A Perfect Storm

16mm
3 minutes
colour
2022

Screenings:
Videodrome (Marseille)
Independent Film Show (Napoli)
Experimental Film East Anglia (Norwich)
Curtas Vila do Conde (Vila do Conde)
Crossroads (San Francisco)
Braziers International Film Festival (Braziers Park)
Laterale Film Festival (Cosenza)
EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam)
Pleinbioscoop (Rotterdam)
LaborBerlin (Berlin)
Bideodromo (Bilbao)
ENSA (Limoges)
Imagine Science Film Festival (New York)
Revolutions per Minute Festival (Boston)
Antimatter [Media Art] (Victoria)
Cinémathèque Québécoise (Quebec)
Engauge Experimental Film Festival (Seattle)
Seville European Film Festival (Sevilla)
La Casa Encendida (Madrid)
Nature and Culture - Poetry Film Festival (København)
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris)
Cinema Nova (Brussels)
Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor)
Florida Film Festival (Maitland)
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Oberhausen)
L'Oeil Lucide (Cadouin)
Videoex (Zürich)
Automata (Los Angeles)
Kalbjärga filmfestival (Fårö)
University of Portsmouth (Portsmouth)
Festival International de Cine de Valdivia (Valdivia)
Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en Provence)
FIMAV (Victoriaville)
LACE (Los Angeles)
Labor Berlin (Berlin)
CU Boulder (Boulder)
The Brattle Theatre (Boston)
Visions (Montreal)
Ad Hoc (Toronto)
Colgate University (Hamilton, USA)

Exhibition:
Bodleian Library (Oxford)

A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely 'self-organised'. As such plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right. Such otherworldliness is also reflected in a sequence of gargoyles, providing a link to the hidden animist tendencies that prevail in human culture. This primordial expressiveness is underlined by an improvised guitar solo by the inimitable Florian Magnus Maier.