With Irish experimental filmmaker Donal O'Ceilleachair
Sunday 27th April / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm
Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 film ‘Walking from Munich to Berlin’ interacts on screen with the more recent "With Wind and White Cloud", by Irish filmmaker Donal O´Ceilleachair.
OSKAR FISCHINGER´S "WALKING FROM MUNICH TO BERLIN"
(1927 b&w 16mm silent 5min) Distributed by LightCone Paris
In the Springtime of 1927, Fischinger (better known for his painterly experimental animation pieces) had numerous debts caused partly by the inflation and crisis in Germany. On June the 1st of that same year he left Munich on foot bound for Berlin bringing with him his camera and films. During three and a half weeks he wandered the secondary roads, filming image by image the people he met and the places he passed through.
DONAL O´CEILLEACHAIR´S "WITH WIND & WHITE CLOUD"
(NY 2005 b&w super8 5 min).
Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 film ‘Walking from Munich to Berlin’ was one of the first single-frame films ever made. In the space of three minutes (one camera roll) Fischinger traversed the length of Germany visually articulating the accelerated mode of modern life and anticipating the break-neck speed of the moving image that would come much later with the advent of MTV and television commercials.
In 2003, Donal found himself in Istanbul for the premier CUZCO 1999. Intent on travelling over land to Berlin he made his way on Eastern European trains with a Super 8 camera and a copy of Film Art: An Introduction. He pointed his camera out the window and 14 days, and 3,240 single frame images later (230 per day) this film was complete.
WW&WC is a contemporary homage to Fischinger’s inspired journey; travelling from the eastern tip of Europe and Istanbul’s Bosphorous shores through Eastern Europe to the heart of Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
WW&WC was originally conceived of as a dual projection film comprised of video with superimposed super 8 film projection. The video represents the filmmakers documentation of the ‘real’ while the film, like a dream is closer to his memory of it. This copy displays the video only. Any dreams are 100% the viewers.
JONAS MEKAS´ "LOST LOST LOST"
(1976 16mm b/w & colour 60 minute extract from 180’)
Diaries, Notes and Sketches filmed in 1949-1963. Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas invented the diary form of film-making. Born in Lithuania in 1922, and displaced from his homeland by the Soviet and Nazi invasions. Lost Lost Lost comprises fourteen years of filming, starting from his arrival in America as a political refugee. It documents the New York counterculture of the 50’s and the development of Mekas’ own filming style.
“The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the ground, create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be an exile, how I felt in those years. They describe the mood of a Displaced Person who hasn’t yet forgotten his native country but hasn’t yet gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel, where I begin to find moments of happiness. New life begins ….” Jonas Mekas
“ The borderline is fading between an artifact – an ‘ouvre d’art’, conceived as such, a pure product of stylized imagination – and what can be described as a poet’s account of events; as sincere and as honest as only a poet’s account can be. Maybe Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost has just marked the beginning of a new genre. In the line of Gide, of a Sarte, of a Malraux. But in film.” Antonin J. Liehm, Thousand Eyes.
Experiments in Diary Film is a film-programme by Aoife Desmond for the Experimental Film Club.
