Vertical Cinema at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, IFFR & Kontraste Festival

"Vertical Cinema," the most ambitious and promising show in the entirety of the Rotterdam festival" "Yet simply the readjustment necessary to watch this program was something tremendous to experience, an exhausting craning upward at the skyscraper-like white tower of screen which asked for an up-and-down scanning of the image rather than the now- ingrained, Strangers on a Train-esque left-and-write reading." - Daniel Kasman, mubi.com/notebook "It was deeply impressive. Some of these works grabbed me by the gut, slapped me around the ears and did funny things to my eyes before throwing me out of the Arminius and onto the cold wintry streets of Rotterdam in something resembling a mild state of shock." "Cinema seems irrevocably conquered [...] The phrase ‘35mm’ has itself become a site of resistance – technological, and therefore also political – and in some way the medium was Vertical Cinema’s message: these shorts, projected onto a vertically hung CinemaScope screen, were aurally violent and unceasingly radical departures from narrative cinema. And yet, over the course of its 90 or so minutes – even over the course of one single short – the bedazzling intensity of the audiovisual onslaught [...] acquired a narrative sensibility of its own." “Not surprising for an event produced by the tellingly named Sonic Acts, nine of the films were as much about a punishing sound design as they were about upending horizontality” - Michael Pattison, Sight & Sound Magazine (part of the British Film Institute) “The festival’s vertical cinema programme offered a rather more sophisticated interpretation of the relationship between sound and imagery. The 10 films were screened on a 12-metre high screen using a 35mm projector rotated 90 degrees, a bank of speakers relaying the soundtracks at an unusually loud volume. This was the only film screening I’ve ever attended where earplugs were handed out at the door. Films by Manuel Knapp, Tina Frank, Joost Rekveld and Björn Kämmerer explored the movement of abstract shapes in dimensional space. Makino Takashi and Telcosystems’ Deorbit generated descending blizzard-like halftone colour textures, and Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovacic’s Bring Me The Head of Henri Chrétien abstracted a still from an unidentified Western into dizzying fractal graphics. The screening typified the spirit, in equal parts uncompromising and enterprising.” - Nick Cain, thewire.co.uk About Vertical Cinema What we usually identify as the indisputable ‘temple of film’, the Cinema, is not really a given, especially not in the realm of experimental cinematic arts. Yet this is somehow sidelined in the process of re-thinking the possibilities of cinematic experience, mostly because the architectural frame is already there, if only as a convention established a long time ago within the theatrical arts. Actually, the history of experimental cinema and the art of the moving image suggests that the space might very well be the crucial aspect of the total audiovisual experience – something one should always question and take into consideration when producing a work for audiovisual, sensory cinema. For the Vertical Cinema project we ‘abandoned’ traditional cinema formats, opting instead for cinematic experiments that are designed for projection in a tall, narrow space. It is not an invitation to leave cinemas – which have been radically transformed over the past decade according to the diktat of the commercial film market – but a provocation to expand the image onto a new axis. This project re-thinks the actual projection space and returns it to the filmmakers. It proposes a future for filmmaking rather than a pessimistic debate over the alleged death of film. Vertical Cinema is a series of ten newly commissioned large-scale, site-specific works by internationally renowned experimental filmmakers and audiovisual artists, which will be presented on 35 mm celluloid and projected vertically with a custom-built projector in vertical cinemascope. It is a 90-minute programme made solely for projection on a monumental vertical screen that was upended on Saturday, 12 October 2013, at 9 pm, in Klangraum Krems Minoritenkirche at the Kontraste Festival. Vertical Cinema features works by Tina Frank (AT), Björn Kämmerer (DE/AT), Manuel Knapp (AT), Johann Lurf (AT), Joost Rekveld (NL), Rosa Menkman (NL), Billy Roisz (AT) & Dieter Kovačič (AT), Makino Takashi (JP) & Telcosystems (NL), Esther Urlus (NL), Martijn van Boven (NL) & Gert-Jan Prins (NL). These ten experimental films are screened live on a vertical monument, a monolith, are a unique blend of abstract cinema, structural experiments, found footage remixes, chemical film explorations and live laser action. The artists – from Austria, the Netherlands and Japan – offer their view of ‘vertical axis art’, and the results of this challenging commission are fascinating.