with filmmaker Karl Kels
“To look at the films of Karl Kels is to discover anew the extraordinary potential of cinema as a visual language. Educated at the arts academy in Frankfurt, Germany… Kels is interested in the unstaged world, in the 'real' if you like, yet studies the reality he finds in a way which questions both its authenticity and the fictional character of our perception of that same reality. He creates fiction himself, yet unmistakably draws from a situation he has no control over apart from the way he decides to film and edit it…. He goes to a place, sets up his camera, observes, and, in so doing, anticipates some action or movement. He chooses a world, which, by its very nature, would be hard to stage: haystacks in a field, a flock of starlings in the air, alcoholics on the street, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses in the zoo…. His films are made out of very few shots, or even a single shot, yet often every single frame of each shot is used, exactly once, and always in an inventive and unconventional setting. Rhythm and movement are the keys to Kels' editing. Independent frames interact in precise choreographies. The absence of sound and music only underlines the powerful play between movement, intervals and unconventional duration and makes the musical qualities of cinematic language all the more tangible.” (Miryam Van Lier, Millennium Film Journal)Four short films will be shown:
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Rhinoceroses (8:43 min, 1987, 16mm)
It is at the end of this film that the rhinoceroses occupy center stage and perform mundane activities such as moving from left to right within their zoo pens. And it is right at the end of this that these archaic beasts will slowly and imperturbably cross the threshold of their cage, the door of which will have slid open mechanically. At that moment, gestures attain their intrinsic timelessness, with the camera recording what takes place in front of it in real time. This relative calm for the spectator (nothing is more peaceful than a rhinoceros in its everyday life) contrasts in a spectacular way with the previous frantic minutes. As his work is based upon using time freely, the filmmaker has done his utmost to organize sequences of images according to an acceleration that is external to the animals in the zoo, but coherent within the process of cinematographic creation. Playing with two spaces in which they are enclosed (one equipped at the back with a door which lifts open vertically, the other with two side doors which slide open horizontally), Karl Kels makes the spectator laugh by giving the film aspects of the burlesque and absurd. He makes staccato shots, edits in close sequence, and animates the rhinoceroses much as an animation filmmaker would do using pixillation. In pure fiction that is only possible thanks to the cinema, these rhinoceroses and their setting are literally exhausted by the playful manipulations of the filmmaker before once again finding, in our company, the sort of peacefulness they need to leave the stage. -
Starlings (5:45 min, 1991, 16mm)
It is night. The moon is shining. A static camera captures a huge flock of starlings searching the sky in circular movements. It is not clear how long Kels had been standing there before he turned on his camera; the event as such can only have come as a surprise to him as well. At first the starlings are hard to identify. Having deliberately edited frames coming from different generations of the original print in a certain metrical order, without changing the actual chronology of their movement, Kels has the constantly changing shapes of the birds dissolve in the rough grain of the celluloid. Once again a technical weakness of the celluloid forms the starting point of his visual enterprise. Shot on one reel without any interruption, the birds' flight gradually forms configurations of astonishing beauty. An immense sense of depth emerges as the starlings move against the background of the distanced moon, yet cross close by electric wires. Moths cannot resist the light and drop down just in front of the lens, and finally, also the starlings seem to take a last turn reaching down closer to Kels' camera just before his reel ends. -
Hippopotamuses (35 min, 1993, 35mm)
It is a question of order or disorder, cleanliness or dirtiness. The main protagonists are hippopotamuses (a male, a female and a baby—a family?) and two painters and keepers in charge of renovating and cleaning their pen. There are two backgrounds to this scene. One wall closes off the space the zoo has allotted to these animals, but two doors that slide open sideways open into another space, a deep space, the cage no doubt, inside the building that shelters the animals. Another setting is perceptible at times, that of water in which the wall, the doors and the hippopotamuses are reflected. This film confronts the spectator with a double challenge. On the one hand, a subtle interlacing of rhythms which simultaneously reveal the movements of these majestic and indolent animals, a purely cinematographic work using editing in order to organize a different time-frame. On the other hand, the scenes filmed from the front and in a fixed position rely on the absolute indifference these hippopotamuses show towards Karl Kels. This set-up, fleshed out by purely visual matter (blacks and whites, shades, reflections), is a brilliant questioning of the vision of the spectator who is invited to look closely: a sort of primitive scene in which the eye is stimulated and provoked by a non-spectacle built up into a cinematographic event. This holds right up until the last shot of a little black bird which flies away, free of any cinematic hold. -
Sidewalk (30 min, 2008, 35mm)
This film is an observation of a piece of New York City sidewalk Kels filmed over four months. As in Rhinoceroses (1987) or Elephants (2000), the framing of all of the shots is identical. This time the integrity of the shots is not touched. 45 shots range from 11 to 210 seconds. Because of montage and context, the banalities that take place on a piece of sidewalk transform into something else.