In Experimenta, two short films explore very different notions of space.
Meridian Plain (2016)
Dir: Laura Kraning | USA | 19 minutes
In the Prologue to her Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno cites Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte du pays de Tendre, a “map of the land of tenderness” that bares the invented territory of her 1654 novel Clélie. Bruno writes that the map “visualizes, in the form of a landscape, an itinerary of emotions... [making] a world of affects visible to us.” In her recent film works, visual artist Laura Kraning has pursued a similar project to Scudéry’s, but rather than inventing new topographies she re-casts historic sites for their imaginary properties (L.A.'s Terminal Island became a smuggler's refuge in Port Noir [2014], while the industrial zone of 34° / -117° [2009] evokes new-age sci-fi). Her films ask: can the memories of 'place' be excavated through a survey of their 'space', and if so, will they become visible to the spectator's eye?
Meridian Plain expands Kraning's project in every possible direction, and for the first time she works from an archive of pre-sourced images. The film begins with a flickering field of grey static, like Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer (1960), but we're soon flung into an unidentified desert terrain. The thrill of Meridian Plain derives from watching Kraning create structural patterns from this world's topography, breaking the contours of the image a hundred times over and matching shapes and lines rather than clear geographical routes. In the film's first movement she creates a juddering montage of the horizon from rapidly alternating angles, sifting through rock as if it were water. Michael Sicinski identifies a "see-saw" rhythm; Holly Willis calls the effect "space-lapse." Then, from macro to micro, Kraning cuts into the edifice and its fault lines, pushing ever-closer into granular formations and, finally, a dissolution into pure texture. On the zoom-out we learn that this remarkable survey is composed of images recorded by NASA's Spirit & Opportunity rovers between 2004 - 2015. Mars plays itself.
Hijacked (2017)
Dir: Shambhavi Kaul | India | 14 mins
In Hijacked, Shambhavi Kaul explores the various forms of 'escape' afforded by air travel, filming on a blacked-out soundstage to simulate the metaphorical 'limbo' of vertical suspension. Kaul's formal strategy denies a clear spatial orientation - we can't know if the man with his knees clenched to his chest, staring through the scope of a bunched fist, is an illegal stowaway, but his body performs an emigrant's narrative. An intertitle signals his possible fate(s): 'Found while refuelling'. 'Froze and fell'. Watching this section of the film I was reminded of a passage from Ryan Sayre's essay The Colonization of 'Up'.
Passengers would depart the aircraft to an elevator with “a single button and a single destination." An intercom announces, “'You are now arriving at the 86th floor. Welcome to the United States of America. Please present your immigration papers at the counter.' And for the briefest of moments, the national border of the country was set, rather arbitrarily, somewhere around here:"
Meridian Plain expands Kraning's project in every possible direction, and for the first time she works from an archive of pre-sourced images. The film begins with a flickering field of grey static, like Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer (1960), but we're soon flung into an unidentified desert terrain. The thrill of Meridian Plain derives from watching Kraning create structural patterns from this world's topography, breaking the contours of the image a hundred times over and matching shapes and lines rather than clear geographical routes. In the film's first movement she creates a juddering montage of the horizon from rapidly alternating angles, sifting through rock as if it were water. Michael Sicinski identifies a "see-saw" rhythm; Holly Willis calls the effect "space-lapse." Then, from macro to micro, Kraning cuts into the edifice and its fault lines, pushing ever-closer into granular formations and, finally, a dissolution into pure texture. On the zoom-out we learn that this remarkable survey is composed of images recorded by NASA's Spirit & Opportunity rovers between 2004 - 2015. Mars plays itself.
Hijacked (2017)
Dir: Shambhavi Kaul | India | 14 mins
In Hijacked, Shambhavi Kaul explores the various forms of 'escape' afforded by air travel, filming on a blacked-out soundstage to simulate the metaphorical 'limbo' of vertical suspension. Kaul's formal strategy denies a clear spatial orientation - we can't know if the man with his knees clenched to his chest, staring through the scope of a bunched fist, is an illegal stowaway, but his body performs an emigrant's narrative. An intertitle signals his possible fate(s): 'Found while refuelling'. 'Froze and fell'. Watching this section of the film I was reminded of a passage from Ryan Sayre's essay The Colonization of 'Up'.
New York in the 1930s was on the brink of inaugurating a kind of vertical citizenship. The 87th floor of the tallest building in the world was international territory, the 85th floor, the United States of America. As the ‘above’ turned into the ‘abroad,’ the US was about to gain a new national border. One can only guess how close we may have come to vertical get-aways, vertical tax-shelters, vertical amnesty.
Passengers would depart the aircraft to an elevator with “a single button and a single destination." An intercom announces, “'You are now arriving at the 86th floor. Welcome to the United States of America. Please present your immigration papers at the counter.' And for the briefest of moments, the national border of the country was set, rather arbitrarily, somewhere around here:"
The lost dreams of futurists have now become a present-tense politcal battleground. Just as new technologies foster anonymity and create nebulous passages for 'foreign' bodies, we have witnessed a counter-action in revisions to the axis on which our laws and regulations travel. Hijacked is a reminder: for better or worse, the future is vertical.
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