Bodies without Bodies in Outer Space
43’07” | Experimental
Austria | 2017
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You hear a slowly increasing mellow droning sound that accompanies the image of a boat running at full speed through what seems to be a river. There are a few people on its deck closely inspecting the water ahead of them. Cut. Against a navy-blue heavily clouded sky, there’s a big wooden cross situated in the screen’s center. On it stretches a man wearing sunglasses and a suit. Positioned on the left and on the right, the other two people look directly into the camera. There appears a caption, aligned to the left hand side of the screen: “There’s a park nearby, let’s get high and suck each other off.” Cut. A woman in her 30s, wearing black and half-lying in bed, picks up the phone. “Antek has died,” she says. “The funeral is tomorrow. Please call later.” The image glitches and stutters, sputtering layers of visual noise. The screen cuts to black. You hear a female voice, as if through a phone, humming: “Ninon, oh, please smile.” This mid-length experimental film is an audio-visual and textual mixtape, a mash-up of over 20 films, multiple audio samples, and textual fictional and biographical stories. With the central point of reference being cinema films made in Polish People’s Republic (1952-1989), the film combines stories coming from various places, fictional and auto-biographical, told through multiple voices and text captions.
Credits
Screenings
The images come from the following sources:
(a) Contes immoraux (dir. Walerian Borowczyk, 1973)
(b, 1) Dreszcze (dir. Wojciech Marczewski, 1981)
(c, 2) Skorpion, panna, łucznik (dir. Andrzej Kondratiuk, 1971)
(d) Femina (dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1990)
(1) Ręce do góry (Hands up!, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1967-1981)
(3) Kłopotliwy gość (dir. Jerzy Ziarnik, 1971)
(4) Trzecia część nocy (dir. Andrzej Żuławski, 1971)
(5) Przeprowadzka (dir. Jerzy Gruza, 1972)
(6) Hydrozagadka (dir. Andrzej Kondratiuk, 1971)
(7) Jak daleko stąd, jak blisko (dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1971)
(8) Ósmy dzień tygodnia (dir. Aleksander Ford, 1958)
9th Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival (Hawick)
14th XPOSED International Queer Film Festival (Berlin)
21st Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris
24th Queer Lisboa Festival Internacional de Cinema Queer
6th Queer Porto Festival Internacional de Cinema Queer