The IFFR’s For Real programme explores a fundamental question prompted by technological advances: what is cinematic? By Edward Lawrenson
“Technologies are changing – digitization is doing a lot to our viewing habits – how do we as a festival respond to that?” The question is raised by IFFR programmer Edwin Carels, speaking in his office on Wednesday – and it’s one that is at the heart of For Real, a major strand of events and installations playing in Signals.
Changing perception
One of the original ideas behind For Real came from fellow programmer Inge de Leeuw, who wanted create a strand that explored if and how new digital devices like tablet computers were changing the way we perceived reality. “The iPad was one of things that occasioned our thinking about this strand. More so than ever, people are in front of all kinds of screens in their daily life, so we’re constantly mediating our experience and communicating via our machines. So what is cinematic about this; what is it from the tradition of cinema that is seeping into these new formats? Is it really altering our modes of handling audio-visual information and entertainment?”
Blurring of boundaries
Digital technology certainly figures in For Real events.
Our Broken Voice, an interactive experience created by artists’ collective Circumstance, provides individual participants with a set of instructions and prompts to be played through headphones on their MP3 players, and sends them out into a Rotterdam location. “It’s the opposite of a flash mob,” says Carrels. “It’s a subtle mob, where you are not supposed to be seen. You just immerse yourself in a big city environment: it’s very close to the experience of a short film. I did it in Ghent and there were some beautiful occurrences – complete happenstance, but everything becomes poetic, that complete blurring of boundaries between your filmic experience and your real-life experience.”
There is a similar blurring to be enacted in Wouter Huis’
Performance #1 presentation in a garage, in which a live big-screen relay of a street view is shown, where the view of the actual street would be. This substitution of a high-definition digital representation for the real thing means, says Carrels, “you start to interpret the world outside as if it were a film scene.”
Through the window
But the strand’s preoccupations aren’t just about our relationship to new technologies. More widely, the project explores the degree to which our exposure to screen culture determines and shapes the way we look at things. “Can we ever leave the frame behind?” Carrels asks.
One of the most prominent responses to this is provided by
Eye Trap – described by Carrels as a “a big cinematic experience, but without film.” “We have a big-scale performance by the Rotterdam Metropole orchestra,” he says. “They’re going to score a film, like they do with silent films. But the ‘film’ is now a window, looking out at the harbour, and we’ve invited Dutch artist Germain Kruip, who’s famous for really subtle installations working with ambient light and architecture, to do something with that window – and the orchestra doesn’t know what’d going to happen. I don’t know either. We’re all going to be watching through the window and we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. The whole thing – because of the setting and the score – will be a filmic experience.”
Stretching the territory
Also including Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory (see front page), the strand develops some of the ideas Carrels put into place for 2011 XL project: “Last year, I programmed events at 40 locations to celebrate our fortieth anniversary – it was a good test of stretching what is festival territory, what are the places where you want to experience film. But these were still institutions – museums and galleries – that we collaborated with. Pushing that further, we ended up in reality itself: not in a formatted, institutional way, but leaving the cinemas behind and stepping into a reality where you’re not sure what kind of layer or script has been imposed. “We take our programming out of the box and away from the screens,” he adds.
More about For Real here.