Das Filmforum der HBK präsentiert im Sommersemester 2020:

Montag | 29.06.20 | 19:00 h

Kurzfilmprogramm: The Unseen

(kuratiert und präsentiert von Meyrick Kaminski, Meisterschüler)

This short film program features a variety of short films that examine that which is unseen, invisible, or relegated to the sidelines. I'll screen some lost treasures from the Australian TV-Show 'Eat Carpet' (90s) among them a selection from French filmmaker Maurice Benayoun's series "The Quarxs" and Jean-Teddy Filippe's cult classic series "The Forbidden Files". Some excerpts will be screened from my original VHS archive, recorded in the nineties. (MK)

Filmprogramm (ca. 60 min):

Tim Leandro – Tomorrow Calling
11:51 min | 1993 | internet (16:9) | col | sound | OVen

Maurice Benayoun - "The Quarxs" (selection)
ca. 12 min | 1990 - 1993 | (VHS recording)

Pengau Nengo – Stolat
21:00 min | 1985 | internet (4:3) | col | sound | OVfr+en

Jean-Teddy Filippe - "The Forbidden Files" (selection)
ca. 12 min | 1989 - 2009 | (VHS recording)

The Unseen - Program Notes, Filmforum June 2020 by Meyrick Kaminski

This curated selection is entitled “The Unseen”. It is a love letter and homage to Eat Carpet, a program on the Australian TV station SBS which screened from 1989 to 2005, and was dedicated to presenting experimental short films from around the world. I wish to make this almost-forgotten feat of television programming better known to an international audience.

"The Unseen" is a topic by nature broad and vague. SBS, acronym for Special Broadcasting Service, commenced full broadcasting in the 80s and was created to cater for Australia’s growing multicultural community. I took it for granted that every morning at 7am the Italian news Rai Uno would be shown without subtitles or overdubbing. Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, Maltese and Spanish news services would follow. Documentaries from around the world were shown throughout the day, and the evenings usually featured two foreign language films, that encompassed works like Kristof Kieslowski’s “3 colours” trilogy, to masterpieces of Hong Kong kung fu films of the 80s, to Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain”.

It was quite by accident that the TV set in my bedroom only picked up SBS, which was the only major channel at the time to broadcast on the UHF rather than the VHF band. So staying up late and watching TV as a teenager exposed me to the works of Pasolini, but also late-night broadcasts of the World Cup. For multicultural Australians, SBS fulfilled a vital service, maintaining language and culture in a far-flung country. For Australians like me, speaking English as our first language, SBS opened a door onto unseen things and made us aware that we were part of a much, much bigger world.

And then randomly one night I saw my first episode of “Eat Carpet”. I must have been 12 or 13. It is hard to overstate the effect that media exerts on the mind of a teenager in that particularly formative and malleable time. The films I’m going to show you felt like they were etched on my retina and in my brain. I made a habit of religiously taping every episode of Eat Carpet I could. Not many of those VHS cassettes survived, and so what I can show you tonight has been rescued from oblivion, sometimes by myself, sometimes by other people who have uploaded them to YouTube.

The name “Eat Carpet” was apparently inspired by an anecdote about Hitler. A diplomat recounted that while waiting for an audience with Hitler, he glimpsed the leader throw himself down onto the floor and start biting the carpet. From that day on, the diplomat always referred to Hitler with the pejorative German word Teppichfresser.

The first film you’ll see, and part of a series that we will return to, throughout is an episode of “the QUARXS” by Maurice Benayoun. Produced between 1991 and 1993, the QUARXS was, to quote Benayoun, “the very first 3D animated graphics series that was widely awarded as a pioneer TV program.”

The series follows the research of a scientist who describes himself as a specialist in comparative cryptobiology as he uncovers and documents the existence of liminal beings known as the Quarxs – lifeforms that defy our conventional understanding of space and time.

This theme of beings in a liminal state is explored further in Tim Leandro’s film “Tomorrow Calling”, which is itself an adaptation of the William Gibson short story “The Gernsback Continuum”. I saw the film long before I became aware of Gibson’s work. “Tomorrow Calling” explores the assignment of a photographer, who is contracted to document the type of architecture known as “Streamline Moderne”. While we may associate this architecture with faded art deco mansions and the Dutch colonial heritage in Indonesia, chintzy seaside resorts like Blackpool and highway diners in California, it was also a language of power set into stone. Think of Albert Speer’s plans for Hitler, for example. Our protagonist tunes into something unseen, a kind of semiotic ghost, the hangover of a dream of chrome and white marble, questioning our own tenuous connection to reality-as-it-seems.

Whether oblivious to difference, or assailed by it, an enduring question remains: “No matter how well intentioned, can we ever see another society except through our own cultural lens?” This question was foremost in the mind of a generation of young Australian filmmakers who lived in Papua New Guinea from the 1970s onwards. PNG had been ruled by the German and British at the end of the 19th century, and after WW1 fell under Australian administration. The country became independent in 1975, ushering in an era of creativity and experimentation. PNG’s first film school was established in 1980 and a group of young filmmakers emerged, among them Pengau Nengo, Martin Maden and Bike Johnstone. They went to Paris in 1985 and participated in a training course offered by the direct cinema workshop Ateliers Varan.

As Martin explains it, “we were doing films about different age groups around Paris in 1985… nobody then of all the participants wanted to do a film about old people. The Europeans wanted to do films about more exciting age groups for them: young children, teenagers, and adults. We were not indigenous filmmakers when we went to Paris then. We were just trying to be filmmakers, of any sort. We just wanted some training to understand the technology and understand the present language of film, how people understand images on the screen and how people put those images together.“

“If I have to say what kind of film [Stolat] is, if anything, it’s a film about the difficulty of making a film. A film about the fact that we made no film in Paris. Except that we met a nice old man. It’s observational filmmaking. His life… maybe it’s self-obvious to you as you spend your time more and more with the person. That’s the big thing that we started to ask at the very beginning… the style of filmmaking that was needed was one that only encouraged these things to come out for themselves, and not to be diminished by our point of view as filmmakers."

For me, this work is an important touchstone of an imaginary genre called “Reverse Anthropology” – on the surface, the Western audience is investigated and evaluated by an unknown team of people with a camera and sound equipment. Without comment and with long camera takes, the banality of everyday life is faithfully captured.

But I think that on a deeper level this film is testament to a universality that can be achieved between people beyond the texts that we’ve been told about colonialism, certain types of gazes, and privilege. This is also the justification for leaving the film un-subtitled. It is my intention to mirror the alienation felt by the filmmaking students as they attempt to communicate with the inhabitants of Paris and the nearby countryside.

The title “Sto Lat” comes from the Polish song of the same name and is sung to express good wishes, good health and long life.

In this screening, I have included such VHS artefacts as the SBS station ID from the 1990s, as well as the iconic Eat Carpet intro and outro sequences, to give you a sense of how it might have felt watching this on late-night TV in Melbourne in 1995.

The postscript, then, to these films is a work by the French director Jean-Teddy Filippe. Filippe’s work, a series known as “The Forbidden Files”, was also shown on Eat Carpet and had an equally profound effect on me as a teenager. But the work I’d like to show tonight is the final film in the series, known as “The Examination” or “Die Prüfung”.

The footage was shot on film in East Berlin and is presented in an archival, documentary style. Filippe’s earlier work can and maybe should be seen as the true precursor to the found-footage style that became popularised by the Blair Witch Project and which the internet is now completely awash with.

The Examination was made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the original series and takes us into a speculative, yet meticulously ordered and annotated realm that some German-speaking viewers may well be familiar with. Filippe’s work blurs marvellously the line between cold hard fact and an unravelling speculative fiction. It was not easy to obtain; in the wake of the Forbidden Files, Filippe’s work has been copied and plagiarised by many, posting poor quality rips of his films on video-sharing websites in an attempt to garner views. At some point, fiction bleeds into truth and truth becomes a fiction. What is real and tangible degrades like VHS tape and eventually becomes sight unseen if we don’t commit acts of memory and preservation.

Here's to the visionary SBS, Eat Carpet, and all the filmmakers whose works inspired me and countless other young people watching them on the far other side of the world.

Meyrick Kaminski, June 2020

[ Abbildung oben: aus dem Film 'Tomorrow Calling' (1993) von Tim Leandro ]