Marvelous Movie Mondays: Robert Seidel’s _grau
EPFC | May 19th, 2020
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS
guest curator: Michael Woods
Hope everyone has had a great week! I’ve been binge-watching 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Online when I can!
THEME: Body Politics / Digital Phenomenology
I’m going to keep this week’s edition short and sweet. Robert Seidel’s _grau is an exploration of digital phenomenology – “a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally … various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds …”
I came across this piece when I was 16, and I’m still in love with this car crash in digital space. The crystalline perfection of CG spectacle is destroyed/pierced, projecting/ejecting a time-suspended after-image as the broken body sorts its damage and recollections and media images. Shards of cartoons and once-familiar objects lose value in a purgatory of nameless shifting energies. Equally revelatory is the score by Heiko Tippelt and Philipp Hirsch.
https://vimeo.com/2669327 – _grau
Other movies – recently showcased at Oberhausen! – that pertain to our theme.
I am the people_I – Li Xiaofei
Untitled #2 – Nguyen Anh Tu Pham
16mm Selfie – Karan Suri Talwar & Sofia Thenmozhi Ashraf
The Falling Sky – Peggy Ahwesh
Labor of Love – Sylvia Schedelbauer