The OBSKURA Festival is an event that questions contemporary practices related to film, on an international scale. Developed by LABO K, a collective of artists, filmmakers and photographers who work with celluloid film, this second edition will take place over three days with screenings, workshops, performances, masterclasses and exhibitions. An invitation to watch together films that manage to clear unexpected territories of the cinema.
Vienna-based artist Johann Lurf is fascinated by image production and exhibition technologies, and his filmmaking practice is a diverse and thrillingly engaging demonstration of those passions. Across his eclectic body of truly inventive films, he employs an acute awareness of the possibilities for magic and revelation to be found in the interplay of real and filmic space. The elemental qualities of the moving image are activated via his conceptual and technical artistry and the medium itself always plays an active role. The result is an expanded adventure of cinema that involves the viewer in a thoughtful exploration of perspective and time.
In his second diary film, Mekas reflects on his life through footage shot across three distinct moments, largely structured around his time in America and Lithuania. In an intensely personal manner, Mekas uses voiceover and text to share memories on his initial arrival in America from Lithuania 1950–1953, filmed on his Bolex camera.
Rotten Love Redux tips its hat to the days of theatrical porn-going with a celebration of tactility, eroticism and utter decay. The program features 16mm porn and erotic films, each which incorporates decomposed or manipulated film stock in its depiction of erotic femme bodies. Working with both found and original footage, the filmmakers in this program employ a wide range of analog techniques—soaking, solarization, painting, scratching, burning—to alter celluloid’s chemical make-up and add a material element to the onlooker’s gaze.
The films of Jerome Hiler (1943) blend a beauteous celebration of the sensual world with a deep sense of introspection and solitude. They are occasions for reflection and meditation, on light, landscape, time and the motions of consciousness. Hiler's encounter with the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, Marie Menken, Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage deeply affected his own artistic path.
We travel back to the years 1968-1972 when Ledoux was a brilliant programmer and festival organiser in search for thoughtprovoking cinema... that is still relevant in 2022. These two rarely screened masterpieces circulated in the best festivals of the time, including Ledoux’s own Films Jeunes / Films Inédits.
“This cinema 'au féminin' reminds us what the imperialist eye had repressed: different modes of editing impulses where what is seen and heard alters our perspective.” – Serge Daney, writing about DEUX FOIS in Cahiers du cinéma.
As part of our ongoing cultural season exploring various aspects of queer sensuality in Russia and beyond, Pushkin House presents a one-off screening of No Place For Fools, a radical work by artist and filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti that premiered in 2015 at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Mavromatti assembled a found-footage experimental film using fragments of the video blog of the late Sergei Astakhov, a gay man and Orthodox activist who had a developmental disability.
