The Laboratory Aim Density* of Prisme #6 is a program of three screenings showcasing films shot recently on Super 8, 16 or 35mm.
Each year our open call receives more and more films, culminating in whooping 300 submissions in 2023 ! We have selected 18 from all over the world (Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Austria, Canada, USA, Argentinia, Australia, Bolivia, England, Czech Republic) and, as this is very important to us, the great majority will be projected on film !
This year’s L.A.D. explores visions of temporality beyond our too human approach, visions of time as embodied by fauna and flora, in a secular manner, overtaking our calendar and our fleeting appearances by their endurance and discretion. When an extinct specie seems to only belong to the past, it still shines in the pleats of our memory. Thus nature, battered by our overplanned everyday lives and our concrete habitats, blooms from all sides, in spite of everything, around and within us. Its rhythm is a profound respiration which knows no end. This eternal return, that science aims to dissect but is rendered powerless without poetry, is offered to us by these films who are rendered all-powerful with their poetry.
* « L.A.D » or Laboratory Aim Density is a Kodak printing control method : a standard control patch specifies densities midway between the minimum and maximum of those typically obtained for a normal camera exposure, utilizing traditionally the face of a woman.
PROGRAM :
- L.A.D. 2 – 2:30pm
Turbulence by Telemach Wiesinger
DE / Lichtbild Wiesinger / 2022 / 16mm / 15′
The film poem TURBULENCE stands in the field of tension between surreal
fantasy and multi-layered reality.
Telemach Wiesinger’s images of aeroplanes from the
perspective of the traveller encounter kinetic wing objects by the
composer Alexander Grebtschenko.
The electronically
controllable “Chimera’s” – elegant bird wings with megaphone – unfold
expressive “acting” presence.
The dialogue between the sound level and the visual level opens up space for emotions, thoughts
and interpretations.
Color Test Program by Stefanie Weberhofer
AUT / FilmKoop Wien / 2022 / 35mm / 4’30
The technical person responsible for the color program at ORF, Mr. Vostrowsky explains the change from black-and-white to color TV. The Interview was shot on black-and-white-film, a mistake that needed to be corrected.
Bus, Turning de Richard Tuohy & Diana Barrie
AUS / Nanolab & CraterLab / 2022 / 16mm / 7’10
Barcelona, immediately after the independence referendum. Shot on black and white film stock using a re-invented colour separation technique. Dedicated to the spirit of independence everywhere !
Traction by Jenny Baines
UK / 2023 / 16mm / 2’46
Traction features the artist in a tug-of-war with an off-screen adversary, who is only seen through their looming shadow. The rope’s tension ebb’s and flows throughout the unrehearsed contest, as the artists physical endurance is challenged.
Oxygen de Karel Doing
UK / Ox-Ex / 2023 / 16mm / 6’03
Blades of grass are racing across the screen.
Heliotropy by Alexandra Moralesova & Georgy Bagdasarov
CZ / Labodoble / 2023 / 16mm / 5′
Heliotropy is a veneration of the Sun impressed on film during the summer solstice observed from the plant-human perspective. The flora nourished by the sun passes from the image into a solution which embraces the film and with its juices develops its own image.
La noirceur souterraine des racines by Charles-André Coderre
CA / Double Negative / 2023 / 16mm / 10′
Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines [The subterranean blackness of roots] is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema. The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us. It’s a dive into the heart of matter.
- L.A.D. 3 – 4:30pm
With the tide, with the tide de Anna Kipervaser
USA / 2022 / 16mm / 2’49
I know, you’re a seasonal beast
Like the starfish that drift in with the tide
With the tide
So until your blood runs
To meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own
With my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
My very own
– Sea Song by Robert Wyatt
kaua’i ‘ō’ō by Samy Benammar
CA / 2023 / 16mm / 4’19
In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced the official extinction of the Oʻō of Kauai. Of this endemic bird of the eponymous Hawaiian island remains solely its song recorded by ornithologist David Boynton. Between the land and the tree tops, I hope to uncover the vanished birds’s trace.
Spoils de Luciana Decker Orozco
BOL, USA / 2023 / 16mm / 7′
“Here between us, I want you to know the truth. There is in my sad loneliness a desire to scream, run away, and ask what has happened to your life tuturururu”. A love song dedicated to ghosts that cannot talk for themselves. An accumulation of spring colors, food spoils, spoils of war, emptied creatures, and fossils.
Osmose de Laurence Favre
CE / 2022 / 16mm / 11′
A sensory exploration of the forest and the tensions that inhabit it, Osmosis interweaves images of pure chlorophyll and the dense blackness of burnt forests. The dynamics of these cycles of life and death imprinted pictorially on 16mm film are amplified by a soundscape articulating sensations of anxiety and appeasement, connecting human and non human in an organic mesh.After the poetic portrait of a glacier (Resistance, 2017), Osmosis pursues an immersion into natural environments that are given to see as metaphors of ourselves. Unless we are the metaphors.
Parallel Botany de Magdalena Bermudez
USA / 2023 / 16mm vers vidéo / 11’08
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.
Ashes by name is man de Ewelina Rosinska
DE / 2023 / 16mm vers DCP / 20′
“I read in the writings of one painter that, for him, the Polish landscape seems to constantly draw our gaze to the ground, making us look not over the horizon but under our feet, at the bones buried beneath each step.The film shifts between a portrait of my eighty year old grandparents and my view on the elements and imagery of the national-Catholic narrative in the Polish landscape.The title “Ashes by name is man” is borrowed from a church notice board in Nowa Grobla, in Roztocze. At the centre of my explorations is the rage of hills Roztocze, while Krakow and Lviv form the boundaries of the area in which I was shooting.”