Martin Arnold:Deanimated (The Invisible Ghost), 2002
Ken Jacobs:His Favorite wife Improved And Other Amorous Interludes, 2009
The Konvikt Resident section challenges the architectonic dispositions of the spacious building, a former Jesuit College, with individual graphic and film projects.
This year's "black box" theme refers to the so-called dark space of a screening hall that, with respect to the concept of exhibition places, represents the opposite of the light space of galleries and museums which are labeled as "white-cube". This year's selection of films has been made with the co-operation of the main festival guests, Martin Arnold and Ken Jacobs. Connection with the latter will be transmitted through communication programmes. Both the experimental filmmakers, representatives of different generations, have been for a long time engaged in the reworking, so-called appropriation, of existing visual film material, or in Jacobs's case, also of the photography. Their individual work with the modification of "lent" film fragments as well as complete Hollywood films, is an inspirational example of the recontextualization of the image culture. Displacing one frame in a film, in the case of video exhibition, is of the same importance as individual scenes within feature films.
Martin Arnold's work is an original installation, not transferable into cinema halls. In his Deanimated (The Invisible Ghost) from 2002, the created illusion of a cinema hall with absent chairs becomes a metaphor for the technique of subsequent erasing of characters from the screened film. The film was made by reworking the horror, The Invisible Ghost (1942) with Béla Lugosi as the leading character. Arnold's installation stands on the border of the "black box" meaning and the gallery space, for which it is intended. He moves the meaning of the film space quite similarly as he manipulates the content of the film, which has become "only" material for a new piece of work. On the contrary, the wooden "black box" represents a significant transport article of the gallery context into the space of the film festival. His Favorite Wife Improved And Other Amorous Interludes, the installed work of Ken Jacobs, is a "series" composed of short video and stereographic animations. The aspects of the Hollywood melodrama mise-en-scène are in the introductory, His Favorite Wife destructed by the natural element of the February New York storm. A sequence of animated stereographs follows and Jacobs adds to their usage: "I have (and deeply enjoy) a collection of early stereographs, most from the 1800's, bought years before they became pricy as collectors' items. It fascinates me that two images can produce so much richness of detail when forms undulate and skip through deep space."
Arnold subsequently reerases, reorders and piles up images, and thus he expresses doubts over the composition and core of the original material, the same doubts as over "our" position in the cinema hall. Jacobs's new film indirectlydescribes the battle between 19th century technology and contemporary digital signals. While he additionally animates the old stereographs, the digitizing of image and television broadcasting "provides" the animation by itself. The reworking of the existing film or photographic material enables him to animate in those works the recording of so-called live animation, which is, ironically, banished from the traditional definitions of animated film.
It is not advisable to watch Ken Jacobs's work if you suffer from epilepsy. The "black box" installation was made possible by the support of the Regional Visual Art Gallery in Zlín. Organizers of the festival wish to thank both the authors for lending their works for this unique installation within the framework of the Festival of Film Animation 2009.
Martin Mazanec
10–13 Dec 12:00 p.m.–12:00 a.m. Atrium AC UP Konvikt — BLACK BOX: KEN JACOBS: HIS FAVORITE WIFE IMPROVED AND OTHER AMOROUS INTERLUDES
— Video installation — Konvikt Resident
10–13 Dec 12:00 p.m.–12:00 a.m. White Burrow — BLACK BOX: MARTIN ARNOLD: DEANIMATED (THEINVISIBLE GHOST)
— Video installation — Konvikt Resident
