19:00, 9 September 2022
Tromsø Kunstoforening, Muségata 2, Tromsø
Free entry
In the 1960s, the Norwegian filmmaker Erik Borge argued the need for more “free artistic short films” in Norway, which he defined as “the deviant product – the strange, the difficult, the angry”. The Deviant Product is a series of screenings around Norway investigating the ambiguous space between art and film, and asking what kinds of deviance and dissent we should be looking for in moving images today. Guests are invited to nominate works they consider important, in some way, for renewing a conversation about alternative and experimental film in a Norwegian context.
The Tromsø edition is a collaboration with the Polar Film Lab, a membership collective providing space and community around analogue film in Tromsø. Lab co-founder Sarah Schipschack has nominated two artists to show work in person: Laida Lertxundi, an acclaimed filmmaker living between in Los Angeles and the Basque country, who will also be running a 16mm workshop during the week; and Anette Gellein, an artist from Stavanger who has just arrived in Tromsø for a residency with the Film Lab.
After the screening Anette, Laida and Sarah will be in conversation with PRISMS director Mike Sperlinger.
The same week, Laida Lertxundi and Ren Ebel will lead a three-day workshop called ‘Oblique Strategies’ at Polar Film Lab (8-10 September) – for details on how to sign up visit the Lab’s homepage: https://polarfilmlab.com/en.
Program
I Always Liked The Sedative Effect Of Flowers
Anette Gellein
A brand-new text-based performance building on Anette’s film-in-progress, based on her research into vocal and pedal effects.
“I have always liked flowers. For no reason whatsoever. They are beautiful, mystical, tactile and nasty if you look close. But the truth is that I don’t know anything about them. Neither do I care enough to study them. Still I love them, superficially, but it’s ok. Like butterflies, I love them too. Some things can be just that, just your own version of itself. I don’t even know where these flowers came from. I woke up from a bad dream and suddenly they were in my hands. This total disconnection is beauty, it’s synthetic. It’s fake.”
Llora Cuando Te Pase // Cry When It Happens
Laida Lertxundi
(2010, United States, 14 mins, 16mm film)
Los Angeles City Hall is reflected onto the window of the Paradise Motel. It serves as an anchor for this traversal through the natural expanse of California. Here, we discover a restrained psychodrama of play, loss, and the transformation of everyday habitats. Music appears across the interiors and exteriors and speaks of limitlessness and longing.
025 Sunset Red
Laida Lertxundi
(2016, USA, 14 mins, 16mm)
025 Sunset Red is a kind of quasi-autobiographical reckoning. An indiscernibility of then and now. Recollection and immediacy. Delicacy and virility. The elusive and the haptic. The Basque Country and California. It’s a set of echoes of an upbringing by communist radicals, not as nostalgia but as a way of making sense, of finding practical applications of the past in the present. Within the film, blood is collected and poured, red filters cover landscapes, and images of desire are both produced and observed. The film is a diaphanous, psychedelic foray into the domestic and the political, looking at ways that politics may erupt, shape a life, form a sensibility, and become inscribed upon a body.
Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live
Laida Lertxundi
(2015, United States, 11 mins, 16mm)
A certain trajectory of being lost is drawn across sparsely populated mountain regions while physical processes from heartbeat to orgasm shape image, sound and color patterns until the horizon is reached. With original sounds and music by Ezra Buchla, Albert Ortega, Laura Steenberge and Tashi Wada.