Monica in the South Seas
Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.
Mika Taanila
Sami van Ingen
Also Directed by Mika Taanila
Woody observation case in Helsinki through early 1950s newsreel footage. Four locations in shots, accompanied by four tape loops and four locked-groove vinyls.
In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.
The Finnish artist Mika Taanila manipulates found scientific footage - a registration of an eclipse that took place in 1945 in northern Finland - that he shows in both positive and negative.
Early 1950s newsreel laboratory marker films used for indicating effects like wipes, dissolves and fade-outs in the work print, now freed from their utilitarian practice into a fantasy realm.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
A compilation from the independent record label Bad Vugum founded in 1987, originally based in Oulu, Finland. Bad Vugum consists of indie rock, noise rock, experimental rock, electronica, hardcore punk, and thrash metal. The label's name comes from an epithet invented by Captain Beefheart, heard uttered during his song "Sue Egypt". Many releases were championed by the BBC radio DJ John Peel.
Suddenly there is an enormous amount of time. At first everything is possible. Anything might happen. Gradually the possible becomes impossible.
Also Directed by Sami van Ingen
A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
An amateur set of images, an attempt to make a political documentary about the middle class revolution turns into an essay on the relationship between perception and interest.
Film by Sami van Ingen
Hammu is the name of the hamster I had as a child. It seemed it was my only friend and being to identify with. One day it disappeared from the cage and was never to be seen again, that marked the end of my childhood, of unreserved trust and commitment. This work is a visualisation of the memories I have about the event, of obsession, tediousness and loss.
The Sequent of Hanna Ave. is the result of my re-workings of some experimental film practices and my enquiries in to the phenomena of the movement-illusionism in the film form. By combining found footage, hand processing and hi-end digital technology, I elevate a few mundane gestures to a new perceptible wholeness, and give some fat fingers and a c-cassette tape all the attention, grace and drama they deserve.
Chance incidents of life and in the darkroom collide, as found footage film strips take new shape under a flashlight. Poetic gestures in the source material and the manipulative body movements of the filmmaker form a new take on depicted relationships, a rite of passage and the artefacts of the process itself. As always gestures become actions, and these determine how we live our lives.
Film by Sami van Ingen
Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.
A film by Sami van Ingen of Bruce Baillie
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.