PANORAMA 8: MAN VERSUS NATURE
From Multiple Chemical Sensitivity to hybrid machine animals. As technology progresses, the relation between mankind and nature only grows more complex.
Bob Log III’s Electric Fence Story
Tinka Stock (Germany, 2004, video, 02:25 min)
The misery encountered by Bob Log III in the Black Forest while trying to knock over sleeping cows – this is the story fondly told in good company by the musician from Tucson, Arizona.
Sportstugan
Gunilla Heilborn & Marten Nilsson (Sweden, 2005, 35mm, 12:40 min)
Henrik gathers some of his friends at a summer house by a lake, deep in the forest. How will these city folks cope with nature? And how will they react to each other, way out in the wilderness?
I like to think (right now, please!)
Delphine Hallis (France, 2004, video, 08:00 min)
Let us imagine for a second a cybernetic ecology, “where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony”. This phantasmagoric thought, which is part of a poem by Richard Brautigan, was the starting point for the film: the animal kingdom blends into a virtual world, to finally become one perfectly united breed.
Exposed
Heidrun Holzfeind (USA, 2005, video, 39:00 min)
Exposed is a cinematic portray of Katherine Devoir, a 35 year old dancer and writer who suffers from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a chronic condition caused by exposure to synthetic chemicals in consumer products, pesticides, building materials, exhaust, tobacco smoke, perfume, cleaning agents, food additives and others. While skeptics, particularly in the traditional medical field and the chemical industry, still question its legitimacy, for Katherine it is a debilitating everyday reality, forcing her to live outside of the norms of society. Her personal story functions as a catalyst to reflect on contemporary conditions of American society, its values and desires, and the complex relation between environment and health.
Exposed crosses borders between video art, documentary film and fiction. Exploring the frictions between (what we define and accept as) reality and
fiction, interpretation and projection, Exposed ultimately reflects on different strategies of representation and a mediated depiction of reality.