AT 2004, bw, 6 min
music: Radian, distribution: sixpackfilm, Light Cone
A remote, barren, almost unfriendly landscape: Kilvo in Lapland was the inspiration for Radian´s music, and even the accompanying visuals by Michaela Grill play with the bare countryside´s resistance to its depiction. A fourfold split screen shows views of this place in a kaleidoscope of animated digital postcards. The normal associationsævisions of majestic, or at least marketable, beauty, of exotic or untouched wildernessæare consistently undermined in KILVO. Instead of showing an idyll, the landscape is reduced to the greatest degree possible. Lines and contours are stripped from the background of black, white and gray tones. The viewer cannot be sure what is being shown, or implied. For brief moments fleeting images appear, then change or are lost. Faithful reproductions are not the important thing here, but the digital transformation of a real landscape into an abstract pattern, translation into a completely different visual form which at the same time conforms to this landscape.
For all its reduction and structural austerity KILVO also has a playful aspect. The movement in the screen sections follows the music´s spasmodic rhythm and its modulation. The sounds and images are combined in an entertaining and complex game with structures, and with musical and visual synchronisms. In the end everyone can invent Kilvo for themselves. In their reservation and simultaneous openness the sounds and images offer a projection screen for the viewers´ mental images, for the search for their own imaginary landscape. (Barbara Pichler)
KILVO is a classical music video in the sense that the music already existed, a track by Radian called Kilvo like the town in Lapland. I wanted to know what the place looked like that inspired the music, so I went online and found all these old postcards and I started collecting them. I reduced the postcards to lines to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the represented landscape. I wanted the final videoimage to look like a postcard, so I divided it in 4 parts and generated every image on a black, a gray and a white background. Each beat of the bassdrum moved the images to the next quarter and I made an arrangement so that each quarter had to move in every three colors and in every possible direction. So in the end it became this very dynamic, animated postcard. (Michaela Grill)
Festivalplacements:
Diagonale-Graz/A, fs21 frameout Festival Vienna/A, Videofestival Bochum/GER, backup Festival Weimar/GER, Viper Int. Festival for Film, Video and New Media Basel/CH, Cannes Short Film Corner/F, International Film Festival Rotterdam/NL, Dutch Open Int. Festival for Film- and Video-Art/NL, Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival/FIN, London Film Festival/UK (selected for London Film Festival Experimenta Tour), Sound Journey Tenerife/E, Synch Festival Athen/GR, EXIS Experimental Film and Video Festival Seoul/Korea, Melbourne International Film Festival/AUS
Screenings:
Topkino Vienna/A, Moving Landscapes Austrian Filmmuseum Vienna/A, Top-Kino Vienna/A, Bawag Contemporary Vienna/A, Breitenseer Lichtspiele Vienna/A, Kino 46 Bremen/GER, Kinemathek Hamburg/GER, Arminius Museumpark Rotterdam/NL, ICA- London/UK, Edinburgh Filmhouse/UK, The Showroom Cinema Sheffield/UK, Side Cinema Liverpool/UK, Arnolfini- Bristol/UK, Lightcone Paris/F, Austrian Cultural Forum London/UK, Austrian Cultural Forum New York/USA, Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival/ARG, EXIS Seoul/KOR