At least ever since the talking picture has been established, cinema has become an audio-visual format. Its means are in images and sounds, an art that focuses seeing and hearing equally. The program compiles seven works in which different approaches to the work on the sound stem as testimony or document, as intervention and as different means of relating image and sound, as reciprocal illumination, or as challenge. Together, they resonate the sound of the world and the truth that is in listening. (Sebastian Markt)
Silent, in the subtitles to a black screen, essayistic thoughts unravel. They start with childhood memories, the recognition that what the narrator thought to be the homely hum of silence back then, actually was the far-away noise of a motorway. The film continues the reflections on the sound of the world and our classifications in a coordinate system of nature and technology, in sound image observations of rural and urban places. It can be read of birds imitating phone rings, and bird-voice-boxes simulating nature.
In interaction with the reflections of filmmaker and sound designer Katharina Pichler, which continue in the subtitles, we are immersed in soundscapes of modernity, and what we think of as silence or noise appears in new perspectives.… >>>
A language doesn't necessarily need to be written and vocal, here it consists of gestures and movements: the members of the performance collective Kitchen Light's slam their hands and arms: six deaf people tell in sign language of marginalization, express their anger and hope at a world that seems to be made for those able to ear. The film montages its images in the flowing rhythm of their movements, rhymes by move not by sound and creates a world to the narrations of its protagonists, in which the dominant order of opportunity and expectation of conformity is cancelled.… >>>
A prairie in the American West crossed by railways, a lonely tipi and the rough vastness, thought collection at the historic location. In the city: a memorial dedicated to the pioneer's spirit, the monumental stone architecture of a government building, a demonstration of young Indigenous people, signs bearing names of Indigenous groups. In 1864, U.S. cavalry troops perpetrated a massacre in which at least 200 members of the Cheyenne were killed. Elleni Sclavenitis‘ film montages images testifying to a contested history: an unmarked location and lived praxis in explicit memorials and the implicit evocation of history by urban architects. Against that on the vocal level individual voices and oral tradition from a kin of one of the massacre's victims.… >>>
The Pantanal, a South American wetland, is frequently the scene of forest fires, also as a result of agrarian capitalist activities in recent years. You could say that ESPECTRO RESTAURACIÓN "shows" one of those fires. It doesn't do that with ostensibly immediate images of burning trees. There is a spectrogram: the visible representation of the frequency range of a sound, the sound of the burning forest. In the frequency range a font is inscribed, a sentence from the Ecuadorian constitution granting fundamental rights to nature. Wherever the letters cover the sounds of the burning forest, bird chirps and other animal sounds home to an intact forest become hearable. The transmission and re-transmission between seeing and hearing, between sound and image reflects our relation with nature.… >>>
The sound of cows chewing leaves always helped him sleep well, said the filmmaker’s grandfather. Far away from his home on Bhutan, the film student Suraj Bhattarai searches for silence. It's hard to find in Brussel's urban environment, instead he hears people's stories. The cameras catch whatever is offered to the gaze while he stands at plazas and benches with his casual acquaintances made possible by the city, voices carry the narrations of elsewhere into the frame and sometimes the search for silence leads to music.… >>>
While her mother is undergoing surgery, the director documents the act of waiting. When the time stretches as it does in a hospital, every passer-by, every gesture takes on a meaning. Desperately and whimsically she examines whether she could control reality through the act of filming, but soon reality shatters her efforts and leaves the terrible waiting time in her hands, as it is – infinite.… >>>
Iyunade Judah, a Nigerian-born, Canadian-based artist and photographer calls his ORI MI AGBE “an experimental film about hallucinations, prayers of fate, and their connection to Blackness.” We see: fragmentary images of Black people, in ordinary street clothes, in colorful, imaginative costumes. Images not easily accessible for the white, European gaze. We hear: a rhythmic, repetitive chant in Yoruba, a language few here understand. These reveal at the same time a gap of understanding that points to the violence of colonialism.… >>>
