Of German origin, Björn Kämmerer lives and works in Vienna. Alongside Johann Lurf, they are part of the young Austrian guard that reinvents the cinematic language using brilliantly different media and mediums. Their films have been awarded many prizes at international festivals and this session will be a rare opportunity to compare their work and exchange views.

Born in 1949 in New York, Dominic Angerame teaches, lives and works in San Francisco. Since 1969, he has directed over thirty-five films screened and awarded in many festivals around the world. He teaches directing, cinematography and criticism at the University of Berkeley in California, San Francisco Art Institute and also acted as professor and associate artist in many institutions. He led for more than 30 years of Canyon Cinema distribution cooperative. His work is greatly influenced by the avant-garde cinema, particularly the 1920s and 1930s, and explores the cycle of destruction and construction imposed by man on his urban environment, constantly changing.

Carte blanche to Kim Knowles (Black Box, Edinburgh International Film Festival)

In a post-screening discussion at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2013, veteran experimental filmmaker Michael Snow referred to the contemporary technological moment in terms of ‘mediums eating mediums’. The current state of analogue obsolescence might indeed be conceived in the context of consumption – one medium rendered obsolete by another, and framed by the wider drive towards (capitalist) progress and commodity culture. But thinking about the relationship between different mediums does not necessarily mean replacement (a negative formulation) but coexistence. In this sense, exploring the field of hybrid practice allows us to reflect on notions of medium-specificity, looking at ways in which different media may enter into a dialogue with each other. It offers a way out of the either/or polarisation that often surrounds the debate about analogue and digital technologies, and shows how the merging or alternating of mediums and formats widens the cinematic palette. This programme brings together films that approach the theme of hybridisation or coexistence in different ways, often explicitly staging the question of obsolescence in creative terms, and foregrounding cinema as a constantly shifting mode of perception.