https://opencitytexts.com Open City Texts Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:43:08 +0000 https://opencitytexts.com en https://opencitytexts.com/Info Fri, 04 Aug 2023 14:03:16 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Info Open City Documentary Festival creates an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of non-fiction cinema. Open City Texts is a publishing offshoot of Open City Documentary Festival. It was created in 2023 as a platform to collect the texts that are commissioned to accompany the screenings of new films in the festival programme. The 16th edition of the festival takes place in London venues between 14-19 April 2026. We conceive of the festival almost as an alternative “film school”, a space where we come together to watch, share, and discuss non-fiction cinema in all its forms. As part of that purpose, Open City Texts hopes to provide a space for new writing on non-fiction film.EditorHuda Awan Assistant EditorSiavash MinoukadehEmail |&nbsp;Instagram |&nbsp;Bluesky https://opencitytexts.com/Writing-a-River Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:33:44 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Writing-a-River Writing a RiverOn George Clark’s Sunless Haven Xiaolu Guo <img width="1949" height="1401" width_o="1949" height_o="1401" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/054c16c159f3e0527987430c37fa7dd88e707ea961032dd55607ebd40e720ca7/SunlessHaven-0016.png" data-mid="209145223" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/054c16c159f3e0527987430c37fa7dd88e707ea961032dd55607ebd40e720ca7/SunlessHaven-0016.png" /> Sunless Haven Director GEORGE CLARK Year 2024 Country UK How would you sum up a film in a tagline? Here’s a go: death in a foreign river or, the Chinese at the door … These phrases perhaps speak to some of the content of this visually exquisite and historically informative film. But even richer descriptions would fall short in the presence of this film’s textured archives and layered soundscapes. Sunless Haven, by artist George Clark, explores a hidden aspect of London’s past: its entanglement with the Chinese immigrants of Limehouse and the subcontinental populations of east and south London. Another filmmaker might have made an interview-based documentary about the British colonial legacy. Clark’s visual essay employs neither interviews nor any of the traditional investigative procedures. Words in his film are reserved for poetic expression. His use of archival images provides a feast of meaning. Life flows on along the river, water carries memory forward. This is a short, dense film, rich in allusions and detail. Clark has dug out archives depicting the Chinese and Indians’ life in the docklands in the 1910s and 20s, including police records concerning the seamen's lodging houses in east London. The records reveal the changing demographics of lodgers and increasing persecutions of Chinese labourers at the time. A proprietor of one of these lodging houses, Ah Ling, was prosecuted on several counts but was unable to pay his fines; the reason given was that he had been a victim of the Titanic disaster. We know that there were eight Chinese seamen on the Titanic, and that six of them survived. But we hardly knew that from a shabby London boarding house, one of them was sent to jail, his legendary past notwithstanding. All invisible, all untold, the imperial narrative pays no attention to these footnotes. Sunless Haven lays them out for us. In the film, an old London newspaper reports on the life of ‘Ayahs and Amahs’. What are these strange words? The meaning of Ayah or Amah seems to be as blurry as the 16mm grainy stock Clark used to capture a faded past. In Chinese, Ayah and Amah are the words for ‘aunt’ or ‘nanny’, written as 阿姨 and 阿妈. The sound ‘A’ is a casual way to address someone you know but without knowing their actual name: ‘Mah’ is mother, ‘Yah’ adult women. These words are perfectly commonplace in China today, and carry no negative connotations. The Ayahs and Amahs were oriental women who, beginning in the 19th century, worked as domestic labourers, often as cleaners or nannies, all over Britain, but especially in Liverpool and London. Clark worked with historians Simeon Koole and Ben Mechan to unearth a handful of archival police documents detailing the diseased and injured bodies in the Thames, and the hopeless living conditions in east London. These Ayahs and Amahs were only a passing note in imperial narrative, their arduous voyages from the South China Sea or the Bay of Bengal, as early as the 18th century, barely known or told. The film shows the docklands’ grimy streets and dilapidated houses, rain drenched spaces haunted by ghosts and hidden sagas. I was struck by signs such as ‘Nankin Street’ or ‘Pekin Street’ (Nankin or Pekin are old colonial spellings used by earlier European missionaries and merchants, rather than the modern spelling of ‘Nanjing’ or ‘Beijing’). One image shows the faded sign of ‘Amoy Place E14’, which makes my heart ache. Chinese myself, as well as an Eastender, I’ve walked on Amoy Place in the dockland, which was part of old Chinatown. In the early 19th century, Chinese seamen and their families began to establish small communities here and in Liverpool. Europe's first Chinatown was established in Liverpool in the 1860s, followed by London's Chinatown in Limehouse. The East India Company also brought Asian sailors and labourers, who were lodged in this area. Chinese women worked in the sunless warehouses and basements of the Amoy Place laundry and textile industry during the 1920s. There, they slaved to earn a meagre livelihood until the bombs of WWII dropped, and Chinatown then moved to Soho. The film reflects the tragic interaction between foreign bodies and the Thames, and we learn how the ill-fated foreigners lived by the river. There is one historical detail not fleshed out in the film that I append here: in 1850, forty people from India were found dead in their lodgings because of cold and starvation. The bleak conditions of the labourers in London led the missionary Joseph Salter to open the 'Stranger's Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders' in Limehouse. ‘Stranger’ is a key word here. Only a few politicians these days would dare to use it. Clark’s images are anything but drily journalistic; he shows us melancholic London skylines at dawn and dusk, scored with an experimental soundtrack. These images have the quality of filtering everything through a soft swirl of English fog, undetermined, elusive, and intangible. Indeed, the film opens with a poem, The Great London Fog, by a certain ‘stranger’ Huang Zunxian. How fitting are the lines: “Vast and boundless is the city’s desolation of dimming light, benighted and hazy, like a dark kingdom of sweet dreams”? Of course, it's not clear for whom such sweet dreams could be realised. Another literary text in the film is an excerpt from Lao She's 1929 novel Mr. Ma and Son. Lao She, a giant figure in pre-Mao era contemporary Chinese literature, came to London in 1924 and wrote about this dark and foggy city in a dramatic form. The reading is well mixed with the performances of artists in London’s misty streets. As arresting as the 16mm footage of the city’s light is the imaginative sound design. In the opening, we hear streams of water and distant horns, transporting us to a past: an old map of the Thames Flooding Points appears. We see the old flood routes, Greenwich pier, Wapping, Bermondsey, Woolwich—the unpredictable twists and turns of the Dickensian waterway. The unfolding of the river map before Clark’s camera reminds me of the unfolding of a traditional Chinese painting scroll—the landscape in the painting reveals itself partially and gradually, through time. Perhaps that’s what a beautiful essay film should do. It’s all about unfolding. Xiaolu Guo is a renowned Chinese British filmmaker and novelist. She has directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today, UFO In Her Eyes, She, A Chinese, We Went to Wonderland, The Concrete Revolution, Once Upon A time Proletarian. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Sunless Haven at ICA, 24 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Does-an-Alarm-Have-to-be-Alarming Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:33:48 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Does-an-Alarm-Have-to-be-Alarming Does an alarm have to be alarming?On Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening Eliza Barry Callahan <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70294fbe0b78cf9afa78bd2385467b63d4c7436a68ad422f759cdc9510009b55/Preemptive-Listening-still1.jpeg" data-mid="209315755" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/70294fbe0b78cf9afa78bd2385467b63d4c7436a68ad422f759cdc9510009b55/Preemptive-Listening-still1.jpeg" /> Preemptive Listening Director AURA SATZ Year 2024 Country UK While a siren is something that works against the present landscape, something contra,the siren is also a reminder that we are in the landscape. The siren alerts us to something we can’t see—dislodges our relationship to the present tense and often acts as a directive to abandon it. The directive? An imperative: go away, go outside! Evacuate the siren itself. How to get out of range? How to get to ‘silence’? How to get to the other side? The siren is untouchable, God-like, at once indeterminate and also a line, a boundary, finite—safe or not safe.&nbsp; Aura Satz’s documentary Preemptive Listening is a litany, an invitation, an invocation of the siren. Its thesis is a question: Does an alarm have to be alarming? The film is also a demystification—showing the siren’s humble centres. Its sources. Its sites. Its architectures. Its moulds. Its quarry. Its rusty perch. It presents the siren as synecdoche (weather, war, dissent, the state!), shows how the siren fills up space like water fills a glass—becomes the environment, the temporary element, the thing that saturates. The siren is erasure of individual instinct; a call for obedience, a bid for trust. The siren is something to bear with, to ignore, to recall. A trick. A tool. A possibility, too—there is somewhere beyond here. There’s still time to get there. The siren is posed as literalized abstraction, and abstraction literalized. As threat. The siren is reconstructed as planetary data, cellos, sheet metal, voices, the wind, the bees, whistles, trumpets, organs, harps, feedback. The etymology of the word siren is disputed. Some believe it to be related to the greek σειρά (seirá, "rope, cord") and εἴρω (eírō, "to tie, join, fasten"), bringing about the definition: “binder, or entangler.” Sirens in mythology are infamously known as the creatures with the calls, the voices, the cries we are meant to resist, not to heed or follow. The distraction. We stuff our ears with wax and tie ourselves to masts to refrain from their pull. Known for their attempt to take us off course, tempt us, seduce us, stop us—the sirens call to&nbsp;us, for us. They don’t repel us, or warn us, or help us—however, they do attempt to shift our course as we are warned to stay away from their songs’ source. The siren (much like its mythological counterparts) is a signal to wonder about, not simply a signal to react to. Preemptive Listening is a siren itself. Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, New York. Her first novel, The Hearing Test, was published in March 2024. She is a New York Foundation for The Arts Fellow. She teaches at Columbia University. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Preemptive Listening at Tate Modern, 25 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Caves-Graves-Prisons-Homes Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:33:53 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Caves-Graves-Prisons-Homes Caves, Graves, Prisons, HomesOn Losing Ground and GAMA James Wham <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87ff803e3ab7926bb85cd025e8ef73c77bead5773ab54c8317c961d82fd6d0a2/Photo-1-LG_Stills_3.jpg" data-mid="209146670" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/87ff803e3ab7926bb85cd025e8ef73c77bead5773ab54c8317c961d82fd6d0a2/Photo-1-LG_Stills_3.jpg" />Losing Ground Director ANONYMOUS COLLECTIVE Year 2023 Country MYANMAR <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f68cbcfcdd199009e9a0d6e573fe80bc2091e3f46fdf7ac8a12b5da1a450bbd/gama_main01.jpg" data-mid="209146672" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8f68cbcfcdd199009e9a0d6e573fe80bc2091e3f46fdf7ac8a12b5da1a450bbd/gama_main01.jpg" /> GAMA Director KAORI ODA Year 2023 Country JAPAN Losing Ground takes place in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar with around five million people, which now suffers under the military junta of Min Aung Hlaing and his Tatmadaw. The group formally seized power in the February 2021 coup d’etat—the date, our narrator tells us, “all freedom disappeared”—though the Myanmar military had maintained de facto control even prior to this. The Union Solidarity and Development Party, an electoral tool of the Tatmadaw, had hoped to legitimise itself through electoral politics, buttressing its effort with a guaranteed 25% of parliamentary seats stipulated by the 2008 constitution (which, of course, they wrote). Yet the election results of November 2020 showed that the National League for Democracy held too much promise; so came the coup. It’s worth noting that the two parties are not so ideologically distinct, that the NLD ultimately operated in service of the USDP: both prefer a neoliberal regime maintained by military power; both favour the Bamar people and willingly enacted a genocide of the Rohingya in 2017, which saw 25,000 killed and more than 700,000 expelled from the country. If the&nbsp;coup seems ultimately superfluous, one should remember the old adage about absolute power. With the electoral route taking too long and too many strange turns, the Tatmadaw thought it better to seize the country by force. In&nbsp;Losing Ground we see the aftermath of absolute corruption: armed soldiers in the street, guns aimed towards civilians, protestors with signs and hardhats fighting for their freedom. Confined to his home, lights out, back turned to the camera to preserve anonymity (diffusing our empathy among the many faceless victims), Losing Ground’s narrator tells us he preferred being in prison because it served as an antidote to isolation. He speaks of poetry, storytelling and hope found in dark places, all while looking out toward a blue sky that no longer belongs to him. “I feel like my future is broken into particles that are so small that I can’t even see the pieces.” Shattered future, shattered past: In GAMA, peace guides sift through cave sediment and find bits of broken bone. These are the remnants of shūdan jiketsu, or group suicides, which took place in 1945 during the Battle of Okinawa, where local civilians, many indigenous to the island, were told to hide in caves (gama) to evade the rape and torture of Allied troops. Some 25,000 Okinawan men were recruited into the Japanese Imperial Army to defend the island; more Okinawans died than members of the Allied and other Japanese forces combined. The gama&nbsp;have since become an issue of contention within Japanese history, which is one reason why peace guides like Matsunaga Mitsuo are so invaluable today. Early in the film, he turns off his torch to offer a ‘dark experience’ and the screen goes black. Immediately we understand that primal fear of the unknown – how far-off sounds resemble footsteps or whispers, how the contours of total darkness conjure ghosts. Matsunaga’s narrative mostly comprises experiential anecdotes like this, an attempt to situate the past on personal terms—itself a mode of excavation. But beyond these individual experiences is the intimation of a greater national reckoning: In 2007, the Ministry of Education demanded a revision to school textbooks, to retract the notion that Okinawans were coerced into suicide. To be coerced (kyoyo) by suicide order (jiketsu meirei) is fundamentally a form of murder and makes the state complicit in the killing of its own people. The gama suicides would therefore differ from the noble kamikaze fighters who willingly (though what’s free will in war?) drove 120-kilogram torpedoes into enemy battleships. And they would differ also from the greater suicidal act that was the Battle of Okinawa itself, fought with the knowledge that the war was already lost, by a defending army outnumbered fivefold, whose sole objective was to buy time for the mainland to negotiate its surrender. “During the war there was no phrase ‘shūdan jiketsu’,” writes Kinjō Shigeaki. “There was ‘gyokusai’, however, a grandiose militaristic euphemism, signifying the ‘crushing of jewels’, meaning people giving up their lives joyfully for their country rather than succumbing to the enemy or falling into their hands. It was only after the war, especially in the 1950s, that ‘group suicide’ came into use … The state now wants to say these deaths were ‘voluntary deaths.’ But that isn’t the way it was. The people of Okinawa never killed themselves on their own initiative.” In the siege of Okinawa, the ancient walls of the Shuri Castle were destroyed, and the old world with it. Local farmers and fishermen who had worked their land for centuries were suddenly swept up in American modernity, dressed in military surplus, smoking Chesterfields, driving trucks and drinking Coca-Cola. Then came the Japanese Miracle, the tech boom, the cult of kawaii overlaying a grotesque and bloody history. And now, the present, in these dark caves—in this dark cinema—where peace guides shine light on the truth. * * * History is written with our bloodRevolution!Those who lost their lives in the fight for democracyOur country is a land built with martyrsWe will not be satisfied until the end of the world – Kabar Ma Kyay Bu (Until the end of the world) James Wham lives in London and writes for The Baffler and New Left Review. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme Losing Ground + GAMA at Close-Up Cinema, 25 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Anything-Goes Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:42:14 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Anything-Goes Anything GoesPortraits at a slant Phil Coldiron <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3f18806dcb2a70370d514881dd12138a64a9a65a664ffcb52582049ad483231/WEBezgif-5-baf4f6b24b.jpg" data-mid="209312759" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3f18806dcb2a70370d514881dd12138a64a9a65a664ffcb52582049ad483231/WEBezgif-5-baf4f6b24b.jpg" />N’importe quoi (for Brunhild) Director LUKE FOWLER Year 2023 Country UK <img width="1488" height="1072" width_o="1488" height_o="1072" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e024931d90156f8f8ec508f967d897c70d01e8b2239986857fc4713b5376fa49/01_Marble-Film_16X9.jpeg" data-mid="209313444" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e024931d90156f8f8ec508f967d897c70d01e8b2239986857fc4713b5376fa49/01_Marble-Film_16X9.jpeg" /> Marble Film Part I &amp; Marble Film Part II Director LUCY HARRIS Year 2024 Country UK <img width="1435" height="1077" width_o="1435" height_o="1077" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2421306d79efeb713e3ed1629ca54bbdecaba8e6cac17bda85c3841a8ca61fd4/Photo-1-Screenshot_2023-07-25_at_22.52.38.jpg" data-mid="209313667" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2421306d79efeb713e3ed1629ca54bbdecaba8e6cac17bda85c3841a8ca61fd4/Photo-1-Screenshot_2023-07-25_at_22.52.38.jpg" /> Afterthoughts of a Walk on the Naze Director LOUIS HENDERSON Year 2023 Country UK <img width="1920" height="1440" width_o="1920" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8fa39109fff29704ea2f7f1a8474bf0b46e0e0fc18407cae47d9317c2e07b0d7/disappearances_5.jpeg" data-mid="209313868" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8fa39109fff29704ea2f7f1a8474bf0b46e0e0fc18407cae47d9317c2e07b0d7/disappearances_5.jpeg" /> Disappearances Director JAMES EDMONDS Year 2023 Country UK, GERMANY As a mode, the norms of portraiture were settled by the first century A.D. A relatively straight line can be drawn from, say, the Portrait of A Young Woman in Red (c. 90-120 A.D.) to the work of any of the last century’s great portraitists. While those two thousand years have seen the invention of an unsurprisingly wide array of formal and symbolic armatures, the central fact of the human face and all its mysteries remains consistent. On this level, a continuity emerges across sensibilities as disparate as Vigée Le Brun and Arbus, Velazquez and Hendricks, Rembrandt and Goldin. Cinema didn’t quite begin with the face, but its role quickly became central. From as early as the research of Vertov and Epstein, the face in motion was understood as uniquely compelling, capable of betraying a whole new range of expressive possibilities too subtle for stillness to capture. It’s odd, then, how rarely artists have produced filmed portraits free of any narrative framework. There are, of course, by now thousands of biographical documentaries—many based around the oft-derided ‘talking head’—but with the towering exception of Warhol’s Screen Tests, cinema’s most sophisticated and accomplished pure portraits have tended to work obliquely, drawing together fragments around the empty centre of their subject, whose face appears rarely, if at all.&nbsp; Luke Fowler’s two decades of work comprise, I think, the most significant body of cinematic portraiture produced to date. He has fashioned a canon of eccentric, obscure, or under-recognized artists and thinkers out of the sediment of their lives, the documents of their archives, the places they passed through. Biography is absent; anecdote, even, is minimal. If classical portraiture attempts to pluck its subject from the world and refashion them as a symbol of it (Goldin’s work depends on showing just how unwilling the world is to let go of its subjects), Fowler works by the inverse, beginning with the world at large and searching out the tiniest traces that might speak to a single, specific path through it. N’importe quoi. Anything goes, it’s all game, as the world forever is before the camera. And so finally we arrive at his remarkable new film, N'Importe quoi (for Brunhild), a portrait of Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, who, alongside her husband Luc, did as much as anyone to realize the post-Cagean whatever of musical composition, to test the thin line between the form of the world and the forms of art. Fowler begins in Meyer-Ferrari’s charmingly cluttered studio, catching glimpses of her amidst endless stacks of tapes and analog devices for the recording and manipulation of sound. “Je pense sans parole,” she says—“I think without words”—and Fowler cuts to a pair of glasses upon a tabletop in burnished, golden light: some think with microphones, others with lenses. Meyer-Ferrari departs the studio with her microphone to collect the sounds of Parisian parks and train stations. At the moment of this transition from studio to city, she recounts her earliest meetings with the man who would become her husband and collaborator, Luc Ferrari, a founding member of Groupe de Recherche (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer. Of Schaeffer, she says, “He engaged me for work that was really interesting to me: it was research on [the] relationship between sound and image.” The final image we see of the studio in this opening passage is a tape box labeled presque rien—next to nothing—then, after a rhythmic cut to black, Meyer-Ferrari alone in the dusty bowl of a park as urban ambience fills the soundtrack. Fowler holds on this medium shot for 10 seconds or so, before moving into one of his typical series of quick reframings, culminating in another cut to black which leads on to an instance of his other recurring gesture: rotating the Bolex’s turret mid-shot, drawing a curved image down as the lens pops into place. The sound, previously continuous, changes abruptly at this last cut; where we heard chatter and sporting thwacks that might have seemed appropriate to a park on a sunny day, there is only sparse birdsong and the rustle of leaves. This layering of potential realities is, I’ll suggest, the ground of Fowler’s practice. Lucy Harris’ Marble Film, Louis Henderson’s Afterthoughts of a Walk on the Naze, and James Edmonds’ Disappearances&nbsp;are more oblique portraits than N'Importe quoi, but each shares this sense of layered reality. For Harris, who also depicts a group at work on their craft—in this case, the production of carved marble—it’s a matter of order and priority. Across the first part of Marble Film (it consists of two segments; only the first was available for preview), we see images that fall into three broad categories: the hands of figures performing somewhat inscrutable gestures; the drawing of what seem to be schematic images; and the actual work of carving marble (this latter clarifies at least some of the pantomimed gestures). But what initially appears to be a relatively straightforward document of artisanal labour is thrown into relief by the dawning realization of what is being carved, an object which reframes the film as a collective multimedia performance. Slippages between mediums are likewise central to Henderson’s Afterthoughts, a kind of landscape detective film which attempts to make sense of a letter written to the filmmaker in his infancy by his great-uncle, the artist Nigel Henderson. A sense of doubt creeps in, as this missive warps time and causality in odd and unaccountable ways. Whether or not this letter is historically ‘true’ matters less than the compelling sense Henderson conjures of being haunted not by a man he never knew, but by his art, and by the landscape and history that shaped it. Edmonds, meanwhile, takes a markedly different approach to the British countryside. Like Fowler, he has learned deeply from his time working on the restoration of Gregory Markopoulos’ massive Eniaios—one of the great works of fragmented portraiture—and the lessons on in-camera editing he has taken from that material are apparent in this deceptively humble diary of his return home after several years of pandemic-induced absence. Filming in quick bursts, often less than a second, Edmonds’ approach to layering is emotional, drawing out the contingency at the heart of the familiar. This question of chance returns us to Fowler. Now back in the studio, Meyer-Ferrari sits for a medium close-up—only her downturned face and the corsage of white flowers affixed to her black sweater are illuminated in an otherwise shadowed room, the most conventional portrait Fowler has ever shot—and reflects in voiceover on her career, “When I begin to record, I tried to make experiences with the microphone”—she turns to face the camera, smiles—“but I abandoned it very quickly, and I let the microphone do its work and I was more quiet with the instrument.” Fowler, with evident delight and curiosity and recognition, responds, “But then you changed to just putting it on the stand and listening?” Phil Coldiron is a writer living in New York. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme&nbsp;Afterthoughts and Disappearances at Genesis Cinema, 25 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Liquid-Connections Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:42:57 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Liquid-Connections Liquid ConnectionsOn The Soldier’s Lagoon Elizabeth Dexter <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a6468e2ef0b041139e25d171b443055897293cc69bd1bd627073df0814b74ac3/LagunadelSoldado12.jpg" data-mid="209423601" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a6468e2ef0b041139e25d171b443055897293cc69bd1bd627073df0814b74ac3/LagunadelSoldado12.jpg" /> La laguna del soldado (The Soldier’s Lagoon) Director PABLO ÁLVAREZ-MESA Year 2024 Country CANADA, COLOMBIA The Soldier’s Lagoon, a body of water that forms part of a tightly interconnected ecosystem in the Colombian Páramo de Pisba, is named after the 200 revolutionary soldiers who died making their way perilously across the Andes in 1819. (200, or more. The British soldiers who encountered the watery grave describe losing count after that figure.) It lends this name to Pablo Álvarez-Mesa’s newest film, which takes the beautiful, wet, and moderately vicious expanse as a jumping-off point for reimagining the traces of colonial and environmental violence, past and present. The second part of a trilogy that travels slantwise through the legacies of Simón Bolívar, The Soldier’s Lagoon is told from the multivalent perspectives of conservationists, miners, pot-makers, and chiropterologists, all percolating into a portrait of place. The film expands the shape-shifting style seen in Álvarez-Mesa’s Bicentenario (2020), becoming more feverish as it pivots between deep history and dream. The hazy quality of Álvarez-Mesa’s 16mm image is brought about in part by the fact of the camera’s mechanical limitation, imprecise and unable to produce a shot lasting more than 28 seconds. At times the image leaks bright red into the frame. Often it doubles, or is subsumed by another in clouds of seemingly ubiquitous and indifferent fog. Segueing transitions, as when the reflection of the sky on the surface of water is dissolved into a blanket of trees, build up like strata of earth. A feeling of accrual becomes palpable, not least of the many violent episodes in history that have amassed and inscribed themselves quietly onto the territory: the looting of Muisca cemeteries by the Spanish, Bolívar’s campaign of liberation, the more recent passage of armed groups. Every so often, the image becomes percussively vivid, released to the clamouring of musician Stefan Schneider’s drums. Although images trickle in and out of vision, certain impressions persist through the brume. One such is the explanation given of the frailejón (“big monk”) plant, named thus by the mathematician and biologist José Celestino Mutis’ assertion that their bowed heads gave them the appearance of “friars in ruanas lost in the fog”. (Do they not also look like the man in the cagoule we saw earlier on?) Not only monks, the plants are also custodians, collecting what would otherwise evade collection. A family member of the sunflower, the high-altitude shrub has thick hairs that draw water from the air.&nbsp; They are integral to maintaining water security for the páramo, transmuting mist into underground pools of water which go on to feed the Orinoco. The film tells us how they are under threat from military activity, and how rates of deforestation have increased up to twofold since the peace agreement in 2016. Álvarez-Mesa includes a shot where the plants angrily quiver upright, like the lick of flames, both theatre and opponent to this destruction. The&nbsp;frailejónes take from the visible but insubstantial mist to maintain the region’s troubled past and uncertain future. It feels as if The Soldier’s Lagoon is operating in the same way when it returns us into the mist. The film approaches history through blurring, lateral fragments, rather than chronology or monument, creating its own subterranean basin where all coexists. &nbsp; Bolívar’s poem at the beginning of the film seems to speak as the páramo when it avers: ¿Pensáis que los instantes que llamáis siglos pueden servir de medida a mis arcanos? (Do you think that the instants you call centuries can measure my secrets?) Perhaps we can discover in Álvarez-Mesa’s fog the secrets necessary to encounter history, politics, and ecology at once, and a means through which to be in direct affiliation, to form and hold onto different images, even in states of half-awakeness. We begin and end up submerged in a turquoise frame, with fog crawling up a precipice. In fog, in lagoon, everything interfaces. Elizabeth Dexter coordinates the Talks and Workshops programme and is a pre-selector for Open City Documentary Festival. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of La laguna del soldado (The Soldier’s Lagoon) at Close-Up Cinema, 26 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Arendt-in-Sarajevo Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:43:03 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Arendt-in-Sarajevo Arendt in Sarajevo On La force diagonale Hannah Proctor <img width="1381" height="1036" width_o="1381" height_o="1036" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5832a5bd3baeaafdf6a0bdf20549cfd9073fb9e05c22c3debe5e92a918a5ac89/Force_Diagonale_still-1.jpg" data-mid="209309713" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5832a5bd3baeaafdf6a0bdf20549cfd9073fb9e05c22c3debe5e92a918a5ac89/Force_Diagonale_still-1.jpg" /> La force diagonale (The Diagonal Force) Director ANNIK LEROY, JULIE MOREL Year 2023 Country BELGIUM Annik Leroy and Julie Morel’s La force diagonale meditates on how individual lives unfold within history, riffing subtly on the life and philosophical work of Hannah Arendt. In its opening minutes, a cable car is shown moving above a snowy landscape, a shot that recalls the opening of Béla Tarr’s Damnation (1988), which gives some sense of its overall aesthetic and tone. Shot in austere black and white very occasionally interrupted by short bursts in colour, the film begins with a series of individual portraits. Unlike the conventions typical of documentary talking heads, these opening interviews are shot in a stylized manner. Rather than speaking to camera we often hear the voices of interviewees over footage of them standing or sitting silently, drawing attention to the subtle movements of their faces. On the surface, the different figures have little in common; what brings them together is how their lives have been shaped by dramatic and traumatic events, by social withdrawal, and later, by seeking solace from social repression and violence in art or alternative communities. First, a former tram driver describes surviving a shelling during the siege of Sarajevo and the lasting psychic impact of her wartime experiences: “life goes on but the wounds linger.” Then, a sculptor who has drilled deep into rocks muses on geological time, how paltry human lives seem in comparison to the temporality of the earth. A Belgian man with a German father recounts how being bullied at school led him to pursue a profound seclusion before having a transformative encounter with the experimental community for autistic children set up by the French pedagogue Fernand Deligny. Finally, a Congolese man orphaned in his youth describes the difficulty of his childhood before discussing how his love of singing has functioned as a source of hope. The film shifts in its second half, moving to depict a choreographed sequence performed by dancer Claire Vivianne Sobottke. In these later scenes Sobottke moves through a woodland landscape and clambers around a large barn-like building. Various actors read extracts from the work and correspondence of Arendt in French and German; the excerpts are often personal rather than theoretical, focusing on Arendt’s experiences of exile and of love. As with the preceding portraits, the viewer is allowed to find their own correspondences and links between the disparate fragments. The film is more suggestive than didactic, its various thematic threads loosely woven to give the impression of a diaphanous fabric catching light in the wind, rather than producing a taut evenly spun surface. I was struck, watching it, of how different the approach was to the only other film I’m familiar with that responds to Arendt’s work: Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt. Unlike La force diagonale, in which Arendt’s words are presented without contextualization, von Trotta’s film is far more formally conventional. It focuses on the publication of the chain-smoking philosopher’s analysis of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961, originally serialized in the New Yorker in 1963. Observing the trial, Arendt was struck by how Eichmann did not come across as a terrifying, satanic figure or a fanatical antisemite despite his horrific deeds, but instead as an unthinking bureaucrat, chilling in his ordinariness. Eichmann embodied what she famously called the “banality of evil.” As Arendt observed, “the unprecedented, once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future.” Von Trotta dramatizes Arendt’s experiences just before and during the trial (in a section including archival footage of Eichmann’s cross-examinations and Holocaust survivors’ testimonies), but the film mostly explores the aftermath. Arendt, a German Jew who had fled Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and subsequently fled to the US from an internment camp in France in 1941, was vehemently attacked when her articles were first published. The most controversial passages in her text argued that evidence presented at Eichmann’s trial suggested that the actions of Jewish leaders in Europe may have exacerbated the Holocaust’s overall death toll, an implied complicity of the victims with the perpetrators that angered many readers. Barbara Sukowa’s steely yet vulnerable Arendt is shown by von Trotta in her New York apartment receiving piles of furious letters, including death threats and a note from a downstairs neighbour calling her a “Nazi whore.” Smoking, always smoking, the film depicts her frosty interactions with acquaintances in the New York intelligentsia and defiant lectures to her students, as well as showing how some of her lifelong friends turned against her for her perceived lack of loyalty to the Zionist project and the Jewish people. Watching&nbsp;La force diagonale, I found myself straining to find a more straight-forwardly historical narrative or a more obvious political argument in the directors’ presentation of Arendt’s work. Given the urgency of the current moment—where Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza continues—I found myself impatient with the film’s elusive and allusive qualities. I found von Trotta’s approach easier to make sense of but then I began to wonder why I found the transparency of her approach and the film’s pedestrian formal qualities so consoling. Perhaps Morel and Leroy leave more space for the viewer to form their own associations. As well as during the choreographed section, a reading from Arendt’s work also features earlier in La force diagonale, as voiceover accompanying footage of bullet scarred buildings in present day Sarajevo, but the voice is so low in the sound mix that it is almost inaudible beneath the diegetic noise of traffic. The snatches of speech that break through suggest it is a passage from the closing section of her epic 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argues that the emergence of totalitarianism in 20th century Europe was connected to increased loneliness; The film’s choice to render it as such means the relation of Arendt’s work to the aftermath of the siege of Sarajevo is left unclear, but the experience of straining to make out Arendt’s words seems to pose it as a question to the viewer. This is also one of very few moments in the film where it briefly switches to colour, reminding me that the footage was shot in present day Sarajevo, and suggesting that the forces of history continue to shape the present. Perhaps the deliberate muffling of the voice by the filmmakers suggests that the connections between the past and the present or between catastrophic historical events in different places are not always easy to discern, but that bullet scars remain. “Life goes on but the wounds linger.” Hannah Proctor is a writer and historian who works at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat is out now with Verso Books. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of La force diagonale (The Diagonal Force) at Close-Up Cinema, 27 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Time-Clock-of-the-Heart Tue, 16 Apr 2024 19:02:40 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Time-Clock-of-the-Heart Time (Clock of the Heart)On 315 and Artistes en Zone Troublés Sean Burns <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b721c1efb524b8618c00d4eafb43ac94606b44e9232918e02d634a22e8a11ba7/Photo-6-315_1343.jpg" data-mid="209147985" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b721c1efb524b8618c00d4eafb43ac94606b44e9232918e02d634a22e8a11ba7/Photo-6-315_1343.jpg" />315 Director DANIEL JACOBY Year 2024 Country NETHERLANDS, PERU <img width="1064" height="776" width_o="1064" height_o="776" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/baeab13dd13087dec7e7b9c09727857a5f3221047adc20adc32336c9927158b1/article01_large-21.jpg.png" data-mid="209147989" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/baeab13dd13087dec7e7b9c09727857a5f3221047adc20adc32336c9927158b1/article01_large-21.jpg.png" /> Artistes en Zone Troublés Director STÉPHANE GÉRARD, LIONEL SOUKAZ Year 2023 Country FRANCE At the beginning of Daniel Jacoby’s 15-minute video 315, a hand in a suit and shirt redolent of those worn by 1950s magicians, pianists or music hall performers flits around in isolation. Are we about to witness a sleight of hand? As it disappears, a voiceover in Spanish introduces the protagonist: “31 May 1985: I’m born in Lima, Peru.” The date becomes a recurring motif, a thread that ties together historical facts, personal stories and handheld, analogue archive footage, mostly captured on a camcorder. As we hear about the artist’s birth, footage sweeps across of a woman holding a baby while other people, presumably family, look on, smiling. In the background, the sound of a slap bass ploughs away like the music accompanying the loading screen of a 1980s arcade game. As the camera pans and the disgruntled child exits the frame, we hear a crucial piece of information, a shadow that will haunt the next eight minutes: “31 May 1989: An unfortunate event occurs in my country.” This fragment of detail provides the fulcrum around which what follows turns. So, the ground is set for a collage of personal, political and historical material, that invites us to examine overlaps and find meaningful connections in the spaces between. The narrator begins to list historical events that occurred on 31 May throughout the years. For instance, it’s the date the White Star Line certified the list of passengers aboard the HMS Titanic in the Southern Ocean in 1912 (75% of the deaths were of adult men, we later learn), and the date the first football World Cup match was televised in colour in Mexico in 1970. Then mid-way through, the screen hits black. By this point, the bass has stopped, and the family home footage ceases, too. Jacoby’s project here is about making visible the violence that polite society would have us forget: on 31 May 1989, members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army, conducted a targeted murder on a group of transgender people in Tarapoto, a city in northern Peru. Jacoby appears to deliberately obscure the details of the incident to situate it in the broader nexus of the film, which associates the tragedy within the trajectory of his life. Jacoby’s voiceover discusses the murder as if it were a military procedure without mentioning the attack by name (Tarapoto Massacre or the Night of the Gardenias). At the same time, saturated abstract footage of the interior of a nightclub flash across the screen. What happened on 31 May 1989 has left a lasting imprint on the artist and the country’s LGBTQ+ communities, but information about the incident is scant online even now. 315 angles at how the everyday patterns of our lives can be implicated in broader political issues and how inimical forces often lie beneath the surface of familiar constellations. What opens is a channel to think about gender, its construction, and its childhood conditioning. As Jacoby ties these disparate incidents (the World Cup, the Titanic, birthday parties and birth) together, the hands of men flash across the screen—they are folded, holding guns, fictional and real. The final hand is that of a footballer, his fingers outstretched; his glove reveals he must be a goalkeeper from the match on 31 May 1970. The use of personal archive footage to explore a broader historical narratives connects 315 to Stéphane Gérard’s Artistes en Zone Troublés. While Jacoby’s film links an event in his nation’s history to his own biography and relationship to queerness, Gérard assembles pioneering French filmmaker Lionel Soukaz’s archive to celebrate the latter’s late lover, Hervé Couergou, and concurrently speak to the wider, transnational moment of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Gérard scoured over 2000 hours of personal, diaristic footage shot by Soukaz throughout the early 1990s to produce a 39-minute film that reads like a dedication to its protagonist. “My name is Hervé Couergou. I am 29 years old, and, really, it’s been years that I have felt sick without being sick—and that’s just fine,” Couergou, a handsome young man smoking a cigarette, tells the camera roughly two minutes into the film. “We are afraid, afraid and afraid again, and even more afraid,” he continues. The ‘we’ to which he refers articulates the anxiety of a generation of his peers, who were losing their friends and monitoring their own health during the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis. By 1996, Couergou would be dead, and through the film, he becomes the narrator of his own passing. It’s a heartbreaking and intimate document of a love affair and life, often containing seemingly incidental shots in living rooms and around dining tables. Soukaz’s footage seems to withstand the process of historicization whereby the reality of suffering becomes cheapened as an artefact. Seeing this in 2024, its quotidian and hand-held nature allows us to sit in on their relationship, and the everyday experiences of living with HIV at that time, the film’s timestamp operating as a temporal indicator. It all feels remarkably familiar. Midway through the film (timestamp: 4/10/1994), Couergou approaches an advert for lice repellent on the Paris underground, writing in small letters on its surface in black pen: “come without hindrances but with condoms.” There’s always a sense that he is rethinking how to communicate his experience and leave behind something useful for his community. How might artists support one another? Couergou often leaves traces in the form of writing or drawings. In another scene, he lip-syncs to a French song whose lyrics are: ‘life is making me tough, fragile and tough’. This moment is particularly captivating as shots of the playful illustrations etched across his window and in his notepads appear overlayed, creating a psychedelic effect. Couergou is often associated with his lovers, either Soukaz or the writer Doug Ireland. However, with Artistes en Zone Troublés, Gérard places him at the centre of the work, allowing us to appreciate his words and playful nature. After his opening admission, we are acutely aware of time working against him. His belief in the power of art to transcend tragedy emerges vividly, but ultimately, we’re left wondering what could have been. Sean Burns is an artist, editor and writer. He lives in London, UK. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme&nbsp;315 +&nbsp;Artistes en Zone Troublés at Genesis Cinema, 27 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/The-Long-Journey-Preceding-Paradise Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:43:08 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/The-Long-Journey-Preceding-Paradise The Long Journey Preceding Paradise On The Sojourn and على مرمى حجر (A Stone’s Throw) Jenny Wu <img width="358" height="201" width_o="358" height_o="201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/989182898afd1d8760bc91fa3f06c985e58f721c916688de81422c5e66b0ae19/WEB55004fc3456d8e98d51d9d415a09916adda3f746-copy.jpg" data-mid="209140200" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/358/i/989182898afd1d8760bc91fa3f06c985e58f721c916688de81422c5e66b0ae19/WEB55004fc3456d8e98d51d9d415a09916adda3f746-copy.jpg" />The SojournDirector TIFFANY SIAYear 2023Country USA, TAIWAN <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/425117a672e124dfe41c905823ea2f712306c354d010af47c999f0756d2956b4/Photo-1-AmineinHaifa.jpg" data-mid="209140197" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/425117a672e124dfe41c905823ea2f712306c354d010af47c999f0756d2956b4/Photo-1-AmineinHaifa.jpg" /> على مرمى حجر (A Stone’s Throw)Director RAZAN ALSALAHYear 2023Country CANADA In The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), the ancient Roman poet Virgil guides Dante on his journey through hell and purgatory, delivering the medieval pilgrim to paradise but stopping short of entering himself. Both Tiffany Sia’s The Sojourn and Razan AlSalah’s A Stone’s Throw feature a guide, a lone figure dislocated in time and space, reminiscent of Dante’s spiritual chaperon. Sia’s is the actor Shih Chun, who played an itinerant swordsman in King Hu’s martial arts epic Dragon Inn (1967). AlSalah’s is a twice-exiled Palestinian elder named Amine. The Sojourn documents Sia’s attempt to visit the filming locations of Hu’s Dragon Inn. The reconnaissance mission takes the form of a road trip through the misty mountains of Taiwan; in the sixties, it was revolutionary for Hu to shoot a martial arts film outdoors rather than on a set, and for him to shoot in Taiwan instead of on the mainland, given he’d been born in Beijing. Sia’s camera captures close-ups of Shih Chun, now an octogenarian wearing bifocals and a baseball cap, as he speaks about the changes Taiwan’s landscape has undergone in the intervening decades. Giving directions from memory in the passenger seat of the film crew’s car, pointing through a rain-speckled windshield, Shih Chun becomes the voice of the landscape, as well as of the past. A Stone’s Throw also documents a journey, this time to Zirku Island in the Persian Gulf, the site of an off-limits offshore oil refinery and labour camp owned by the United Arab Emirates. AlSalah’s journey is conducted via satellite imaging, with the aid of web-scraped data and the recollections of Amine, a Palestinian from the coastal city of Haifa, who has spent his adult life first exiled in Beirut, Lebanon, and then sent to work on Zirku Island. AlSalah’s camera follows a hunched Amine as he walks on a boardwalk towing grocery bags through dismal weather, struggling against the elements in stark contrast to the way the viewer, at other times, glides smoothly over digital landforms produced via satellite technology. As AlSalah delves into archival research, she traces the forking paths of Amine’s recollections, too. “This is the Haifa shore,” his voiceover explains in one shot, as the camera assesses a grainy black-and-white photograph in which a group of men are gathered around the Kirkuk–Haifa oil pipeline. According to Amine, the Palestinian labourers pictured there “contributed to destroying this pipeline in the thirties,” to obstruct the British and Zionist colonial project they knew was intent on displacing them. At the start of The Sojourn, Shih Chun warns Sia’s crew, “Where the inn … was constructed, those landscapes have completely transformed. They’ve been turned into roads.” In other words, they should not hope to reencounter the lush mis-en-scène of Hu’s wuxia film. The actor’s point is restated indirectly when the film cuts to the galleries of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, where the camera lingers on towering mountains rendered deftly in black ink, such as those in the Yuan Dynasty gentleman-scholar Wang Meng (1308-1385)’s handscroll Pine Cliffs and Waterfall. The monochrome artwork, like Dragon Inn’s lost landscape, depicts a place in the mind and memory rather than on earth. Nevertheless, Shih Chun’s countenance—and Amine’s voice—serve as intimate counterpoints to the bygone and obscured locales whose incomplete visual records mediate and frustrate the documentarians’ respective journeys. Just as the lowest level of hell in The Divine Comedy is known for its abundance of ice, water in its liquid and particulate forms plays a key role in both of these films. Melancholic voices in A Stone’s Throw lament: “The sea roars. I wander silently … I am a stranger everywhere. Where are you, my dear land?” Although the anonymous speakers long for their land, AlSalah’s film can only offer footage of lashing waves. Viewers feel the vertiginous pull of the tides, recalling the seas that claim the lives of thousands of migrants annually. For Sia, mist is a metaphor for covert activist operations that negotiate visibility to resist the surveillance strategies of autocracies like mainland China, whose leaders are increasingly threatening Taiwan’s sovereignty. For both filmmakers, hell is a place on earth whose local identity has been overshadowed by the interests of various political regimes. The vices for which individuals are punished in Dante’s underworld—greed, violence, fraud—find systemic counterparts in these films, and in atrocities like settler colonialism, forced migration, and one-sided treaties. Neither documentarian’s journey ends in paradise. Both are left open-ended, dissipating like mist and seafoam. Neither Sia nor AlSalah gets a satisfying glimpse of her subject, and what they find instead reinforces the distance between individuals today and the minor histories of previous generations. One senses, however, that Sia and AlSalah won’t leave their respective guides behind in contested terrain either. So long as the lands through which they travel remain under threat of encroachment, their histories under threat of erasure, both will continue, in the spirit of intergenerational reciprocity, the dialogue with their Virgils. Jenny Wu is an art critic and educator based in New York, whose writing can be found in Art in America, Artforum, ArtReview, e-flux, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme&nbsp;The Sojourn + على مرمى حج (A Stone’s Throw)&nbsp;at Close-Up Cinema, 27 April 2024. https://opencitytexts.com/Finally-I-Got-Close Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:32:36 +0000 Open City Texts https://opencitytexts.com/Finally-I-Got-Close Finally I Got CloseNotes from the journal Erica Van Horn <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f51eeede3afc5ec0aef9fc5730137cdd12ea134bc7dead2d5271bd700a152c86/Public-Surfaces_4.jpeg" data-mid="209227805" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f51eeede3afc5ec0aef9fc5730137cdd12ea134bc7dead2d5271bd700a152c86/Public-Surfaces_4.jpeg" /> Public Surfaces Director GILLIAN WALDO Year 2023 Country USA <img width="341" height="256" width_o="341" height_o="256" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9fbd85681fdcdcdaa296ccdea02795691eddec7d7cb5ccdbb1f956d6e9f19658/WEB1344_bl-2.jpg" data-mid="209227782" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/341/i/9fbd85681fdcdcdaa296ccdea02795691eddec7d7cb5ccdbb1f956d6e9f19658/WEB1344_bl-2.jpg" /> Becoming Landscape Director EVA GIOLO Year 2023 Country BELGIUM, CANADA <img width="2880" height="2160" width_o="2880" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f3f864f3044457db7157bf2d138197d2b01c3118014b00840305114e34ed8e10/Film_Still_04.jpg" data-mid="209227783" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f3f864f3044457db7157bf2d138197d2b01c3118014b00840305114e34ed8e10/Film_Still_04.jpg" />In Praise of Slowness Director HICHAM GARDAF Year 2023 Country UK, ITALY <img width="3424" height="2155" width_o="3424" height_o="2155" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f261486f083ebe1da839f15e5d0c931a1d6a84cb465da83654f80aed27752f04/Langurs-Group.png" data-mid="209227780" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f261486f083ebe1da839f15e5d0c931a1d6a84cb465da83654f80aed27752f04/Langurs-Group.png" />Slow Shift Director SHAMBAVI KAUL Year 2023 Country INDIA, USA We invited artist and writer Erica Van Horn to respond to this programme of films. Van Horn has been keeping a record of her life in rural Co. Tipperary, Ireland online at Some Notes for Living Locally since 2007. She has collated five pieces from the journal that speak to the focus on detail she admired in the programme: “Thinking about the films, I recognised&nbsp;that I was simply locating my own interests within them. Each camera focused carefully on small things. There need&nbsp;not be a complete narrative if such focus is right. Here, I share some fragments of my own landscape, a place where&nbsp;not very much happens.” 12 January There is not a lot of variety in the things I see when I walk out in winter. At this time of year there is little animal activity. The cows are all under cover. I do not know where the sheep are. Most days the things I see are much the same as they were the day before. Most days I never meet another person. I have to take different routes to provide myself with variety.&nbsp;Today I got excited when I saw something on the road up ahead of me.&nbsp; I was looking at it for a long time as I approached. I was keeping an eye on it in case it moved before I got close enough to identify it. I could not decide what it was. Finally I got close. The object had not moved. It was a sugar beet. It was not a whole sugar beet, but only half a sugar beet. The other half must have gone off in the machine that gathered them up in the field. This half might have fallen off a trailer. It gave me something to look at and something to think about. I am still excited about it. 26 February I met an old man as I walked down from The Boulders. He had been up on the mountain all morning checking on his sheep. He was driving a little pick-up truck with a very small bed behind the tiny cab. It had no road registration. It was more like a dune buggy than a road truck. He had a sheep dog squeezed onto the front seat beside him and a dead lamb in the back. The back was small enough that the lamb’s body filled up the whole space. The space was the size of a wheelbarrow. The farmer was dressed in the way of older farmers. He was not wearing a fleece nor a T-shirt nor blue jeans. He wore the jacket of a wool suit over his pull-over sweater with a white checked button down collar showing at his neck.&nbsp; His trousers were also made of wool. They were the trousers of a suit but they were not made of the same wool as the jacket. His trousers were tucked into his high rubber boots. Nothing he had on was clean but everything was tidy. These were his working clothes. I commented that I had not seen him, even from a distance, for a long time. We agreed that it was at least six months since we last met. He explained to me that what happens is that We Lose Each Other In The Landscape. 11 March There are plenty of signs in nature but there are rarely words to read as I walk the fields and lanes. I miss the barrage of language that people in towns and cities take for granted. Perhaps town dwellers find so much language annoying. There is plenty of machinery to look at. I am curious about a lot of the machines because I rarely know what they are being used for nor what a covered trailer is carrying. I am curious about these functions but not curious enough to ask questions and to learn the facts about them. I enjoy considering my own solutions as I walk. 21 August The early evening silence is enormous. It takes a while to register that the deep quiet is because the wind has stopped. There is no wind. There is not even a small breeze. After two days of howling and thrashing and roaring, everything is silent. We have been beaten and buffeted by gusts of noisy wind since Wednesday night when Storm Ellen hit. Branches and entire trees have fallen down, roofs have blown off, fences have been blown down and electricity has been lost all over the country. We have been hit harder than usual. The storms off the Atlantic usually hit the west of the country first and they are weakened by the time they reach Tipperary. Still, we got off lightly. We did not lose electricity as many nearby homes did. Along with the gusting winds, we had thunder and lightening and rain off and on throughout the days and nights. There are many branches to pick up. Things blew all over the place. Small dead animals and dead birds are strewn everywhere. They were tossed and smashed into walls and trees. The roads are lined with huge broken trees and branches. Men and machines are working to cut them into manageable pieces. I rang Tommie to see how he was after the big storm. He said he did not hear a thing. He slept like a baby all though the worst of the winds. He said “Giving these storms a name like Ellen is a trick to make us less frightened. Sure, we all know an Ellen, don’t we?” 13 September Michael stopped in the road. His pick-up truck was pulling a closed trailer with a bull in it. He was taking the bull to another farm where it would be turned out into a field with females. He shut off his engine. He was in no hurry. As we spoke, with me standing on the road and him sitting inside in his truck, the bull began to throw himself around. The trailer rocked from side to side. The force of the bull’s weight thrashing around inside the trailer made the truck move. Even with the hand brake on, Michael’s truck was getting pushed and jolted along. I could not believe that the truck could be rammed forward by the sheer force of a bull in the back. Michael was neither surprised nor worried about the energetic antics of the bull. We continued our conversation until another vehicle came along. Michael told me, “We have to move now because We Are Blocking The Road With Our Words.” Erica Van Horn is an American artist (and writer, editor, printer, bookmaker, and publisher) long transplanted to Ireland where she runs Coracle Press with her husband Simon Cutts. Her outsider’s acumen is trained on the minutiae of daily life, collecting visual and textual details of what is often overlooked or seemingly insignificant. The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn, was shown at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in 2010, where there is an archive of her books and papers. This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme Becoming Landscape at Close-Up Cinema, 28 April 2024.