Looking for Alfred

Also in this combined programme

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  Britton, South Dakota

  A found footage film from the mid-20th-century heartland. Vanessa Renwick has resituated cinematic snapshots as an eerie, anonymous parade of children, confused subjects with unclear futures. You have seen their faces.

  • Screen Tests
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  Roz

  Working with performer Rosalynde LeBlanc, Burt Barr has created a music video which overturns the rapid-fire schizophrenia of the genre: he limits the frame to a tight head shot, fixing his subject with an intimate and unswerving gaze. From LeBlanc’s lips we hear Otis Clay’s amorous voice crooning the Bluegrass classic Banks of the Ohio.

  • Screen Tests
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  Folk Music and Documentary

  Like Warhol’s screen tests, Seth Price subjects a symbolic segment of his own generation to the ‘portrait test’. Will this imaginary hipster melt under the lights and let slip his intellectual slothfulness, his lack of congruence in his ideas, his `look’? And who is feeding him these happy-hour lines, nuggets of misinformation?

  • Screen Tests
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  Location Interviews

  A female interviewer questions five women about their origin. But they have scarcely started to explain when the questioner interrupts them and asks them to change their statements about their countries and families. The woman do as they are told, but become notably more strained.

  • Screen Tests
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  Taxonomy (Death Stories)

  People pose before the camera. At the same time an off-screen voice murmurs some ‘vital’ information. The video presents a ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ catalogue of death choices – ranging from the peacefully domestic to heroically brave. We are left pondering our own demise.

  • Screen Tests
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  Une grammaire de temps

  This video simply consists of a face of Kurtag’s grandmother, her father’s music (the composer György Kurtag), some barely perceptible traveling shots and the batting of an eyelid in almost motionless slow motion. Multiple exposures that multiply and transform the vision of a loved one. Musical and admirable.

  • Screen Tests
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  Solo mit Chor

  A face remains in the picture for a total of six minutes. Only the colors and the mood of the lighting change. Like a photograph in a developing bath, it slowly reappears again and again, the shading changes and the eye color is altered in a barely noticeable way. The border between perception and imagination […]

  • Screen Tests
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  Reckless Eyeballing

  Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era of black criminals staring at white women, this hand-processed, optically-printed amalgam reframes desire by way of everything from D.W. Griffith to Foxy Brown and Angela Davis: `Your lover belongs to this band of murderous outlaws.’ (Cinematexas International Short Film Festival)

  • Screen Tests
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  Living A Beautiful Life

  An attractive married couple reports in turns from their stylish villa in Los Angeles about their perfect life: how they are, what they have – things that others can only dream of. The text of the film is based on statements by American students, who responded to the question: ‘How do you imagine a beautiful […]

  • Screen Tests