Stanotte, dopo una nevicata, girando per Amsterdam. Il parco, uno spettacolo che ricorda un po’ “l’annee derniere a Mariembad”… la selva oscura e io, lo zombi che ne esce…

The 2nd of December in the seenaatzaal of the University of Utrecht, unfortunately on invitation only…

Massimo Benvegnu is a writer. He keeps a column on Amsterdam Weekly about film. He gives a workshop in film writing, in the sense of writing about film… If there is anyone interested…

Well should be the time that new people write about film and make film review, having seen the provincialism and the sheer incompetence of many column in the news here in Holland.

Good luck to Massimo!

more info in .pdf

Hello People,
You can enjoy some of Cinesol Production clips on our vimeo channel. Just hook into http://vimeo.com/cinemasolubile. Is fast, also if the original quality, to be enjoyed into a good dark cinema on a big screen with other eyes with you, in the dark, sharing the experience… is another thing :)

Be adviced that you will not find from here clips from cinema solubile, that have been destroyed the evening of the performance. Some bootlegs appeared during the years, and we like to remember that is against the rules of honor of Cinema Solubile to revive your pieces and use them again. They die the evening they are shown. If you can find them around, be aware, what you are seeing is a dead film ghost.

A twisted story: a young man asks his girlfriend to “be kind” to his dodgy boss while he is dreaming to overrule his power and had strange hallucinations with mystical undertones. The boss invites the couple for a pizza and brings his mother along. The events unfolds to a darker end…

An exercise in no-budget style. Shoot in a week in the summer 2008 in Amsterdam. Mixes images taken with P150, photo-camera and digital SLR. The soundtrack contains original material performed for the film.

First short film written and directed by me not to be “solved” in a cinema solubile.
With: Maddalena Fragnito de Giorgio, Francis North, Vittorio Casanova and Dini Mosch Hendriks.

Photographed by Pietro Durante, recorded by Cecilia Dino, Costumes by Sara Bartesaghi Gallo and music includes Hansko Fisser, Dose Zero and The Stooges…

Since no budget film rely on people and all they get is glory please see the film till the end titles to get them all and give back your thanks…

I decided that a film is there to be seen and that all the rest is not interesting that much. All these festivals are obsolete anyway…

So Doppio Nero, the first real cinesol production film is being uploaded on vimeo, right now for anyone to watch.

I hope the quality will be good enough. Remember that is shot in DV to look odd and is edited to be seen on big screen (if you don’t mind).

The film is available on DVD if you like to project it, just contact me directly… Any suggestion, comment or rant is welcome :)

Back from a full force full days in the Orkz, the (h)ospital venue for the centenary edition of the Cinema Solubile of this winter. I will not repeat here all I have said in the previous posts about it, and pass to give space to the effort and the fragments of 11 brave film makers and to their work.

DISCLAIMER: Also this time, being alone in doing the speaker, the futurist professor and the film i have lost many bits and pieces of information. So please if I misspelled your name, forgot some detail or have no possibility of quoting you right, use your email program and write me the corrections, I’ll be happy to be your slave and fill them in.

Note on the following that the jury, composed by two hand picked random viewers that did a terrific work in keeping track of the evening wave of creativity, have given a star vote to a film expressing 3 votes (top 3 films). On this the audience have expressed, raising their hand, their own vote, that I report here by.

THE MAKERS vs THE FILMS

Kasper
(4 vp)
Kasper surprised us the first evening with a sort of multimedia equivalent of a garbage assembled air gtr and switches, piped through a mic and a sort of computer processor, a very funky coordinate of recycled hardware and software that sounded like… a guitar played with a hammer?
It was a wonderful noise add to the evening and I hope to get the bootleg soon (as for ll the first evening, i saw someone recording).
His film title I cannot remember had something to do with steel flowers. The film was good. I loved especially the flower. Kasper played with the orchestra with fun and is a great chap to add color to the show. Good to have you around!

Bernard
(* + 10vp)
“love turns to hate when you cannot see my eyes”.
Strong, psycotic, solipsistic, deformant, geometrical decline of a feeling into the opposite. Rage and obsessivenes in both the extremes of feeling. A quite futurist piece, very unbalanced, visually strong. A favorite of the audience and jury alike.

Michael
(9 vp)
“langzaam”
Very good acting, direction and concept. Waiting. Satisfaction about of ghostlike activityes. Performing a ritual. Michael adds a very variable dynamic touch to the evening, with his short movie and also with the playing. From painful noise to graciously distorted mandolin. He has many colors to give and we get also the picture.

Jan
(** + 16 vp)
“up to you”
Postmodern, self referential, lost, desperately funny. Jan is a great performer and we discover here that he can be next Jim Carry too: is face is rubber! Jan gets here the palm of the winner of the contest and also a small prize of a wine bottle that disappears and gets found back just in time to avoid him to pay a round at the bar. Good as usual the expressive layer added by the live-performed theremin.

Valken
(16 vp)
Poetic, dark, cold or very hot, a collection of beautiful shots made with mobile phone (i guess) of life after the fall of western civilization. So in this case very much futurist in spirit. Logs, cattle, cats, mud, repetitions, rituals. The message: live and don’t bother. I am actually looking forward to that. Great movie, possibly my personal favorite. Also the audience voted massively for it. It was a slap on public expectations not on the taste.

fredd
(* + 10 vp)
“the art of travel”
Hacked in less than one hour just before the show. It got many more votes it deserved. The trick? A very good recording of stone cutters singing under the sun in Puglia 1957, that I took from Lomax archives (hey don’t sue me, I have bought the CD original AND you stole the singing too). Soundscape is also in this case more than 50% of the result :). Other component a layer of mouth made bromfiets noises and some shady camera movements. And that’s it, here you have the ultimate road movie. The art of travel with your own lazyness. Anti-futurist.

Hansko
(* + 9 vp)
Hansko’s lanterna magica storytelling does keep the audience nailed on their seat. He sits with his laptop and starts a slideshow with his own illustrations while the music he composed for the film plays directly on the sound forge timeline. Hansko’s expression and storytelling conveys secure the feeling of urgency in the story. He reads from a book and takes his time to match the images. I watch the faces of the first line of viewers in the light reflexed from the screen they look, lost and fascinated. I seem the only one still believing is theatrical, they all into the film’s story, taken from this mislukte Hemmelin’ flute-maker.

Avik
(5 vp)
“Rob zombi”
Shot with a love for the rhythm of cinema and it’s possibilities Avik puts together a funny divertissement with the genre of zombi college movie. His main actor is well directed and casted and his expressions are perfect for the over-the-line hommage to Ed Wood. A great attempt to destroy anything holy in the art of film, but maybe too few in the audience appreciated the framing. Well I did. The shoulder shot of Rob trying to catch the fugitive shows the hand of a master.

Marcus
(2 vp)
“the art of war?”
Marcus is a kind man and shot is first film. He shot it directly in the camera, and was a great poetic film, about people, and things he love. The camera refused to cooperate and lost all between the first shot (a head saying “hello”) and the last (a kid saying “goodbye”). A perfect metaphor for the 100 years of futurism. To show something Marcus recorded 5 minutes of still in the exhibition space close to the cinema just before we started. Was a very good excuse to have a great musical improvisation by the unorosso orchestra. While smashing the tape Marcus managed to cut his hand and dripped some blod on the fragments of the previous films like to seal a pact between all makers, a bond. Marcus could have been a futurist soviet poet. I love you man!

Sander
(15 vp)
“I am old enough to masterbate”
Sander did a live cinema show. Now you grin and think bad. No way. He distributed some words between the audience and let them read aloud the camera while he was sampling the video. THen made the images play on screen with the orchestral improvisation and my reading of them to the apotheosis of pollution. Not a hebrew/catholic view on masturbation. It was like the tarot’s tower exploding in joy. No one flead, and was a good fun. Plus the fun has a added layer. The title he has got says “masterbate” not “masturbate”. So it is all a game of words? And what had in the end Sander done? He mastered his “bate” to have us all, as fishes, eat the hook.

Alberto
(* + 11 vp)
The title for Alberto was “Quixotic”.
You can immediately see from his film that the young generation of filmakers has a passion for documentary. To make a film for Alberto means to go around and use people to “act” a something. The quest for “Quixotic”. Pasolini meets Jarmush. A keen eye to typecasting, a funny use of himself as an actor, a strong concept and a speedy editing. One of the best artifacts we have destroyed so far. A little poetry would bring it to the next level. And having known Alberto, he is a man that will hunt the poet in himself to the better end of the path.

CREDITS The MUSIC

Unorosso have been:
Bass Alblas — bass
Fausto Casara — drums
Jan Klug — pataphone and theremin
Federico Bonelli — voices
and guest performances of
Kasper van de Hook — “name your thing here” and self assembled electronics
Michael “defenestrated” — mandolin and effects
?? — last evening we had also a bike and some bass by someone and i forgot his name…

Location
ORKZ Cinema Groningen, a five star cinema and a location populated by nice people

Weather
ICE/Snow/rain and some rays of sun

soon there will be pictures….

Thanks to Jan Klug and to the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen we have been able to organize for the 100 years of the Futurist Manifesto another edition of Cinema Solubile, our small temporary autonomous zone format for cinematic creativity.

The recourrence will be double, because it will also recur the 10th year anniversary of “UNOROSSO”, the improvisation poetry reading project kept up by Fausto Casara and Federico “il cane” since the 1999 futurist manifesto anniversary in Rome (Italy). You can ear some of our recordings on the still not dead website on myspace if you like, yeah I know, myspace sucks…

The Event will be split in two evenings.
the first evening is the 10th, were the 11 makers will be introduced to our audience and to the futurist message. You will be welcomed by the resident unorosso orchestra with sounds, historical recordings, poetical readings and a dynamic lecture by Federico “il cane” Bonelli about the importance of futurism in post tidal ecumenism of the XXIst century. At the end of the evening the makers will put in the hat their one-liner title for a short film and after a sacrifice to the robotic muses they will pick from Marinetti’s hat their destiny and depart with their own task.

In the second evening, the 11th of february, the short films will be presented to the audience and thereafter destroyed. The unorosso orchestra will stay available to the makers for eventual live sonorization of the films and to provoke the audience with more contemporary poetic terrorism acts.

the chosen location for the event is he RKZ bios in het Oude RKZ, Emmastraat
15 in Groningen

---

The Frank Mohr
The FMI is named after Frank Mohr (1931-1998), cultural advisor to the city and province of Groningen and chairman of Academy Minerva and the Prins Claus Conservatory advisory boards.

Frank Mohr was a fervent advocate of independence and innovation within art education in North Netherlands, and of deepening knowledge through collaboration between art and scientific education.

Frank Mohr Instituut
Radesingel 6
9711 EJ Groningen
The Netherlands

Tel. +(31) 50 595 11 50

I received note today from Daniele about this experiment…

Zeigeist Maschine is a transformer. It holds and represents a process of transformation. The process is made by people, encoded into software, computed by recycled hardware, elaborated by free software: interprets, expresses and computes knowledge of various sorts.

Zeitgeist re-uses words. Freeing them from copyrighted press with a cutter. It needs an introspective mind to dig into the surrounding semantic spaces. To induce the current time “soul” the Machine has to be fed. We assume that poetry (in any form) is the only definitive approach to existence and the will of producing poems is part of the zeitgeist. To begin the operation we need a social gathering, a public space, sound vibrations and other factors. The Zeitgeist Maschine is an operation and the history of its doing defines it more than the plan it has been scripted from. Fulfillment is not necessarily the scope of the operation. Success is determined by its poetry. So to say a-posteriori.

The operation is composed of 3 phases:

primo atto (first phase)
A selected group of people are invited to a open gathering. They are requested to bring a periodical, a news paper or a magazine they would like to contribute to the operation.

Around a table, with cutters, scissors, and other sorts of blades they will be asked to tear the periodic apart, to free the words they like from the tyranny of copyrighted media and scripted policies, from lies the press seeds into our life consciously and unconsciously through advertisement. Operators will be allowed to express their inner poetry in freedom, cutting out from the raw material _whatever they like_ and make their poems with it.

They must do so in a state of calm, disregarding any conscious thought about the content. Poems made in this moment by our guests have to be assembled freely to fulfill each participant’s aesthetic principles and poetic sensibilities.

[In our first exhibition this operation has been performed by F.B. and Carlo Prelz during the first day of the Piksel convention, on a half empty table in a room full of noise and machinery...]

At the end of the given time and with joy the poets will discharge the fragments with whom they have composed their poems of choice into the machine. Such a machine is called Pneumolisolemmigraph (”wind breaking word writer”) or ZPM (Zeitgeist Poesie Maschine). The maschine is activated by the master of ceremony. The ceremony ends.

secondo atto (second phase)
The Pneumolisolemmigraph operates the following way:

A wind making fan is controlled by a recycled computer running linux. The process of construction determinated that the fan has a inverted propeller chopping the material instead of a fan blowing them. We left it this way, we believe that this impossibility of handling poetic material with care is inherent to the nature of our Zeitgeist.

Images are processed by the Pneumolisolemmigraph with a custom re-synthesis algorithm.

For the re-synthesis algorithm we had started with the idea of using children’s images and ancient drawings, but that would have given an effect of continuity with the past. The past is instead already chopped by aggressive nihilification of 70 years of consumerist culture. We use noise instead. Images made by the process flow on a LCD screen. The sounds of the machinery are remixed by samples derived from the freesound.org archives by a custom designed patch in pure-data.

terzo atto (third phase)
In our code-dreams we would have freed the words from the ZPM in a final small performance. De-activated by the poetic team, ZPM will finally sleep and the words that have been used will be freed again and distributed to the audience as a tool for further poetic actions. Technical instabilities and time factors have made this operation unnecessary.

The liberation of the remaining poems in the bay of Bergen is given as a task to the curators of the exhibition for the day of its conclusion.

Federico Bonelli and Robert Fischer

Documentation:
ZPM has been set up first at USF (Bergen, Norway) for the opening of the Piksel 2008 Festival.

The wooden box, in platan wood recycled from a previous production has been made by Hansko Visser at “De Mislukte Zigeuner BV” (demisluktezigeuner.com) musical-soul-woodmaking atelier in Groningen.

Some pictures from the poems made to load the machine with are included. Poems were made with the help of Carlo E. Prelz. I have to thank also Alejandra Perez Nunez for “being there” and offering her help.

Zeitgeist has been included into the Piksel exhibition, and can be visited in Bergen at the 3.14 gallery until the end of january (http://www.stiftelsen314.com/)

An interview with us, realized by GISS.TV for the Piksel festival is available online at http://giss.tv/dmmdb/piksel08

Hot time in late november are forecasted in the city of Spoleto Gallery of Modern Art. A new edition of fucina-off. Against all odds, massive culture cuts from the central government and political social and economic depression our friends in Spoleto will stand again with some good material, performances, media art, visuals, music and a platform for discussion. I will be there in the first week with a workshop and some presentations. Be there or be no where :)

SPOLETO, CITY GALLERY OF MODERN ART

from 24 November to 8 December 2008
Symposium of the emerging arts:
because from encounters,
confrontations, fusions and interactions, new forms and contents
can emerge, unexpected, original and never easily classifiable.
Fucina.off offers the time and the space for a creative
exchange between artists, public, students and critics, around
various topics related to the contemporary art production.

Creative programming and interactive systems
Bodies and new environments
Online communication
The new frontiers of the arts
Art and society

for more informations check: www.fucinaoff.net

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