Audience Submissions 4

As best as I can read it, this submission goes as follows:

a telephone laughs
Christian Bok’s wife is like + like
donde me es habille!
the moon is an oatmeal cookies
the eyes taste & wish for raisins,
for a mist of milk.
a jungle miracle comes on vinyl
now I remember the Sussex
courtyard torso statue seven years ago.
“I raise a hope of nice proximity”
I bring you pianos stuffed with
writhing meat for song!
But the cat’s eye will migrate
to any nearly climate
and a lie is a truth not yet
understood.  the flower seller
knows this with the depths of
the insides of flowers.  As
deep as the eye can’t see.
a vigorous face washing is a
cure – all for reality or un-
reality, whichever opposite
of what you’re in.
choose a fashionable vest
in case there are more
than 2 of you.
now you’re everyone to everything.
stupid voices gape your way.
stand up & be the man you want
to be! – Be a drooling breast man.

At least that is what I think it says.  Mysterious Laurie.  If there are corrections please add them to the comments or send me an e-mail.

Audience Submissions 3

If anyone has more images, text or other surreal thoughts about the films, please scan the form (with your name & e-mail showing) and send it to communication@csif.org.   You can also drop it off at our offices.  You have until Friday December 5 @ 2pm to get me your draw ballot and surreal input before I do the draw for a 3 day pass to the $100 Film Festival and a t-shirt.

Audience Submissions 2

Some audiences submissions from the draw.

New Surrealist Cinema

By Melanie Wilmink (CSIF Communications Coordinator)

Short films as visual poems is an appropriate metaphor, particularly for this screening.  In poetry, you tell a story or share a moment in the same way you would in a longer text.  However you have some constraints, including the traditions of writing, and creating rhythm, beauty and narrative quickly.  We think of poems as short pieces of text that show us a moment and demonstrate its beauty and importance all at the same time.  A poem does not explain itself.  It just is what it is.

These films were selected for the same criteria.  We looked at how the films fulfilled the Surrealist mandate… were they surreal?  Then we looked at quality, which included their artistic values… how striking were the images, how beautiful and memorable, how concise were they, how well did it flow and finally did it use the medium… celluloid – in their process.   In many of these films celluloid is as important as the story.  Un Chien Andalou used film because there was no other option.  These days film is a choice, and has many benefits, including the quality and depth of the image, but it also takes more time and expense to use.  There is a discipline to using film that we wanted to explore in this program.  In many of the films, celluloid is used to create an atmosphere where nostalgia and memory figure prominently.  The artists deal with dreamworlds, and the visceral quality of film helps to set their film in a different time and place.  Film affects what the final product looks like; dirt, scratches and grain all set a certain tone.  In Skulls and Blackberries, the story IS the process.  Eric Ostrowski uses sunlight and the acidity of fresh blackberries to expose and develop his film (similar to automatic writing).  He left the film, covered in blackberries, out in the sun for several days and the final film is a result of chance reactions with those elements.

Other films like Memory Lapse (Scott Amos) and Yesterday’s Wine (Roberto Ariganello), used found footage (another Surrealist process) to create surreal scenarios.  Amos uses contradictory text and found footage to defy our expectations and Ariganello uses found footage from old film archives and found language tapes, which he remixes to create a fragmentary and surreal narrative where speech and images combine in surprising and delightful ways.

This act of combining images in surprising ways is key to the Surrealist act.  Disjointed images and timelines work to upset the normal expectations that viewers have for films. Surrealism is designed to disturb, and because it pushes the boundaries of normal understanding, it is inevitable that people will sometimes find it uncomfortable.  This is used for effect in narratives. Films like Melty Kitty, Memory Lapse and At the Heart of It All, use images out of context to make a point.  They are simple collage-like films, but the narrative that they imply is disturbing and does not seem to mesh with the images.  Yet, at the same time, as much as the images do not seem to fit with one another, they still make sense in a strange and intriguing way.

Surrealism can be used to create meaning/ story or it can simply emphasize the story that is already there.  One could argue that any meaning you derive from a surrealist work, whether it is found footage or created, is inherent in the work.  Because of the tenet that surrealism taps into the unconscious world, any story attached to it is valid, whether the story is applied to the story by the author/ filmmaker or the viewer.

Many of the contemporary works here seem  to discard the original idea that the surrealist method HAS to be completely unconscious, and use images created Surrealist ways to make works that have overlying threads of narrative.  They take fragments of surrealism and cut away the boring parts to make a whole work using only the best surreal fragments.  I think that this program is a strong example of all of the different ways of using Surrealism in a modern context and you may agree, disagree or have something to add to the points made in this program.  Join us for the discussions after the screenings, write or illustrate something for us (and enter it in to the draw for a $100 Film Festival 3-day pass), or join us on the website and blog.  And above all…  enjoy the films!

Jury’s Notes – Charles Tepperman

These are an unruly bunch of films.  And surrealism has always been an unruly, convulsive set of ideas.  Here are films that unsettle, play jokes on us, and visualize our unconscious desires and anxieties.  A few words to set the stage for – but certainly not make sense of – these films.

“The cinema is a marvelous and dangerous weapon if a free spirit wields it.  It’s the finest instrument there is for expressing the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct.”  This is what Luis Buñeul wrote about motion picture, and there are many films in these programs that were made by such ‘free spirits.’  Certainly, Grotesque and Red Like Meat confront us in ways that both shock and disgust.  Marvelous and dangerous for much different reasons is Skull and Blackberries.  This film is dangerous because it threatens to make the artist’s hand irrelevant altogether: here photography is truly nature’s pencil, colouring in dreams with blackberry juice.  Copy Shop reminds me of something Bunuel once wrote about a Buster Keaton film: “The film was as beautiful as a bathroom.”  Copy Shop is antiseptic, like our glorious modern world.  But in this film, impossible things can happen: sterility and multiplication go hand in hand, duplicating the hero like dangerous bacteria that escape our best efforts to sanitize.

Some of the films in this program revisit earlier moments in motion picture history, replaying them like the raw material of our ‘optical unconscious.’  Alone and Yesterday’s Wine do this by bringing the strange, unobserved actions and motions of old movies to our attention.  The surrealists believed that popular films could be a rich source of productive energy.  André Breton, the writer and high priest of French surrealism, enjoyed dropping in on movies at random moments, absorbing whatever powerful visual energies they had to offer, and then – at the first hit of boredom – moving on to the next theatre: “I have never known anything more magnetizing.”  But surrealism isn’t just film history; it’s always reinventing itself.  What surrealists like Breton appreciated most was the cinema’s “power to disorient,” and surrealist strategies reappear in many of the impossible, disorienting, paradoxical stories here.  At the Heart of It All is notable for the vivid, trancelike state it induces.  Tell Us The Truth Josephine, is one of many disorienting stories in this program, but it towers above the rest… mostly because of the stilts.

Bunuel called Un Chien Andalou “a despairing, passionate call to murder.”  I felt assaulted in the same way when I saw Botched Eyeball Operation.  Science film or horror film?  Is there any difference?   At its premiere in 1929, Un Chien Andalou was preceded by a science film about astronomy, pointing our eyes up to the peaceful heavens before placing us under the surrealist blade.  Chien and Botched Eyeball Operation are just two of the films in this program that attack with such surgical precision.  All of these films slice through our dull, conventional ways of seeing the world, and dare us to contemplate the strange, ludicrous, and inexplicable true reality of our lives.

(Charles Tepperman)

Jury’s Notes – Luke Black

I am proud to have been a part of the CSIF’s surrealism film program; the idea of doing a tribute screening of Un Chien Andalou for the 80th anniversary of the film has turned into a great opportunity to create a showcase  for some truly fantastic surrealist work.  The programming committee has put a great deal of time and energy into executing this idea into a brilliant series.  The staff went about soliciting films from both old and new resources, and the results of their work can be seen in the hundreds of amazing films that were submitted to the jury from around the globe.  We on the jury faced quite the task of narrowing down so many entries to find the best for the festival.  We spent many a Saturday afternoon locked in the dark but comfortable and aptly-named Sofa Cinema viewing and debating the merits of every film.  In the end, we even ended up extending the two night event to a three night series, all in order to show as many of these incredible works as we could squeeze in.  The third night at the Plaza will even be screening  almost entirely on 35mm prints, which is a real coup for the event and the CSIF programming committee.  I really believe that the staff and committee deserve a huge commendation for what they have achieved with the surrealism film program.

The submission requirements had few stipulations, as long as it could be deemed surreal in some way and utilized film.  As a result, there are films dating back to 1993 (or 1928 if you count Un Chien Andalou), ranging in length from 28 minutes to as short as a single minute and the program includes genres from fiction to animated to experimental to a time lapse shot of a cat-candle melting.  Some will be funny, some will be strange and some will shock you, but all of them are definitely surreal in their own way.  As a member of the selection jury, I sincerely hope that you are entertained by the films you see and that you leave the screening thinking and talking about the eclectic arrangement of films you will get the chance to see tonight.  After all, I’ve enjoyed the films so much I’ll be at all three nights watching them again.  Enjoy!
(Luke Black)

Jury’s Notes – Melanie Wilmink

The sun dances to pages of worthless markings;
devils follow the slingshot of burning gold to superficial light.
Feast on the sucker’s shoes, taste disastrous eyes.
Flight and the judgment of sound plead with juried baskings of turtles on settled sands.
They leave trails of trees behind in their oceanic footprints, forests that flee from the fading limbs and collapse under the weight of time’s own crumbling.

Project this poem.
And let it’s light caress your skin and make you a story.

Surrealism on Film is a series of fragmented, beautiful moments that make up something important.

Like a poem, these short films act quickly;
They show their image and demonstrate its beauty.
No explanation necessary.

That’s your job.
Take these moments and make them your own.  Surrealism seeks shattered boundaries.  Shatter them.  Embrace these fragments of visual poetry and find your meaning, should you need that, or discard the idea of meaning, should that strike your fancy.

The only thing I, we, this program, these films require of you is that you put down everything you have known up to this point and open yourself to the unknown, the unconscious and the unsettling.

You may not like it.

You may like it too much.
- I hope you do.  (Melanie Wilmink)

Programmer’s Welcome

By Melody Jacobson (CSIF Programming Coordinator)

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.*

Welcome to the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers’ inaugural Surrealism Film Festival, a celebration  of the depth of the imaginative realms.  The festival was inspired by the 80th anniversary of the seminal film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and includes a screening of that film as well as contemporary media art works, a spoken word performance and a special radio program devoted to Surrealism sound art.

Un Chien Andalou, the last film in our program, was a divine collaboration between two great minds that, in keeping with a basic tenet of the Surrealists, set out to make a film that didn’t make rational sense. Buñuel and Dalí deliberately wrote the film to avoid narrative structure or meaning in any way, and yet countless analyses have tried to impose a storyline in the symbolism.  Indeed it is difficult to watch the film and stop our minds from trying to connect the dots rather than see it for what it is, a magnificent dive into the fantastic, the mystical, the world of dreams.  This is the core of surrealism, and as the Surrealists maintained it is important to gather truth—both universal and personal—from the images and symbols is that the bedrock from which our collective unconscious draws meaning.

I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.*

The Surrealist movement caught fire with artists from every medium, inspiring the visual, literary, musical and performing arts to plumb the depths of consciousness and push boundaries to create new works that resonated and inspired countless generations and regenerations of theme and content.  The contemporary media art works in the program are perfect examples of how Surrealism has evolved throughout the years, with themes ranging from the intensely personal (Tell Us The Truth Josephine, perhaps / We, Melty Kitty, My Life in Dreams, Foodie, Hallucination de la mort de Guy de Maupassant) to the existential (Copy Shop, Wor, Alone, Citadel, Grotesque, Machine Guts, La Invención (The Invention), Yesterday’s Wine, At the Heart of It All, The Cat’s Pajamas, The Fever of the Western Nile,).  Love and personal identity are explored in excruciating and touching ways (Red Like Meat, Falling, Love Songs, The Traveling Eye of the Blue Cat, Morning Will Come) and experimental examinations of the unconscious abound throughout the program (Memory Lapse, Skull & Blackberries, Professor Delusia, the Nocturnalist, On Phenomena & Existences No. 3, Three Minute Miracle, Dali Ants, Seahorses and Flying Fish, Citadel). One film that stands as a direct reference to Un Chien Andalou is the squirm-inducing Botched Eyeball Operation, a one-minute tribute to the infamous sliced eyeball scene in the film.

In keeping with other art forms that were inspired by Surrealism, we also have a special radio program that is part of the Festival.  Hosted by the amazing Paula Fayerman, Programming Coordinators Melody Jacobson and Melanie Wilmink will be joining Paula on her CJSW program Noise beginning at 9 pm until 10:30 pm on Thursday, Nov. 27 to explore Surrealism’s influence on music and sound art.  We have also programmed a spoken word performance by Christian Bök to take place at the Plaza Theatre to begin Saturday night’s program.  Calgary-based Christian Bök is an experimental poet and critic, who is internationally recognized for his work.

The CSIF is immensely proud to present this program in Calgary, an experience that will certainly inspire, exhilarate and possibly terrify all who attend.  It is our hope that by taking part in the festival as audience members, you will all leave the theatre changed by your experience and be inspired to celebrate the surreal in this world of ours.

It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.*
*André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism  (1924)

Program Guide link

View the program guide… filled with film listings, descriptions, and articles to stimulate your brains.

If that link doesn’t work, you can find it here: http://csif.org/surrealism/program.html