Cinematic Space

Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Cinematic Space suggested that most film-makers are toying with the potential of their medium. From Orthographe’s haunting war diorama, which segues into a violently beautiful laser display, through the playful cartoon and music mash up of Stereoptik, to David Fernandez’s journey into his father, these selections tear up the flat screen, bring the performance back into film – most literally when Fernandez uses his flesh as a canvas – and flagrantly abuse the notion that cinema is a two dimensional shadow-play. Orthographe, having taken the audience through sepia photographs of war to a contemporary recreation of a space battle, convert film into a three dimensional light show: if Stereoptik recall the delights of Tony Hart, they escape sentimentality through an ironic humour. Fernandez may have been slow to start – the first ten minutes seemed to be an anxious check of the various technologies – he demonstrates both the beauty of film on flesh and its potential to draw an audience into an intensely personal examination of paternal influence.

The recent Film Festival offered examples of collaborations between musician and film through the disappointingly macho 65DaysofStatic and the melodramatic ZombieZombie, who got to the heart of Eisenstein’s Battleshop Potemkin, but A Cinematic Space slapped the human at the centre of the projection. The overall programme serves as an insight into the range of ways that film can merge with performance. A Cinematic Space’s surface was entertaining, seductive, sliding gently across the senses and opening up complex ideas through an apparently superficial beauty.