Hackney Film Festival 2012 opening night – review

Scanner perform Unto The Edges

Scanner perform Unto The Edges

The Hackney Film Festival kicked off this weekend with an unorthodox night of audiovisual exploration at The New Empowering Church on Westgate Street.

Turning conventional concepts of film exhibition, visual narrative and electronic music squarely on their head, the audacious festival programmers offered a unique platform to a form of filmmaking still outside of the mainstream: that which culminated in live audiovisual performance.

On Friday night, the atmospherically murky warehouse venue was a cross between an edgy graffitied Berlin nightspot and an orange palm tree-filled Club Tropicana as it played host to an expansive and impressive list of audiovisual performers.

Early on in the night, local artists Blanca Regina and Matthias Kispert performed ‘Banquet’, a meditation on the role of food in everyday life, with spectators offered the chance to directly participate by consuming sweet treats generously offered up on a table display by the performers.

They were followed by one of the chief performers of the event, Scanner. A consummate audiovisual performer, the East London based artist’s impressive curriculum vitae includes work with British fashion designer Hussein Chalayan as well as scoring the soundtrack to ‘This Our Still Life’ by filmmaker Andrew Kötting.

Scanner – real name Robin Rimbaud – is preoccupied with investigating the space between sound, image and form and creating multilayered audiovisual pieces that ‘twist technology’ in unexpected ways. In other words: These are not exactly three minute hook-orientated pop songs.

Rather, they are fully immersive soundscapes that are to be experienced rather than merely ‘listened to’. Some audience members stood attentively, some sat, while others lay on the floor to feel the reverberations from the sound system through their bodies, craning their necks to view the accompanying hypnotic visuals onscreen. Meanwhile another female individual, potentially high on more than just artistic creation, grooved in peaceful isolation to the futuristic sounds.

Next up were fellow headliners The Light Surgeons, another veteran audiovisual collective, performing their work ‘LDN-REDUX’. The piece, previously performed by the AV whizzes in Sao Paulo and Jakarta, is a thumping techno-tinged tribal meditation on London’s everyday patter and the role of digital information oft hidden within.

It involves the live manipulation of video of London landmarks, printing presses and rushing residents to irrepressibly addictive beats, scratchings and sounds. Londoners move relentlessly in cars and career on foot along the city’s streets, in a style somewhat reminiscent perhaps of the video for ‘Ray of Light’ by a little-known pop culture icon called Madonna.

Overall the night was a quiet revelation, demonstrating that film and sound needn’t always be what we have come to expect from our experience of it thus far. Kudos goes to the organisers for being bold enough to show a less well-explored side to both film and its exhibition, in keeping with the fact that as a medium, it continues to be a perpetually and rapidly evolving means of expression.