FEELER GAUGE FESTIVAL
BLOCK 5 FREESTYLE
PROGRAMMERS' NOTES: Anything goes in these five films, where we journey with filmmakers through their idiosyncratic streams of consciousness.
Lydia kicks us off with an epic, polyvocal free association that starts and ends with mantids, and interweaves the poetry of Phil Kaye, teachings of scholar-activist Tim Wise, and musical tracks with musings on being Black.
Sara rides repeating radio waves in her micro road film based in Los Angeles, and hyesung follows her own nocturnal flow of frequencies in New York City.
Qianyi envelops us in a transcontinental sea-road-sky dialogue-dream between floating and fragmented spiritual selves, and Ruth brings us home to her family, collecting the fragments she aspires to retain as memories.
Total run time: 38:15 mins
Image: Qianyi Ma, Wander (film still)
An experimental stream of consciousness observation piece.
finer frequencies is a short portrait of the radio array atop Mt. Wilson, overlooking Los Angeles, in the Angeles National Forest. As I drive up the mountain I notice radio signals occasionally repeating, looping over themselves. The soundtrack was created using a portable radio I modified, tuned to certain frequencies.
The footage taken during a night-out in New York City, is put together without much editing process. The soundtrack, Minor Threat by Minor Threat, is superimposed throughout the film. The action, sound, and the bare minimal editing are meant to create a flow, passage of time, nothing more.
Wander is a film primarily experimenting with the effects of superimpositions to play with surreal sensations, as a poetic dialogue floats along the way. No carnal character as narrational subjects exists inside, only the two’s voices hovering from a distance over the dynamics like extraterrestrial creatures drifting away from the Earth. And the fluid exhibition of sceneries spans across Asia to North America with chaotic velocity, which, in my vision, may relive a spiritual diaspora after fragmentary experiences here and there. And in this space, the past is unrelentingly flooded away in the fading memory.
memories i intend to keep is a short-short “home movie” type short that explores its narrator’s mortality and the fragility of memory.