Abstracted and Emotional Architectures – IFFR 2025

This review considers analogue 16mm films in the Rotterdam International Film Festival; shorter, marginal works experimenting with form; Tiger Award winners; and terminates with a deep dive into the trauma, the emotional architecture resident in the Ukrainian Cinema of Sergii Masloboishchykov. 

Blake Williams’ presentation at Worm curated the expanded visual music of Cinema of the Spectacles. The program framed classic 16mm experimental films with Anaglyph (Paul Sharits, Hy Hirsch), Pulfrich (Ken Jacobs, Takashi Ito) ChromaDepth (Kerry Laitala, Jeff Scher) and Diffraction glasses (Jodie Mack). The audience is given a handful of four paper glasses and is asked to switch between them for the appropriate films by Williams. Sharits’ 3D Movie (1975) consists of abstracted animated fields of coloured lights that ripple and swarm, accentuated by red/green glasses that both separate and enhance these movements. Jacobs’ piece Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1990) recycles a Lumiere Brothers’ found footage tracking shot from a century earlier. The Pulfrich effect covers one eye with a polarised filter to slow image registration on the filtered eye, the lag creating a three-dimensional depth. Jeff Scher’s Turkish Traffic (1998) separates layers of hand-painted colour and Turkish traffic with ChromaDepth glasses. The musical score by Shyam Brass Band Mere Hathon Mein, motors the image rhythm. ChromaDepth glasses contain filters that move red closer to the eye than the blue hues which appear further away. Jodie Mack’s Let Your Light Shine (2013) is enhanced with diffraction glasses which multiply the colour and patterning of the original 16mm film. Her film frame is strategically designed, as the diffractions fill the black spaces Mack has left in the original pre-filtered film.

The two Dinamo Embodiment/Disembodiment programs consisted of selected films from the Dinamo group which formed in Rotterdam some festivals ago. The group consists of worldwide distributors of experimental and innovative work. Each distributor nominates one film independently from their catalogue for screening under the embodiment/disembodiment theme. This is the sole programming process. No need to negotiate with other distributors. Bill Morrison’s materialist resuscitation of Eve Tangay in Wild Girl (2021) was submitted by Re:Voir. Pip Chodorow, from Re:Voir, is now based in South Korea where there is a growing interest in such experimentation. He was the one distributor present during the screening. In the two programs 2020 (2021) by Friedl vom Gröller and Razor Head (1984) by Tom Chomont were presented in their original 16mm format, the first submitted by Sixpackfilm, the other by Light Cone. Both films explore acetate film’s granular quality. Vom Gröller uses forensic black and white views of teeth to respond to their Covid masking in 2020 and Chomont’s lyrical, colourful homoeroticism explores and re-contextualises human skin.

Another program of 16mm film was Fine Grain. Whilst the previously discussed examples recycle older, historic films, this program showcased recent work, with two world premieres. Unfortunately, these films also suffered the most from the 16mm medium’s emerging technical precarity. Unearthed by Karl Lemieux (2024) most directly fits the title with the materiality of the black and white imagery echoing the decomposing landscape of the discarded Soviet Union industrial Murmansk Oblast, considered the most polluted landscape on the planet. 

Milena Fina on the Phone

In Am Telefon Milena Fina (Milena Fina on the Phone) Albert Sackl’s interest in 3D is relatable back to the Cinema of the Spectacles program, but here, approached without glasses, and produced completely in-camera on one strip of film. Sackl moves a Bolex camera from left to right along a short rail, gathering two frames to the right, two frames to the left. This method reproduces the two side by side positions of the eye. Like animation under a rostrum camera, given that 4000 frames equals about three minutes, this operation is repeated interminably. Two bodies collide in flickering agitation. These agitated images do provide a hypervigilant 3D effect reminiscent of the flickering instability Paul Bush propagated in Episodes from the Life of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2001). 

The Individual by Sara Sowell is a two-screen work, which required a very short intermission to set up after the single projections. This was a playful re-appraisal of Dadaism through a Feminist lens that sees Marcel Duchamp reveal a new identity for himself as a woman. Man Ray’s autobiography and his rayograph technique informed the film’s photographic aesthetics. Sowell’s black and white granular home-processed visuals were enhanced by the dynamic interplay between the two screens. Kathy Acker, Rosalind Krauss and Claude Cahun provide further textual support. Cahun’s androgyny was particularly useful.

The other short was the abstracted Skeyesee by Jimmy Schaus. This was screened three times because of out of focus projection issues, the third projection appeared to be a digital back-up version. This was unverifiable because the technical pauses ate up all the Q&A time. The presenter wrapped up the session immediately and apologetically with a funerial call for more 16mm projection to keep this ‘old technology’ alive and to avoid such situations in the future. 

A Patriot of These Woods

Another 16mm short worth identifying was Karel Doing’s practice in A Patriot of These Woods. Doing’s phytograms explore biological contact directly onto film emulsion. This practice extends Man Ray’s Rayograph contact printing traceable in The Individual and Stan Brakhage’s Bosch inspired The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). In contrast, in The Garden of Electric Delights, Billy Roisz extends Brakhage’s film into a digital direction through AI and digital manipulation and an eventual focus on the pixel rather than film’s grain. 

Henri Hills’ digital Commute (2024) plays as a sustained piece of visual music. Hills’ precise editing squeezed its unrelenting rhythm out of tracking sequences of train tracks. This collection of moving train tracks, with its pauses and bifurcations doubled as a visual score. 

Other notable historic shorts appeared in programs around Katya Raganelli’s films on Lotte Reiniger, Lotte Reiniger – Hommage an die Erfinderin des Silhouetten Films (1997) and Valie Export, VALIE EXPORT – Portrait einer Filmregisseurin (1981). All of Raganelli’s documentaries were productively placed inside a feminist project by the festival. Export’s performative video work, including a close-up masturbation on her own body, even astonished Raganelli. The Lotte Reiniger short shadow plays were instructive to see in the one program along with Raganelli’s contextual documentary that placed Reiniger socially inside the inner circle of innovative early cinema. 

Cast of Shadows

In contrast, two documentaries on John Lilley and Robert Flaherty discounted and re-contextualised the work of fallen creative luminaries. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens re-evaluated the celebrated experimental neuroscience on animal intelligence by Jon Lilley in the ‘60s. Cast of Shadows by Sami van Ingen, with access to the Robert Flaherty archives, stressed the committed supportive work of his partner and daughters while noting his own wanderlust and lack of fiscal discipline. It was insightful to hear that Nanook of the North (1922) was initially a critical and financial flop in North America but gained its momentum to prominence from unexpected European success. Despite this critical success financially, it was not.

Although my motivation in Rotterdam is to access the more marginal works not accessible elsewhere, and the precarity of the 16mm scan above certainly pursues that train, several appealing works ended up prize winners.

Fiume o Morte!

The Tiger Award winner Fiume o Morte! by Igor Bezinović caught my attention early as a creative form of documentary storytelling. The film enlisted strategies where the unspoken, erased and invisible can still excavate a truth. The project drills down into the 16-month 1919 fascist occupation of Fiumo, now Rijeka, Croatia’s third largest city, by Italian poet, aristocrat, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio. He was an inspiration for the later emergence of Mussolini’s fascism. The film begins by interviewing city shoppers who remember nothing of Annunzio’s reign and his gutting of all the town’s bridges. Some subtle moments of recognition are found and these people are invited to be actors in re-enactments of events of this period, illustrated by archival photographs and movie material that locate action sites. These co-incidental actors rise to the occasion and through uniforms and briefings offer appropriate gestures, postures and grimaces that enhance the dad’s army-like events of the occupation. There are moments of creative humanity in the documentary’s telling. A soldier actor standing in a Fuimo/Rijeka street is approached by a passer-by to comment on his handsome profile, which will undoubtedly find him a good wife. He whispers he is only an actor. Another three or so second archive sequence of Vietnamese marching soldiers is repeated over and over to help illustrate a brutal racist event involving this group. This was the only imagery available. Such reflexive line blurring adds a level of engaging authenticity to the unravelling of events. 

I identified with the emotional architecture mapped out by this historic documentary, intensifying my viewing experience. My own Dutch history was invisible to others here but still played itself out. Outside the cinema visceral traces of the church bells ringing through Rotterdam’s streets on Sunday uncannily inhabited my body. These were sonic traces of visits to my grandparent’s barge as an eight-year-old, a barge moored near the vertical bridge Joris Ivens documented in De Brug (The Bridge, 1928).

Anka Gujabidze’s Temo Re won the Tiger Short Competition with Adrian Paci’s Merging Bodies and Lin Htet Aung’s A Metamorphosis. It was another effective form of storytelling. At 50 minutes it is hardly a short. Its use of black and white photographs rather than moving images was reminiscent of Chris Marker’s use in La Jetée (1962). The film is based on Temo Rekhviashvili’s Courier’s Tales and the writer plays himself in the film as a struggling unemployed actor in a precarious gig economy of a different register to the one operating in California’s Silicon Valley. He survives as a 100km a day scooter courier in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which has seen better days. In the film, Temo tells a friend he is publishing a novel about his daily adventures. 

Merging Bodies blurs the boundaries between workers and machines into the kind of abstraction Stan Brakhage achieved in filming inside a glass ashtray in the much longer Text of Light (1974) The factory space, liquid aluminium, steam, movement and sound, and the washing of hands are lit by luminescent light. The last shot catches the reflections of a seemingly morphing face on an aluminium sheet that recalled the blur of Francis Bacon’s screaming Popes. A Metamorphosis documents Aung’s experience of growing up with state television. Imagery includes a glass in a digital cage, curtains that only shift slightly, the dictator’s house window, the Myanmar flag on a dark sky. Images from television are re-shaped into a counter broadcast verging on a collagist abstraction whose dread remains readable but contained.

La Durmiente

La Durmiente by Maria Inês Gonçalves captures a historic moment in Portuguese history which is re-enacted by children of the same age as the 10-year-old Beatriz who was due to become Queen during the dynastic crisis of 1383 which ended her life. The work is shot at the Monastery of Sancti Spiritus in Toro, where Beatriz’s tomb is situated. This film was selected to compete for the next European Short Film Award. The Monastry’s architecture frames this playful workshopping of a past situation and life. This attitude to documentary also drove the success of Fiume o Morte! 

This conscription of children to fathom history brings me to the feature-length Josephine the Singer and the Mice People (1994) by Sergii Masloboishchykov, part of the impressive retrospective of his work framed under the title The Political (Un)Conscious.¹ Hording children, dressed as if occupying a Dickensian novel, run amok in the regal architecture of an impressive historic ornamented theatre. Based on a short story by Frantz Kafka, their wayward behaviour is driven in anticipation of Josephine’s remedial singing. In this cacophony Josephine’s hesitancy is practiced and she finally emits a Kafkaesque surrealistic squeak as a healing act. For the director, the nationalism emotionally plumbed here through creative fiction is in search of Ukraine’s ‘soul’. 

This film was constructed at the time of Ukraine’s new independence from Russia at an emerging ‘infantile stage’, in the early 1990s. Later work processed further historic developments. In the documentary The World of Sasha Shumovich (1997) Masloboishchykov pays tribute to the cameraman of this film, murdered not long after Josephine the Singer and the Mice People’s completion. Collegiate descriptions paint an honest, unique, creative open character, whose personality you realise seeps through the emotional timbre of Josephine the Singer and the Mice People. An important collaborator in his theatrical projects is his partner Alla Serhiiko who repeatedly delivers Masloboishchykov an emotional core through her facial resonance, reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s later work. 

Ukrainian Argument

The combined program of Nevseremos! People of Maidan (2005), Ukrainian Argument (2014) and Invasion (2023) bled into each other as historic traces of Ukraine’s immediate history. At times, the history that Masloboishchykov excavates is only two seconds old. This had been the first time these three films had been shown together, thanks to Vseliubska’s programming. The first phase’s dialogic structure teases out the positions of the voices from Ukraine’s east and west. Masloboishchykov captures the mechanics of dialogue. This is not about accuracy but about kernels of hope and direction registered on the faces occupying Maidan. This fragmented dialogue is more acutely recorded in Ukrainian Argument nine years later. There is a sense of anticipatory energy smouldering in Maidan that Masloboishchykov’s camera captures. Events take place, weddings, church services and speculative piano playing on a rickety machine. Locals contest a future like scholars at an Orwellian science-fiction convention. Hope mutates in front of us into multiple forms, forcing us viewers into a gamut of post screening processing. This cinema keeps working on you for weeks, like Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) did for me after its first viewing. Masloboishchykov’s triptych terminates with Invasion, a case study of acts of resistance. A wounded husband needs an ambulance in an invaded Ukrainian zone, his partner tells the camera. There is resistance to sending an ambulance to such a contested space. Eventually, help is negotiated but the ambulance is disabled, and the driver killed, his bloodied body straddled over the steering wheel of the mangled van. We have entered a space beyond dialogue and argument about right and wrong into dread and pain. A caring male body is offered up at its altar. This is powerful, incisive, sustainably human filmmaking.

These phases are taken up and processed through two women in Masloboishchykov’s latest fiction Yasa. Danya, Hanna’s son and Darka’s lover, died in 2014 during the Revolution of Dignity. Hanna’s Activism during the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution had delivered a productive government position that had witnessed corruption. As the women get closer, Hanna becomes more aware of the mistakes she has made, which the next generation now must address. A pervasive, smouldering guilt lies around Danya’s loss, now readable around the pervasive male loss of fighting the Russian invasion. The dialogue is between two women, but it is all about the absent sacrificial man. The film begins with Hanna (Alla Serhiiko) standing on a panoramic window ledge, many levels above the ground. A sonic blast knocks out and fragments all of the window glass into an insidious liquid shower. At the film’s end, Hanna stands on the same ledge, this time looking down on a burning landscape below.

Masloboishchykov’s cinema deserves a more extended view than this. The style in his television documentaries is also unique and completely alien to my television viewing. A commentator in the corner of the frame is inserted into a collagic field of illustrations. This open-ended form enables a deeper emotional interpretation than a classic documentary form. Masloboishchykov’s other features and shorts productively further address the national trauma currently being worked through. Given the political shifts currently taking place in Ukraine and Europe, this work was the festival’s highlight.

International Film Festival Rotterdam
30 January – 9 February 2025
https://iffr.com

Endnotes