A Cosmonaut's Trip

a cosmonaut's trip

12th JANUARY 2016, ICA, Cinema 1, 8:30pm
BOOK TICKETS via ICA website (£7-£11)

Focusing on the immensity of sights of deep space, ‘A Cosmonaut’s Trip’ features archival footage by pioneers of early cinema alongside animation and contemporary artists’ moving image works. In parallel with the Cosmonauts’ exhibition currently at the Science Museum, this film programme investigates cinematic reactions to outer space, from the first footage filmed through a telescope to contemporary works by artists interested in topics such as gravity and its loss, space exploration and representation of the limitless.

Man has had, since antiquity, a fascination with space. The possibilities of spaceflight and interplanetary travel have been visualised for centuries. Rockets, spacecrafts, cosmonauts and camera systems were sent into space across the 1960s. But before then, since the beginning of the medium of film, a compulsion to address the scientific ‘distant’ showed a fundamental curiosity to explore the unknown.

With the aim to visually recreate the movement ‘outwards’ from ground level to the void and vastness of the cosmos, the film programme is structured to bring the viewer further and further with each work, starting from the detachment from Earth and heading towards the depths of outer space.

Programme curated by Giulia Saccogna.
With introductions by Natalia Sidlina, Adjunct Research Curator for Russian Art, supported by V-A-C Foundation at Tate and Cosmonauts exhibition curator, Science Museum; and Dr. Mike Allen, Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London and author of 'Live From the Moon: Film, Television and the Space Race'.

LSFF Special Event, presented by MicroMacro Film.

SCREENING PROGRAMME:

An eclipse of the moon seen through the longest telescope in the world. The eclipse was recorded and ‘clocked’ at Greenwich.

The old astronomer Nigadimus, while observing the sky with his telescope, discovers a new star and falls in love with it. He has but one thought: to travel to it, to declare his love for it. But how? Gaston Velle is a celebrated name in early cinema, though he still needs to be brought out from the shadow of his contemporaries Georges Méliès (whom he also plagiarised) and Segundo de Chomon. He was one of those several magicians of the 1890s who took up film as an extension of their magic skills. He left the industry by 1914, his kind of film having lost favour with audiences.

Les Astronautes

France | 1959 | digital | color | sound | 1.37:1 | 12’05’’
Director: Walerian Borowczyk, Chris Marker
Cast: Michel Boschet, Ligia Borowczyk, Anatole Dauman, Philippe Lifchitz
Camera: Daniel Harispe
Editor: Jasmine Chasney
Music: Andrzej Markowski
Production Company: Argos Films, Les Films Armorial
Courtesy: Arrow Films

An inventor constructs a spaceship out of odd pieces of wood and newspaper; he launches it from the roof of his house after having filled it with most treasured bric-à-brac. First of all he flies through the town and, looking in through one of the windows, he watches a woman taking off her clothes. The spaceship then makes its way into outer space. (…) In Les Astronautes Borowczyk develops his technique of animating stills which he used so successfully a year earlier in Dom. The general tone of the film is much more whimsical and light-hearted than most of his work, which may be accounted for by his collaboration with Marker. The inventor is a delightfully eccentric figure, a homely dreamer quite out of place in the space age; Kafka’s archetypal little man thrust into the fairy-tale world of outer space, reminiscent of Méliès’ Voyage dans la Lune. With its mixture of poetry and burlesque, this is a masterpiece of surrealist incongruity. (Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1970)

'Like in a child’s dream, buildings from the Soviet era start leading their own life in a separate reality. Synchronisation has been compiled from free associations and small impossibilities. The slow tempo and spatial soundtrack give the film a compelling atmosphere and inner logic. Buildings from the Soviet era make the scenes monumental and suggestive'. (Rimas Sakalauskas)

Shadow Sites II

UK | 2011 | digital | 8’58’’
Director: Jananne Al-Ani
Photography: Adrian Warren
Courtesy: the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize

In response to the development of aerial photography during WWI and the subsequent production of complex aerial reconnaissance and satellite navigation devices, used in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the 2003 Gulf War, Shadow Sites II adopts the vantage point of such missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the ground surveyed. The film features land bearing traces of both natural and human activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above, the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye. Only when the sun is at its lowest point do features such as archaeological sites and settlements come to light. Much like a photographic plate, such ‘shadow sites’ map the latent images held on the surface of the earth. (Sharjah Art Foundation)

This planetary educational film is a true orphan, nothing is known of its production history. It entered the Prelinger Archives from the Mogull Brothers collection, a group of films from a New York City nontheatrical distributor. Titles and credits have been deleted, and two or more films are assembled into a single work that exists nowhere else. Even its name might have been created after the footage we see was assembled, as we find no record of a silent-era film with this title. The sets of titles tell different kinds of overlapping educational narratives as we take our trip to the planets, and are evidence that the film has a fragmented history. Some of the titles are fairly straight informative science education, although the information offered is a bit out of date. (…) The best clue to its identity is that some footage is from Max Fleischer's animated short All Aboard for the Moon (aka All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon), a Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph released theatrically in February 1920. (…) The narrative of the film aims from Earth toward Mars and achieves its destination. The highlight is the ecstatic enjoyment of the astronauts as they bounce around in Mars’ low-gravity environment. But without breathing apparatus! (From Megan Prelinger's notes)

'Moon explores the many facets of Earth’s mysterious satellite and man’s fascination and struggle to understand it. Viewed through the lens of black & white cinematography translated into ©®’s paintings, we encounter the unknown'. (Christian Volckman ©, Raphaël Thierry ®)

‘The solitary Pioneer 10 probe, carrying gold plaques with messages from human civilization, silently sails through the universe without any contact with Earth. This digitalized fantasy explores the fate of the most famous popularizer of humanity in the galaxy. Sound elements and 3D animation suggestively express the openness of the universe through silence and stylized radio communications’. (Jakub Korselt)

Brilliant Noise

UK | 2006 | digital | b&w | sound | 4:3 | 5’47’’
Director: Semiconductor
Courtesy: Semiconductor and LUX, London

'Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots by ground based observatories and satellites, they are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies'. (Semiconductor)

'The lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th century BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on the imperfect terrestrial sphere'. (Jeanne Liotta)

Particles in Space

US | 1980 | 16mm transferred to digital | 4:3 | b&w | sound | 4’
Director: Len Lye
Courtesy: Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Lye completed his last great film a few months before his death at the age of 78. The film returned to the black-and-white techniques of Free Radicals. Lye created what he called “vibrant little images” or “zig-zags” with a sense of “zizz”. The clusters of small scratches gave the film a unique texture – the images looked rough but were in fact extremely subtle. The title Particles in Space referred to flashes of energy of the kind sometimes seen by astronauts in space. The soundtrack combined “Jumping Dance Drums” from the Bahamas with drum music by the Yoruba of Nigeria and the sounds of Lye’s metal kinetic sculptures. The opening titles demonstrated Lye’s mastery of the scratching of letters and words on film, a method imitated by other filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. (The Len Lye Foundation)

From materials preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.
Digital version by Park Road Post Production and Weta Digital Ltd.

Tue 12th January 2016
Screening starts: 8:30pm
Venue: ICA (Cinema 1)
12 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

BOOK TICKETS via ICA website.