QR Code/Film [#3]

First work from the ‘QR CODE / FILM’ series. Following in the footsteps of classic authors such as Gil J. Wolman, Peter Kubelka or Tony Conrad, who worked with alternating white frames (transparent) with black (opaque) in the 50’s and 60’s (last Century). — AP

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.

"[An] experiment that aims to highlight the number of shots of a specific scene [from Hitchcock's Psycho] by replacing the shot of the image with several of the credit titles from the same film [...] An early work, which would be the first official of Pinent's filmography, made when he was only 16 years old, [...] Two years away from Matthias Müller's 'found footage' reference work, 'Home Stories' (1990), a key piece in the genre." -Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

Film made with analog 35mm photo camera framed vertically. The sound that arises is caused by the image extending over the optical sound track. The content focuses on the descent made from a building in the Plaza de España in Madrid, honoring the great Spanish filmmaker Iván Zulueta. — AP

Theoretical experiment that uses the technique of picto-cinematography, win which “the search for the temporal objective duration of painting” stands out; this comes to us via its real measurements on a 35mm film. This technique allows us to get “a new vision of a pictorial work” within a temporal duration defined by cinematographic means. In this experiment, the same image of the painting remains in emulsion on the optical soundtrack, thus generating a sound. — AP

The starting point: the propositions from 1910’s and 1920’s about visual rhythm or visual music. We try to avoid the supposed failure explained by Jean Mitry and to propose a new way with the hope that the score of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata can be literally applied to the verticality of celluloid. Since it is perhaps impossible that cinema can grasp what ephemeral instant music is, let us picture the madness and ecstasy of a row of musical notes trapped onto any format. We could add or classify this work within “lettrist cinema,” but in that case could we not be referring to “integrist cinema”? An integral score, leaving no room for clumsy performances. — Ana Isabel Aréjula, Mardrid, 2002

It has always been understood that the secret of movement lies in the decomposition of time. Aristotle was convinced that the horse in his gallop never rises completely from the ground. Only in the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge, using a series of photographic devices operated by cables, observed the famous horse Phryne L. In order to understand its mystery, through the dissection of time: in an instant it is suspended in the air. — AP

FILM QUARTET / POLYFRAME is conceived as a small cinematographic bomb attempting to question the established definition of frame as the minimum unit of (cinematographic) time by dynamiting it in four fragments. A step further in the so-called sub-genre practice of found footage film – recycled material – is also put forward for consideration in this project. The appropriationism applied in this work makes use of material found in Hollywood cinema (Singin’in the rain, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952); Pink Panther; Buster Keaton; etc., the first avant-garde period (Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí, 1929) and American experimental film (Wavelength, Michael Snow, 1966-1967). Such method makes possible, therefore, to maintain image ecology while it provides an analysis of the history of cinema. — AP

Film-essay tribute to Paul Sharits’ artworks, focused on displaying and deconstructing cinema as an object, proposes a study of time and at the same time rends tribute to the master Sharits and his body of artwork. — AP

In this film the author looks back on his own artistic career, resuming his film (‘EXPERIMENTAL SKETCHES. 4,200 frames not moving away from home’), a semiabstract work, filmed on Super-8 format, and literally put onto 35mm format. […] Collage as radical realism in order for home-made Super-8 to force its way into 35mm market world. It is the film that travels, that sees the world, and sketches will no longer be sketches to everyone’s eyes because we will move from the daily the handmade to the industrial, from the diary to biography, from biography to hagiography, from hagiography to, inevitably, poetry. — Ana Isabel Aréjula, Madrid, 2002

This project fits within my cameraless conceptual interests as a filmmaker. Specifically, this cinematographic proposal consists of projecting 35mm film on both sides and exploring the specificity of its transparency and the double soundtrack. As in my previous films, I am exploring different ways of creating new forms using the materiality of celluloid and its potential.