Program Notes.
This program celebrating the launch of MFJ No. 80 “Strata” consists of works discussed in the issue. Representing a cross-section of moving image works both old and new, it compounds layers of history and culture, personal and political, revealing new insights through their juxtaposition.
Works screened from digital files.
Programmed by Grahame Weinbren and Vince Warne.
All film descriptions are excerpted from MFJ No. 80 “Strata” & MFJ 81.
Diane Severin Nguyen TYRANT STAR (2019, 15’50”)
Concerns with the effects of globalization are reflexively formalized as Nguyen cross-culturally depicts present day Ho Chi Minh City in Tyrant Star. […] Combined with a playful mixing of fonts and color that evokes the visual language of an invitational karaoke video, at-times abstruse texts are absolved by transitions into equally motley, musical segments. […]The melancholy tone established in the first sequence is recontextualized by the doe-eyed performance of Sound of Silence given that, as Nguyen repeatedly mentions in interviews, the song was embraced as a peace anthem during the Vietnam War. Adopting pop-culture’s co-optive techniques for re-inscribing historical and political tensions, the film communicates the sentiment of global displacement and stasis, all the while questioning whether its original social significance holds true. –The Light Decay of History Yuka Murakami
Julie Perini 1000 WATERS: HOT SPRINGS (2024, 4’20”), WATERS: RIVER MOSS HERON (2024, 3’13”)
Perini’s 1000 Waters series is composed of four separate films that intermingle audio-visual ecocriticism with observational memoir. […] Each begins with the camera centered over a blank canvas. The white noise of water, deprived of its physical bodies and corresponding visuals, aurally defines our entry into each film. Sporadically, human voices are overheard. With a controlled, assertive hand, Perini gradually introduces paint via viscous, dripping acrylic, pendulum swaths of watercolor, or dabber splats, until each canvas becomes wholly drenched, revealing an optical illusion just beneath its surface. –1000 Waters: Julie Perini’s Personal Hydrosphere Elizabeth Lowe
Christoph Janetzko DER WALD (THE FOREST) (2024, 13’)
The subject of Christoph Janetzko’s latest film is a specific place, which the filmmaker discovers for himself and at the same time opens a new visual experience.The location is the Harz Nature Park, a forest in the German low mountain range. It is undergoing a slow process of dying. The landscape is employed not as a starting point or background for projection of the filmmaker’s imagination; rather, a viewer’s perception is subjected to a visual-artistic composition through a temporal process. Janetzko filmed in the Harz mountains between 2018 and 2022. Time is shown here both in the changing of the seasons and as the trace of destructive environmental development. After the title fade-in —an almost Wagnerian landscape in cloudy mist— Janetzko reinforces the impression of a dark danger, an incipient nightmare, a looming catastrophe. The film represents a turn towards a non-filmic reality: we are invited to reflect on the issue of climate change and its consequences, just as other experimental filmmakers address sexual diversity, racism or feminism. Janetzko’s experimental film thus points beyond the immediate sensory film experience to a meditation on a global social challenge.—WALD, Ulrich Versum, MFJ 81 (forthcoming Spring 2025)
Disclaimer: This page is for your personal use only. It is not to be duplicated, shared, published or republished in whole or in part, in any manner or form, without the explicit permission of the publisher, author, and copyright holder(s) of the images.