aemi @ PLASTIK Festival 2017

Published date: 25 Mar 2017

SUNDAY 26 MARCH 8:30 PM
Venue: Irish Film Institute

Over the course of its history there have been many that have looked to cinema for the access it gives to a more plastic appreciation of time. In 1923 Elia Faure celebrated cinema for the ways it made of time ‘an instrument’-

“in the cinema time clearly becomes necessary for us […] we play with it at our ease. We can speed it up. We can slow it down. We can suppress it. Indeed I feel it as being formerly part of myself, as enclosed alive, with the very space which it measures and which measures it, within the walls of my brain.”
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Faure dreamed in 1923 of an ‘art of cineplastics’ and, though we’re likely not there yet, many years later Peter Kubelka would talk about how cinema’s unique combining of ‘artefact’ and ‘event’ allows us access to the plastic properties of time. Like many others Kubelka felt the medium of film had a privileged role in this regard, a notion borne out by works like Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (screening here from a 35mm print). With a variety of different media forms, obsolete or otherwise, now at our disposal, we can test rather than accept film’s privileged role in this regard, particularly when looking at the artefacts of digital media made visible in a work like Soda_Jerk’s The Time that Remains or the traces of VHS scans that continue to haunt the works included here by The Duvet Brothers and John Scarlett Davis.

SCREENING PROGRAMME:

Soda_Jerk The Time That Remains (2012) 2-channel digital video / 12 min
Duvet Brothers Pillow Talks (1984) SD Video / 1 min
Duvet Brothers Untitled (1984) SD Video / 1 min
John Scarlett Davis Curtain (198-) SD Video / 17 min​
Bruce Conner Crossroads (1976) 35 mm / 36 min
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Run time: 67 minutes