#2 - The Colours of Small Gauge Cinema
This is Film! 2025 #2: The Colours of Small Gauge Cinema
For the second session of the public lecture series This is Film!, curator, filmmaker, and artist Karl Wratschko discusses the use of colours in small-gauge cinema, focusing on cameraless filmmaking from the 1970s to today. Paired with a screening of experimental short films.
Instead of using a camera, they worked directly on the film strip by painting and drawing, scraping and scratching in the emulsion, manipulating the film material with chemicals, burying it in the ground, covering it with objects from nature or exposing the photosensitive material directly in the daylight. We will also look at an analogue film with images created by a computer. This unconventional handling of film results in superior colours that would never have seen the light of day through the ordinary exposure of film stock.
This session will be moderated by Simona Monizza, curator of experimental film at Eye Filmmuseum, and paired with a screening of experimental shorts.
Guest
Karl Wratschko is a curator, filmmaker and artist. Since 2016 he works as film curator for the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and as curator for museum exhibitions. He studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies and Business Administration in Vienna and Paris. From 2006 to 2014 he worked as curator, archivist and DVD editor at the Filmarchiv Austria.
Programme
Small Things Moving in Unison (Vicky Smith, GB 2018, 5’, 16mm)
Experimental animation film in which thousands of tiny perforations were made directly into 16mm black leader. These repetitive physical actions generate marks that describe relational fields.
Abstract Film en Couleurs (Cécile Fontaine, FR 1991, 3’, 16mm)
A film made without a camera, in which the successive exposure of three torn pieces of film, manually advanced past the gate of a super8 cassette and exposed to a light source, creates a series of abstract luminous pulsations. The original was blown up to 16mm in 2001.
Abstraction 1 (Marcelle Thirache, FR 1999, 3’, 16mm)
Artist Marcelle Thirache made this film entirely by hand, painting directly onto the film strip, frame by frame. The result is a series of coloured bursts creating a dynamic and a rhythm that do not need a soundtrack.
All Over (Emmanuel Lefrant, FR 2001, 7’, 16mm)
For this film, Lefrant developed a technique in which the film strip emulsion is coated with layers of chemical substances. Materials and colours are then spontaneously applied to the film in semi-controlled gestures, creating a shower of coloured dots.
Film Sans Caméra STST (Giovanni Martedi, IT 1975, 5’ 16mm)
A prominent figure of European avant-garde cinema, Martedi developed a film practice in the spirit of Arte Povera. He made this film by reusing film ends and found scraps of film.
Traffic (José Vonk, NL 2004, 5’ 16mm)
Short animated film with coloured geometrical figures, made of pieces of colour foil that were stuck on the film. The result is a choreography of speed and transport, set to music by Hans Muller.
Landfill 16 (Jennifer Reeves, US 2011, 9’, 16mm)
Reeves made this film by burying leftover film footage and letting enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the images. Later she hand-painted the film to give it new life. This practice of “recycling” is a meditation on nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies and productions.
Loudthings (Telcosystems, NL 2008, 13’, 35mm)
This film is an audiovisual account of an expedition into the innards of the computer. Using a set of elementary instructions such as modulation, masking, and feedback, Telcosystems programmed a self-organising network of algorithmic processes for the creation of spatial image and sound.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2025
Length
150 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
This is Film! 2025
This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice is an annual public lecture series in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam devoted to notable projects in the fields of film restoration and film heritage, with international guest speakers and film screenings.
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