Invitations for the Untutored Eye
Saturday 5th October
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
14:15 - 15:30 | 56min plus Q&A
International short films
A programme of works that remind us of the essence of experimental film as an adventure in perception. The acts of seeing, looking, watching are explored in their relationship to the eye of the camera. What does the medium of film allow us to see that we wouldn’t otherwise? Things you can’t un-see. If you listen carefully, can you hear the act of seeing? Touch the vision when it disappears with the torn-out eyeball, taste the watching with visceral disgust. These sensorially intense films question assumptions of what it’s like to see, exploring the potential of the audiovisual medium to appeal to the full human sensorium. Can a film make your throat hurt or the top of your head tingle?
Films by:
Cassandra Lesage Fongué | Ryan Marino | Will VanKoughnett | Ellery Bryan | Natalie Peracchio | Sofia Tudela | Karel Doing
AUTO|BIOGRAPHIES
Cassandra Lesage Fongué | 13min
Auto|Biographies is an exploration of what it means to point a camera towards nature, and how the lens mimics the eye as a tool that perpetuates the biases implicit in human vision. Through a mixture of digital video and animated experimental analog photographic work, the mechanism of the camera, proxy of the eye, is dismantled. With minimal silent narration, the film invites the viewer onto an immersive journey—across green landscapes devoid of green, torn film and torn out eyes, and vegetal corpses — to rediscover the limits of their own vision and explore novel ways of presenting nature devoid of the human gaze.
Obscured in Soft Light
Ryan Marino | 8min
Filmed over several months during the evening hours while all was quiet, the film explores the nocturnal resonances and traces of domesticity left dormant amid the stillness of night.
In Paintings, All Emotions
Will VanKoughnett | 9min
In paintings, all emotions, obscure or obvious as it might be, each day seems like a natural fact. If the sun gives consent, places exchange their distances in phrases of forgetfulness, through wormholes of iteration. The skies are dark, smooth without many people. Photographs erase other photographs, the clouds depart the truth, I sharpen my pencil; a lot of things happen. A reenactment of the birth of color photography, within the birth of landscape as a site of recreation: a conversation between technologies at the dawn of imagery.
My Body Is a Lens I Can Look Through
With My Mind
Ellery Bryan | 4min
My Body Is a Lens I Can Look Through With My Mind is an experimental essay film that starts at the 2024 solar eclipse and uses performances, planetary movements and geological records as jumping-off points to explore memory, meaning-making and subjectivity. Created in response to the death of my former partner, it creates a symbolic taxonomy of diaristic objects and interactions with domestic and natural spaces focused on overlapping histories. It inspects the impulse to derive stable narrative and mythology from lived experience, moving back and forth between matter and remembrance.
The Story of The Cricket Queen
Natalie Peracchio | 4min
The “Story of The Cricket Queen” recreates digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics with analog film techniques.
Fill Your Shelf
Sofia Tudela | 2min
The distance between one hand and the other is now palpable. The supermarket line offers you frozen risotto at the same time as a set of tuppers for vacuum packaging. It is no longer your hands that once faced the work of transforming food. The day to day moves fast and hasty, like the rhythm of what we see in this film.
Phytophonics
Karel Doing | 4min
Plant matter is used to create finely detailed indexical traces on photochemical film. The traces are not only visible but also audible. By feeding botanical textures, patterns and rhythms into the optical sound system noise, cracks, pops and hiss is generated. Seeing is hearing. Such a cross modality disobeys the usual lipsync illusion and replaces this so called realism with a radically different concreteness. Phytophonics is serious play with living material in a world that is increasingly based on simulated sham. Eco-punk against the abyss created by late-capitalism.
