic focuses. Thus, a number of films deal with places and landscapes marked by the traces of historical events or current conflicts and undertake a critical or personal stock-taking. At the same time, they express the desire for alternatives: the question of other world models and new forms of living together, which is answered with the creation of utopian universes or recourse to traditional cosmologies and indigenous knowledge.

Sharing and passing on experience, learning and understanding across cultural borders and geographical distances is also a key focus. This involves individual acts of speaking, silence or concealment, the political dimension of witnessing and remembering, or the empowering potential of translations. Other works revolve around the close connection between body, place and identity. They play with the medial production and subversion of gender concepts, find idiosyncratic formal strategies to deal with experiences of discrimination and violence, or tell of the contradictory longing for bonding and dissolution of boundaries.

The four feature-length films in the programme find a language that is as critical as it is humorous to illuminate the often-silenced connections between social class and artistic career, or use documentary, fictional and performative forms of cinematic narration to tell the story of a black commune in the USA. The portrait of an early women’s rights activist and socialist finds an unconventional form to honour the linguistic power of this historical figure, while a feminist film classic of the 1990s both cleverly and subversively focuses on a subject that film history has virtually ignored: menopause.

Curated by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy

“The gods have become our diseases.” C. G. Jung

In his essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses”, Hollis Frampton posits the idea of the “Last Machine”. He describes this machine as made up of “the sum of all film, all projectors and all cameras” and calls it “the largest and most ambitious single artifact yet conceived and made by man (with the exception of the human species itself.)” ¹

His description of this machine continues by following a consistent, if gruesome logic: “It is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all) and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.“ ²

In the service of this machine – according to Frampton – we are “doomed to the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe and fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe”, of which its ultimate manifestation is “an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film.” ³

If devouring the universe and enslaving us into its eternal reconstruction is the film machine’s logical end point, we have to ask ourselves: Why did we allow it to exist in the first place? And perhaps more importantly: Why do we continue to be its willing assistants?

Now, it can be seen as the ultimate act of human self-regard and hubris to anthropomorphize non-human creatures and inanimate objects. But perhaps we don’t anthropomorphize enough. Perhaps, in order to understand how we got to this point and to grasp where we might be headed, we have to accept that the film machine is not just humanlike – possessor of human traits, emotions and motivations – but too human, absurdly human, oozing humanness.

Were we to add to Frampton’s diagnosis, we would suggest the following profile for the current incarnation of the film machine:

“Superficial charm and good intelligence; absence of delusions or other signs of irrational thinking; absence of “nervousness” or psychoneurotic manifestations; unreliability; untruthfulness and insincerity; lack of remorse or shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behavior, poor judgement and failure to learn from experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; general poverty of major affective reactions; specific loss of insight; unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations; fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without; suicide rarely carried out; sex life impersonal, trivial and poorly integrated; and failure to follow any life plan.” ⁴

At the same time, the film machine hides much of this behaviour behind a mask of charisma and leadership. It presents an attitude of comfort and nonchalance, which make it seem like following its whims is a viable alternative to the droning reality of everyday life.

Which is to say that the film machine displays the attributes of a psychopathic personality. Of course, the machine is not solely to blame for its character. Clearly, we created it in our image. It would not be going too far to call it our child. But its aberrant behaviour points to some deficiency in the relationship. Something in its upbringing has certainly taken a wrong turn.

It would be easy to fall into despair at our missteps as parents. The film machine’s antisocial and sociopathic behaviour can lead to deep feelings of personal failure and guilt. Nonetheless, it’s true that “the nuclear family is usually the easiest group for the adolescent or adult sociopath to manipulate.” ⁵
Motivated by our parental concerns, and specially our guilt and protectiveness, the film machine has taken advantage of a dynamic where, no matter its irresponsibility and the damage it causes, we continue to offer our help and support. And so, by persisting in our attempts to bail it out of trouble and fruitlessly undo its wrongs, we place ourselves on the path of unceasing suffering. As Frampton’s eternally cold archive/prison should make clear, continued reinforcement is very costly.

Simply ostracising the film machine though, is not a realistic option. There is little chance that we will simply turn the machine off and go on with our merry lives. Not just because banishing your offspring is a choice few are willing to make. The interdependence of our relationship is enrooted at a more elemental level. Allowing ourselves for a moment to jump metaphors and skip from the filial to the ecological, our dynamic can be further seen as one in which we are caught in a process of coevolution with the film machine. As it has been growing, mutating and evolving, the film machine has been forcing pressures upon us that have obliged us to change and evolve in response. We’ve naively laboured under the impression that we created and have been shaping the machine for our own pleasure when, in reality, it has equally been modifying us for its own needs. ⁶

So, we find ourselves at an impasse: we cannot break up with the machine (it would never let us, and we would never want to anyways) and it certainly cannot leave us (who would feed it its images). Which means that we carry on, stuck with each other; adding to the pile of so-called “content” as the mangled monstrosity that is the infinite film continues its slow lurch of blind expansion. ⁷

To even begin to find a way out of our predicament, we need a better picture of the film machine’s nature. This image is not only for our benefit (although that is also long overdue) but is in fact most useful for the film machine itself. For the machine’s appetite – its need to consume the whole of reality – imposes upon it a drive for completeness that the infinity of its hunger makes by design impossible to satisfy. Its knowledge, however unconscious, that it will never be full, is the source of its ever-present anxiety.

And so it struggles for coherence where none exists. It uses a multitude of dishonesties and delusions to hold itself together; a way to walk the narrow path on the cliff’s edge, ever fearful of falling into the abyss.

It’s quite unlikely that we will be able to make the film machine change its ways by force but there might be a way to trick the machine into surrendering its unbearable drive. Every film screening is an occasion for the film machine to re-enact its narcissism but perhaps these occasions can be used as an opportunity to hold a mirror up to the film machine so that it can face its self-centred ways.

In order to achieve this, we have chosen to cut out and examine small sections out of the incoherent aberration that is the infinite film. We hope that these samples will offer the machine a true reflection of its distorted self; an image of what the machine has done to itself – the endless mutilations – in order to exist at all. Our hope is that this encounter will force the film machine to confront the absurd reality of its outward presentation and thus, come to terms with the futility of its desire.

To see and to know this image might just be a way for the machine to realise that, no matter its effort, what it has amassed, in the end, is nothing. It has nothing and therefore is nothing. To see and to know will reveal that it can never see and know (for there is nothing to see and know) and as it floats in the void that is its self it can finally sleep and for the first time, dream.

Curated by Nour Ouayda

“The first image is always a surprise”, says a voice-over in Akram Zaatari’s video Countdown. This video is part of a series called Image + Sound that edits TV news footage alongside staged events. It aired on the Lebanese Future TV in the mid-90s as part of the morning show Aalam al Sabah. How did such an experiment in form end up on Saturday morning TV in 1995? “You need to shock the viewers,” says Fouad Naïm, director of TéléLiban between 1993 and 1996, when asked why he would program a show as experimental as Mohamed Soueid’s Being Camelia on public television. The first image is always a surprise but, past that initial encounter, the second, the third, and all the images that come after are less of a shock as they make way to showing the viewers that “there exists an alphabet other than the one they are used to”, Naïm explains.   The 1990s in Lebanon were marked by efforts of reconstruction of the capital and the country following a general amnesty law that ended the civil war without any reparations. It was within this context that a restructuring of the television sector took place with the government reducing the fifty existing channels (each political party and militia had its own broadcasting channel) to around ten. Channels such as TéléLiban, a public television network owned by the Lebanese government, and the newly founded private Future TV recruited young talents and gave them access to professional equipment and airtime. This led to the unusual (and never-since repeated) freedom to produce various video experiments on TV, marking the beginning of the careers of filmmakers such as Mohamed Soueid and Akram Zaatari.   Today, the use of social media and online platforms by institutions and initiatives as space to commission works creates a similar structure of production, allowing for and stimulating experimental film gestures that cannot find a place in the more normative residency-grant-festival-circuit. This recourse to social media, and especially a platform such as Instagram, has gained more importance since the beginning of the pandemic. Structures such as the Beirut Art Center have been using these platforms to host their online micro-commissions while Rehla, an underground experimental magazine, uses it to publish found footage mashups that relate to a monthly theme explored in each issue. We also see filmmakers and video artists using these platforms as an extension to their work and research such as Chantal Partamian’s Katsakh account in which she explores various analogue film processes through short capsules that allow us to peek into her experimental film practice.   Zaatari describes his videos from the time he worked at Future TV as “moments stolen from television and not produced by television.” The freedom to experiment is not only one that is granted but one that is taken and reclaimed in order to hijack and subvert a certain production apparatus. “Let’s raid the television”, Fouad Naïm and Mohamed Soueid used to say. Echoing two distinct moments in time (Lebanon of the mid-1990s and today), the works in this program unfold various unexpected gestures in film and video experimentation that act as small beacons of resistance, showing that different modes of production are always still possible.   So: Show us the money, give us access to the infrastructures, and we will resist.

Curated by Jaakko Pallasvuo and Steve Reinke

It is too late, epoch-wise, to have thought of this now, but it seems to me we’ve been using the wrong model for anxiety. Instead of looking into the void and finding the void looking back at you (Nietzsche) it should have been sticking your finger into the world and, when you bring it back in to yourself, smelling nothing (Kierkegaard). 

He pulled my finger and nothing escaped as a gas. It was nothing to point out, no specific thing, just a small cloud of the nothing that upheld the world. The finger was also nothing. 

Media art on the other hand was everything. Even if it mostly recorded sound and vision, not smell. 

When I got stung by a jellyfish, I felt like we were really communicating. The jellyfish did not have fingers, hands, arms, eyes, a heart or a brain, but its message was effective and hard to ignore.

The Anthropocene continues apace and the bodies pile up — not only the extinction of species (many of which were annoying anyway) but the eradication of entire genera (most of which must contain something of value). Families, orders, classes, phyla — even the kingdoms will crumble. This changes death. Here is work that heralds, discusses, celebrates the new death, this fresh death.