Berwick New Cinema Competition ♝
This programme contains 6 films.
Films by Steve Reinke, Onyeka Igwe, Rajee Samarasinghe and Ja’Tovia Gary
From Harlem to Giverny, patrilineal tales to Artaud, nature will give way to febrile artifice. What dizzying force is this—throwing us between opposites: deafening silence vs. slide-projector clicks; glitch-y celluloid vs. HD; projected futures pressed up against the archive? But there’s calm around the corner—a reprieve from the chaos of subjection. “Can I live?”, one voice enquires, rhetorically. Consider how the subtext to our fervid biopolitical project.
Q&A with filmmakers Steve Reinke and Onyeka Igwe
Libidinal Empathy
Libidinal Empathy is a found footage montage of young men who elicit, in various ways, empathic responses from the viewer that also carry a strongly libidinal charge. Philosopher Levinas speaks about the face, and what it requires of us. —Steve Reinke
It is no small occasion when Steve Reinke lets out three as-yet-unseen videos onto the world. These three works stack upon each other to create a tower with building blocks of beauty, terror, absurdity and logic. Glenn Gould, Antonin Artaud and Nathaniel Dorsky each prompt concise ruminations on febrile topics which seem obvious once spoken but could only have come from Reinke’s unique viewpoint. Terrifying and tender images and ideas spring forth from these concentrated, short bursts of rhetoric and provocation. — Herb Shellenberger
Director
Steve Reinke
Production Countries
Canada United StatesProduction Year
2019Duration
3 mins
Print Contact
Steve Reinke
Video to Placate Artaud
Video to Placate Artaud is a videotape to placate the 20th-century artist Antonin Artaud, who was not very calm. Certainly transgression and nervous energies or violent impulses once went hand-in-hand, but perhaps today requires a calmer, more considered approach. —Steve Reinke
It is no small occasion when Steve Reinke lets out three as-yet-unseen videos onto the world. These three works stack upon each other to create a tower with building blocks of beauty, terror, absurdity and logic. Glenn Gould, Antonin Artaud and Nathaniel Dorsky each prompt concise ruminations on febrile topics which seem obvious once spoken but could only have come from Reinke’s unique viewpoint. Terrifying and tender images and ideas spring forth from these concentrated, short bursts of rhetoric and provocation. — Herb Shellenberger
Director
Steve Reinke
Production Countries
Canada United StatesProduction Year
2019Duration
5 mins
Print Contact
Steve Reinke
Devotional Cinema
The artist is inspired the day after seeing Nathaniel Dorsky’s Arboretum Cycle to make a video engaging with the natural, botanical world. Thinking, as usual, of the difference between poetry and philosophy. —Steve Reinke
It is no small occasion when Steve Reinke lets out three as-yet-unseen videos onto the world. These three works stack upon each other to create a tower with building blocks of beauty, terror, absurdity and logic. Glenn Gould, Antonin Artaud and Nathaniel Dorsky each prompt concise ruminations on febrile topics which seem obvious once spoken but could only have come from Reinke’s unique viewpoint. Terrifying and tender images and ideas spring forth from these concentrated, short bursts of rhetoric and provocation. — Herb Shellenberger
Director
Steve Reinke
Production Countries
Canada United StatesProduction Year
2019Duration
2 mins
Dialogue Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Steve Reinke
the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.
Onyeka Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of auto-fictional response. The artist summons a variety of artistic, literary and personal sources to create a singular biographical document of many strands. the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history’s master narratives using a variety of forms. As witnessed in the choreographed sequence in which Igwe and the British-Nigerian dancer Titilayo Adebayo, both dressed in black, perform a dance that is part-call and response, part-classical chorus in miniature, riff- ing on the story of the artist’s grandfather as told by her grandmother. —Tendai John Mutambu
Director
Onyeka Igwe
Production Countries
Nigeria United KingdomProduction Year
2019Duration
26 mins
Dialogue Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Onyeka Igwe
everyday star
A strange vision caused by intense heat. Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses. —Rajee Samarasinghe
everyday star is a short, silent film by Sri Lankan artist and filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe. Developing his practice over the last decade, Samarasinghe has examined as many different topics just as he’s experimented with different forms of media (16mm, VHS, HD, 4K) and different aspect ratios and image orientations. That is to say that he is a filmmaker who is just as curious about refining the formal and textural qualities of his work as he is curious about his objects of inquiry—migration, animism, violence and ethnography, to name a few.
While Samarasinghe has built up a substantial body of short-form work which has rightly been exhibited and awarded in many international festivals, everyday star strikes as a particularly significant achievement. Shot at a wide aspect ratio of 2.66:1, the film’s lush images stretch out horizontally, framing close-up shots of faces just as effectively as landscape shots. Simply put, Samarasinghe’s digital cinematography is stunning. The images, especially those of the natural world, interface with those of classic, celluloid-purist experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage or Nathaniel Dorsky, but Samarasinghe subverts the traditionalism of these images with digital tools in the same way one could argue he subverts the experimental film canon’s white, Western positioning.
Samarasinghe says everyday star was “inspired by the act of watching light shine through a window onto my father’s decaying body every day during a vicious and prolonged illness which ultimately led to his death in 2008”. Ten years on, he refracts the memory of these powerful moments into a meditation on cosmic light, deep shadow and flickering colour as intrinsic aspects of liminal states and transitional phases. — Herb Shellenberger
Director
Rajee Samarasinghe
Production Countries
Sri Lanka United StatesProduction Year
2018Duration
9 mins
Producer
Print Contact
Rajee Samarasinghe
The Giverny Document (Single Channel)
In this multi-textured cinematic poem, filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes a slew of riotous techniques and materials—from direct animation on archival 16mm film to woman-on-the-street interviews and roiling montage. What emerges is an ecstatic document, as vibrant and dynamic in form as it is politically incisive.
The Giverny Document (Single Channel) is a meditation on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. It moves from the beating heart of metropolitan New York—where Gary shoots interviews on location, deftly conversing with generations of women and girls in Harlem—to the pastoral surrounds of Claude Monet’s eponymous gardens in Giverny, France. Against the verdant backdrop of the latter, Gary interleaves strands of direct animation like momentary glitches or infections into the scene’s bucolic atmosphere. The artist appears in the shot—at times recumbent, sometimes strolling through the historic French gardens. She is a paragon of self-possession, her own muse. She is, in many ways, a compelling riposte to art-history’s servile negress. And through the interpolated footage of the legendary Nina Simone, Gary reminds us that Black femme performance’s creative, virtuosic force is her lodestar—complemented by the febrile animations woven in and out of this forty-minute polyptych. The Giverny Document (Single Channel) unleashes a sensibility at once documentary, musical and painterly, pushing the bounds of abstraction and figuration through its whirling mass of forms, sounds and Black subjects—subjects who live in the wake of slavery’s seismic aftermath. —Tendai John Mutambu
Director
Ja'Tovia Gary
Production Country
United StatesProduction Year
2019Duration
41 mins
Dialogue Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Ja'Tovia Gary