Bruce Baillie Study Reel

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.

Chance incidents of life and in the darkroom collide, as found footage film strips take new shape under a flashlight. Poetic gestures in the source material and the manipulative body movements of the filmmaker form a new take on depicted relationships, a rite of passage and the artefacts of the process itself. As always gestures become actions, and these determine how we live our lives.

Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.

Exactly is some re-arranged found footage with its original sound track re-united. By omitting just the name of the protagonist I have turned this recycled strip of film (cut for recycling purposes from a 35mm screening print into a 16mm leader by an unanimous lab years ago- thus the undulation of images) in to three meditations on the international market economy.

Sami van Ingen continues to explore the Flaherty film family with Cast of Shadows, which questions how much memories, images and end credits can lie.

A documentation of an installation in Oulu 1991: An 8000Kg ice cube. A process where a passerby is faced with something familiar in a way that some element of normality is transformed to abnormal.

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.