“Process Festival: Exploring the World of Experimental Cinema and Performance Art”

The beginning of the “Process” festival can be traced back to 2016, when Ieva Balode curated a series of events at “Kino Bize”. “Bize” director Māris Prombergs suggested that she should make such a festival. Initially surprised by such an idea, Balode believed in it and wrote a project for the first festival together with the director Lāsma Bērtuli. This year, the “Process” will be held for the fifth year. On the other hand, the idea to establish the association Baltic Analog Lab or “Baltic Analog Lab” (BAL) was born when Ieva visited the Berlin laboratory “LaborBerlin” and got to know other similar laboratories in Europe.

“Celebrating the five-year anniversary, this year the festival will offer a more colorful program of events. We would like to thank the “SPECTRAL” project, which is a cooperation project between six European analog cinema laboratories, one of which is “Baltic Analog Lab”. within three years, these laboratories will pay special attention to extended cinema practice. And the “Process” festival will also include three performance programs in which authors from different countries of the world will participate. Until now, there was only one such program at the festival,” Ieva Balode reveals the news of the festival program .

She continues: “This festival is for once for the curious and the open-minded.

We offer cinema that is something between art, performance and traditional cinema.

We seem to be using the tools of traditional cinema, but mixing up the structure in which this cinema is made. The structure exists, but it is being deconstructed, as is the space and manner in which the cinema is shown. It is a live performance. For example, in the “Process Expanded” program, the filmmaker projects the film himself, interacting with the projector and the space. Sometimes the image goes off the screen, sometimes it doesn’t at all, there is only the sound of the projector, as we will experience this year in the work of the Spanish artist Enrique del Castillo (Enrique del Castillo) in the performance “Umbrafono”. His performance could especially appeal to people interested in experimental music. The circle of our audience is wide enough, because everyone will be able to find something interesting in the program.”

Festival program

Elena Pardo (Elena Pardo, Mexico) together with Platon Buravicki, Enrique del Castillo (Spain), BR Laser (Bernhard Rasinger, Austria), Jan Kulka , Czech Republic), Miguel Ángel Puertas (Spain), Aurélie Percevault and Pierre Pierre Pierre (France). Both nights will also feature extended cinema classics Guy Sherwin and Linna Lu (Lynn Loo) from Great Britain, whose works will be retrospective in a separate program, and shortly before the festival, they will also lead a creative workshop dedicated to optical soundtracks, the results of which will be demonstrated in a performance on the opening night of the festival.

The extended cinema program of the festival will also be complemented by two 16mm cinema installations – “Everything Comes Full Circle” by Lilan Yang (China / USA) and “Between Us” by Elina Matvejeva. The installations will be visible before the performance evenings in the “1983” cultural center next to the Wagon Hall. But on the closing day of the festival, a discussion dedicated to extended cinema will take place in the premises of “Baltic Analog Lab” (Lienes Street 19a), where you can hear the thoughts of the artists of the festival about this art form, as well as ask the artists about the questions they are interested in.

The program of works by foreign experimental cinema authors of recent years will be selected by guest curators Ulrich Ziemons (Germany), who is in charge of the “Forum Expanded” section of the Berlin International Film Festival, and Aurelia Persevo, who works at the Nantes film laboratory “Mire” and directs the festival “Prisme”. , as well as “Baltic Analog Lab” member Lāsma Bērtule. On the other hand, in the program curated by festival director Ieva Balodes, there will be an opportunity to watch the latest works in the field of Baltic analog experimental cinema.

The festival will also offer an opportunity to learn about the history of particle experimental cinema – in a separate program, Jānis Putniņš will talk about the collective “Schmelzdahin” active in Germany in the 1980s, which researched ways to biologically and chemically act on film emulsion, creatively decomposing and transforming it. Films will be shown in their original format from 16mm film.

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Experimental cinema – personal and without expectations

Aiga Leitholde: What is the place of experimental cinema in today’s digital, product-oriented world?

Ieva Balode: I like how Jānis Putniņš describes experimental cinema – this cinema is personal cinema. Big cinema takes place in a hierarchical way – at the top is the director, the producer, who have subordinates. In experimental cinema, the author does absolutely everything alone. He is the “orchestra” of his film – he is a director who also develops and edits the film, often also scores it, and also projects it himself. So it’s a much more intimate and personal experience, and therefore, I think, more artistic. Just like an artist paints a painting, it is also a work created by his soul, I don’t want to call it a product. Latvia still continues to create, including in the Great Cinema arthouse. We don’t have the industry to do really commercial cinema. But mostly, one always thinks about the viewer, about the revenue of the cinema.

Experimental cinema does not have such expectations, there is no such need to recoup the investment that the artist himself has put into the work.

Of course, it’s nice if it ever works out, but it’s not the primary setting, the business. The result of experimental cinema is a work of art intended for human self-growth. It has an aesthetic function.

Experimental cinema also works with archival materials, preserving and interpreting collective memories.

Yes, nowadays the genre of experimental cinema “found footage film” has been created. Once upon a time, when everything was captured on film, everything was recreated. Nowadays, there is a lot of archival material that has been made into new films.

This is an interesting direction, because inevitably experimental cinema is associated with a supposedly historical medium, but at the same time we try to show that it is also a contemporary medium that has its own separate place in the cinema industry.

I personally work with 16 mm analog cinema film, because it in a way dematerializes the world we are used to, the captured image details will not be so obvious and clear. They resemble the reality we live in, but the reality is completely transformed. Similar to painting, the same landscape can be painted with both oil paints and graphite. We will recognize this landscape, but through the artist’s vision, it has entered another dimension. People who shoot on 16mm film also appreciate the dreaminess of this technique.

Experimental cinema is like a portal to a new vision.

I like that you say portal. With that in mind, we also make films, trying to give the viewer a transcendental experience that takes them on a psychedelic journey. That’s why these so-called narrativeless films, (I still believe that everything has its own narrative), these films do not have the usual logic. Experimental cinema deconstructs this logical story sequence, sense of time and reality, bringing the viewer into the world of dreams and unconsciousness, and this is what fascinates me in this format.

Future director Roberts Vanags is shooting his National Cinema School diploma thesis “North Pole” on 16 mm film.

In my opinion, this is largely the merit of Jānis Putniņš. He is also an important cornerstone in the establishment of BAL. It is a blessing that Latvia has Jānis Putniņš and Signe Birkova, who know and are fans of experimental cinema. Jānis Putniņš in the 1st year of the film school teaches students about experimental cinema, hands them an analog camera.

I hope that under the influence of all this, the direction of the cinema industry in Latvia will also change in the future, because there are many young students who like experimental cinema.

If students also choose to follow the traditional path of cinema, their approach to filmmaking could be different.

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You already mentioned that BAL are members of the “Filmlabs.org” network. How are these connections between laboratories formed?

It is important for BAL to be in this network of laboratories. This is how the whole world learns about us. Each laboratory has its own specifics. It is common for authors to gather in laboratories, for whom it is easier to share rooms together. We are also a collective of authors, but we offer many educational events for outsiders. Foreign filmmakers come to us to give master classes. This medium is so special that it needs skills that are passed on to each other, this is how the medium survives – fortunately, people from the laboratories have understood this and are focused on sharing, making friends. We have a forum where authors share film development recipes. The Lab Network is a very supportive community and we are very happy to be a part of it. I myself come from the world of art, where the artist usually works alone, and I find such community support something very disarming – I can learn, I can share. Feeling like belonging to another family. A year ago, together with five other European laboratories, we wrote the “SPECTRAL” project, which was supported by “Creative Europe” with funding for 3 years. For us, as a small laboratory in the Baltics, this is a big step forward to build greater and more international cooperation with other organizations in Europe and beyond.