Looking Back Before You Leap(2023)

IMÁGENES CAPITALES(es)

Two friends dreaming

Phantasia(xx)

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Final Score(th)

In this documentary, four boys spend their senior year of high school studying for college-entrance exams that only one in five students will pass.

A Personal Fidget(en)

Based upon a habitual fidget of the filmmaker involving the tags in his clothing, Reilly Mitchell explores the feelings of his past by removing something that has always stayed so close to him and turning it into something new.

Lament to Waters(pt)

May our smiles not be forced for your enjoyment and may our pains no longer be hidden. May my mother Yemanja help me. A short film about the pain we carry alone and that we only confess to the sea, which is life, but for us, black people from the diaspora, it's also a memory of a past of sadness and death.

Tomatoes(en)

Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.

Encyclopedia of a Drifter(ja)

Nagaremono zukan is a documentary video, release from V&R Planning (AV). "Flower Picture Book" is the second work in the bicycle trilogy after Yumika. A very private sexual movie with Tomoko Matsunashi, right after Hirano broke up with Yumika. The violence of the camera is clearly increasing. If Yumika was the light, Nagaremono zukan is the shadow. There are two version of Nagaremono zukan, the censored one and the original hardcore one, with additional scenes, better quality and longer runtime.

My Throat, My Air(de)

Set in Munich's petty-bourgeois Westend, film documents life at home with former Fassbinder actor, Warhol collaborator, and horror movie director Ulli Lommel. Rather than a straight documentary portrait of this bohemian household, the camera prefers to follow the narrative impulses of the family members. Lost in serious play, the kids improvise hypnotic death scenes while their mother claims to come from a planet where everything is "ethereal and incorporeal." As parent-child relations are unscripted and re-scripted on the fly, the dilated time of a collective daydream is punctuated by the ordinary sounds of an electric toothbrush, vacuum cleaner, and piano.

Somewhere Real(en)

Roads fall into the sea and a travelogue breaks against the landscape.

back and forth(xx)

Stuck in the traffic of life.

............ (ellipsis, ellipsis, ellipsis...)(xx)

Noise, static, channel change...

breathe exhale inhale(xx)

Time lapse of clouds and a mimosa tree to the silhouette at dusk.

Feet in Water, Head on Fire(en)

Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.

Empire of My Melodious Mind(en)

Be. Belonging. Words on vintage flash cards shuffle past in a stream-of-consciousness that shows the mind working, assigning labels and names to things through love and language. In the space of a moment, perception embarks on an epic journey of tongues, through Cantonese and English sounds and Ektachrome memories that form the characters and identity of this American-born Asian filmmaker.

An Uncountable Number of Threads(en)

Travel films have an established format with their own conventions, history and baggage. It is a medium that has all too often sought to control, define and dictate perceptions of ”other” places. Comprised of footage shot while travelling on group excursions across Russia in 2019, An Uncountable Number of Threads is an attempt to draw out the ethical restrictions of a travelogue, while questioning how (and why) to make one. At times there is an awkward tourist-gaze, aware of its outsider position. But as a self-reflexive work that considers its own creation, it ultimately unravels, as the artist rationalises themselves out of a particular way of working, inviting the viewer into their uncertainty.

Wall Ball(en)

A wall and a ball.

Ma bande magnétique arrière(fr)

Untitled (Pink Dot)(ja)

In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.

Prometheus(en)

“I've never seen light that looks or feels so dark; forward moving possibility united with so much cosmic terror.”—Marilyn Brakhage

One Minute Reharsal(pt)

Actors Isabella Lafin and Rafael Grendene reharsing a scene from the movie Marriage Story (2019).