CAN 2022, col, 10 min
music: Sophie Trudeau, soundmix: Timothy Herzog, supported by: Canada Council for the Arts, produced by: Michaela Grill, Sophie Trudeau, distribution: sixpackfilm

Galileo calls his compound microscope with a concave and a convex lens the occhiolino, or little eye. A meditation on early scientific films. The last part of our found footage series.

Excessive microscopic seeing. That might be the main idea behind the images in occhiolino, Michaela Grill’s and Sophie Trudeau’s finale to their five-part found footage series. Or rather, behind the appropriated material from a 1920s scientific film that has been condensed here to an enchanting audio-visual weave. One believes that what they’re becoming aware of from out of the darkness is a huge eye, while a harmonious-minimalist pulsating synth sound provides the beat. What seems to be a blinking eye is, though, in fact, massively enlarged views of a cell dividing, which nonetheless does not at all dampen the magic of the “entoptic” phenomenon produced here. The pseudo-pupil presents itself—in the figurative sense—as a makeshift vessel for all kinds of cellular, even molecular structures whose transience is held together at the sound level by well-tempered string chords. A comb-like web briefly begins to solidify but is immediately torn away again by rapid staccato fire. The process intensifies further, whereby joining the illusion of it steadily becoming larger is a simultaneous semblance of increasingly deeper penetration into the matter. Horizontal image splitting and subsequent re-calibration underscore the inner dynamics of this visual profundity—of the submersion in the dissecting gaze. And in the final third, as a bewitching beat begins to draw everything under its spell and successively decelerate it musically, we see the bravely throbbing mass that is billowing within itself, gradually calm down. A supposed “little eye” (occhiolino), although the micro-optics depicted therein quite large—and in Grill’s and Trudeau’s treatment, equipped with immense allure whose force our own vision has great difficulty evading. (Christian Höller) 

festival placements:
Tricky Women Filmfestival Vienna/A, Int. Shortfilmfestival Dresden/GER, Porto/Post/Doc Festival/PT, Paris International Animation Film Festival/F, Les Sommets du CinĂ©ma d’Animation Montreal/CAN

screenings:
Cinemateket Oslo/N

exhibitions:
VerksmiĂ°jan Hjaleyri/IS