OM Production: Super 8 Treasures from Slovenia 1
Originating from a different time, from a country that no longer exists. The mysterious collective OM Production had an energetic output in Sound and vision, now almost forgotten. The frail history has been brought together and organised by an archivist. Slobodan Valentincic set himself the target of filling and other blank page. With forgotten radio fragments, papers and above all with films. Films that have not been screened for decades dusted off. Not copies, only originals on Super8. Tiny rolls of film. But what a power is contained in such a little role, all brought to life in the projector.
It turns out to be a wayward collection of films with a passionate maker who roams the winding paths of experimental film history in his own way. Super8 is the media and it is played with cheerfully. We see distorted, unravelled images, processed film stock and live-delayed pictures in which light is reduced to strips of paint on the canvas. Film images as a collection of projected abstract painting.
Tetraplan for instance, is a minor masterpiece. The images of water and pomegranates, water and mouths, and water again are fertile. Slowly these impressions become squared. Memory starts to play a role. It’s like game of memory, new combinations emerge from the same images in a vibrating surface. It’s no longer the film that does the work, it’s the memory the blinds and hypnotises.
The programme is opened with the premiere of an almost image list documentary about OM Production and its curator: Operation Mammoth by Jurij Meden. A suitable introduction for a forgotten oeuvre.
Programme 1:
Operation Mammoth, Jurij Meden, 2006, 29’, video – world premiere
Gate gate paramgate/Velika pot nima vrat (The Great Path Has No Gates), 1977/1978, 5’, Super8 performance
Galactic Supermarket Presents Cosmic Rainbows, 1977, 15’, Super8
Dislocated Third Eye Series – Next movie – High Noon, 1983/1984, 15’, Super8
Mangiafuoco, 1979, 5’, Super8/16mm performance
Programme 2:
Aura/In Aurovision, 1978, 9’, Super8
All Is One, 1977/1978, 7’, Super8
Om mani padme hum, 1978, 7’, Super8
Yin-Yang, 1977/1978, 6’, normal8 performance
Tetraplan, 1981/1985, 29’, 16mm
