Séance
“Sights and Sounds are arranged in counterpoint, spirits of memories are summoned. Manifestations are performance and affections are reproduced. The past is the counterpoint of fiction and the present.”
This screening + performance programme is a collaboration between filmmaker Tzuan Wu and sound artist and musician Fangyi Liu, with three sections: film screening, cine-concert, and sound performance with image. It begins with Wu’s solo film screening, then Liu will provide a live score improvising with the images. Using fragments of found-footage, travelogue, and diary films, Wu will join in to create a dialogue between sight and sound.
Film Screening
DISEASE OF MANIFESTATION宣(言)癖 (2011)
9:01 mins
Video
The passionate political manifestos or the small scale manifestos/ manifestations in our everyday lives, can be consider as the compulsory desire to maintain, to repeat, and to reproduce the manifestos, aiming to achieve an unachievable substance. Melancholia in the Freudian context is defined as the subject tries to maintain the lost object even more then the subject itself, and this causes the notion of disorder. The act of manifestation is to rupture with the present world and the compulsion to change it. Here comes the paradox between outward-looking and inward-looking perspectives of the notion of revolution, which is the initiation of this project, manifestations as the infectious psychosis.
QUOUSQUE EADEM? (OR A SELF-PORTRAIT) (2012)
9:03 mins
Video/ Super 8mm
When one is holding a camera, it means changes in the way of seeing, distortion of the perception. It’s an opaque state of intermediacy. The image made in this way is also non-transparent as is, changeable but repeating, just as the perception of everyday lives and to the selves, is hard to determine and trap in the stalemate. This work started as a personal project, a one-man home video, which represents the certain stage of my life, and it was produced only for my own. While started working on it again, I changed the initial goal. Reassemble with narration, HD images and digitalized Super 8mm footages, to transform the (pseudo-) video diaries to a video essay about my reflections on the interrelationship between vision, memory, and the process of image (re-) production.
YI-REN (The Person of Whom I Think) (2015)
13:45 mins
Super 8mm to digital
Yi-Ren is a collaged love letter made of various sources. Such as my super8 mm diaries, karaoke videos, and found-footage from Kang-Chien Chiu (1940-2013)’s films, and poems. It is also an act of homage and a queer reading of Chiu. Reassemble, manipulate the materials, and melt the ready-made and the personal into one. Or, maybe the personal emotions and experiences are actually all borrowed from someone and somewhere. Like the line “my moans have a bit of Hollywood in them” suggests, our emotions would not exist without acting, or movies we have seen.
Cine-concert / Live Scored Screening
Proxy of Heaven (2015)
7:31 mins
Super 8mm to digital
Documenting, exploring and collage the touristic images of different religious spaces, in Czech, France, and Taiwan. Passing through these passages of the holy experience, witnessing the “memento mori” and the desire of happiness brings us back to the mundane human world.
World’s Odds and World’s Ends (2014)
12:01 mins
Digital Video
An experimental ethnography of tourists. Documenting the touristic activities in the medieval town Cesky Krumlov of Czech Republic. Using time-lapse photography to capture the repetition of the paths, the action, and the faces. The alchemy is the metaphor of their psychodynamic, and their doomed quest of the freedom in the odds and ends, at the end of the world.
WE CAN’T GROW UP TOGETHER (2010)
3:33 mins
16mm to digital
Freaks also grow up from little as well. But the things we had lost in time differ. That’s the reason we can’t grow up together. The film was shot on 16mm, based on a childhood (false) memory, transformed into fantasies and symbolic objects, and performed in a public environment. The elements in the film are both the markers of emotion and time, with montage, the outside world, and inner scenery came across to each other.
Some events seem to be not important at the moment might become a crucial milestone in a personal sense. Through retelling and rewriting the memory, the pointless emotions turns to the flowing memory and being able to preserve.
Biography
Wu Tzu-An is a Taiwanese experimental filmmaker and artist based in New York. He collages different materials and textures of the moving image, from digital, analogue to animation. He applies many DIY techniques and uses the heterogeneity of the images themselves as the methodology. His works have been shown worldwide, including BFI Flare (London), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherland), CROSSROADS (San Francico), Xposed International Queer Film Festival (Berlin), Golden Harvest Film Festival (Taiwan), MixNYC (New York). He was awarded the jury prize at Festival of Different and Experimental Cinema (Paris). Besides of these, he is also a member of the cinema collective <The Other Cinema> and the co-founder of countercultural zine group <後母Post-Motherism>.
Liu Fangyi is a sound artist and musician based in Kaohsiung. His work focuses on noise collage and field recordings. Fangyi uses objects and voice as source material in his improvised performance, and often collaborates with different musicians and artists around the world. He creates a Facebook group called Cochlea and to network among musicians from different fields and to new audiences. Fangyi has initiated several performances to promote new audio experiences.