States of Desolation

At the first Art Films screening we will explore the desolated states of human existence with a backdrop of Nature, History, isolation, local myths and speculations through three well crafted films made by Ali Cherri, John Skoog, Maria von Hausswolff and Anne Gry Friis Kristensen.

The Digger by Ali Cherri, 24 min – 2015

For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates. Although majestic, the wide-angle shots have no monumentalising intent: the beauty and extent of the site speak for themselves. What is playing out here is the possibility for one man to become part of a landscape that overwhelms him yet seems to need his help. Seen under the silhouette of a rock about to devour him or as a dwarfed figure spade in hand walking from the back of the frame, Sultan curiously busies himself from day to day to prevent the ruins… from falling into ruin. Hamlet’s words in the famous gravedigger scene come to mind: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings at grave-making.” But here the human remains have long since become archaeological artefacts: the highly luminous outside sequences alternate with shots inside a museum where the bones are sorted and laid out for the visitor’s eye. The switching between day and night but also the soundscape of the man’s singing and the sound of his transistor radio suggest that even the greatest solitude can allow itself be inhabited. Above all, it underlines the paradox of these empty tombs, where death is compounded by the absence of the relics.

Reduit by John Skoog, 15 min – 2014
Cinematography: Ita Zbroniec-Zajt
Sound: David Gülich

In the early 1940’s the farm-worker Karl-Göran Persson started to fortify his small house in the flat farmlands of southern Sweden. He wanted to build a place where he and the people in the village could find refuge in the event of a Soviet invasion. He took any metal he could get cheap
or for free from the neighboring farmers and used it as reinforcement for the cement casting of the house’s new exterior walls. Karl-Göran lived alone in the house and continued his re-construction until his death in 1975.

Entrance to the End by Maria von Hausswolff, Anne Gry Friis Kristensen, 30 min, 2017

A trippy and brutal psycho-ethnographic expedition into the tropical jungles of the subconscious. The dense, tropical motifs in ‘Entrance to the End’ are immortalised on analogue 16mm film in Panama’s jungles by Maria von Hausswolff during a trip to Panama, and all the film’s sound is recorded on a cassette tape by the co-director Anne Gry Kristensen. Title cards set the tone and define the evolutionary law of the jungle: ‘We didn’t come to dominate the world because we were the smartest or the fittest… but because we were the craziest, baddest motherfuckers around.’ Hausswolff and Kristensen’s dark, audiovisual work is the subconscious’ answer to an ultra-violent Italian cannibal film from the 1970s, and to every romantic notion of nature as a harmonic place that is in balance with itself and its inhabitants.

Art Films is a screening programme curated by Erdal Bilici. The screenings will take place once a month at Kunsthal Charlottenborg Cinema.