a film poem by Miki Ambrózy

duration: 20'
source formats: 16mm, 8mm, video
production format: 16mm
distribution format: 16mm, color and  BW, optical sound
 

The buddhist master Dōgen writes: “When bearing a child, do parent and child emanate together? (…) You should study and penetrate how the time when parent becomes child is the practice and realization of bearing a child.”

My transformation from child to parent was like an endless cycle of resistances, including going from digital filmmaking into the underworld of laboratory based work. Every obstacle possible came my way and I embraced them all.

The writing that accompanied me on this journey ended up becoming the film itself: writing as film/film as writing, image as text/text as image. The relentless flow of life passing through…

technical notes, credits

All of Rites was developed and assembled in Labo BxL (artist-run lab in downtown Brussels), L’Abominable (collective lab for preserving heritage formats, La Courneuve, Paris), MTK Grenoble (hosted by Etienne Caire), and L’Atelier de la Senne (Brussels).

Original formats: BW 16mm reversal film, BW and color 16mm print film, 16mm color negative film, DV video, 8mm color negative
Projection format: 16mm, optical sound, BW and colour

Film stills, texts

Produced by Visualantics
Photography, printing and text - Miki Ambrózy
Edit - Fairuz, Miki Ambrózy
Editing advisors - Els Van Riel, Andreas Hannes
Negative cutting - Mariette Michaud
Photochemical engineering - Etienne Caire, MTK Grenoble
Typography - Salome Schmuki
Sound design - Boris Debackere, Miki Ambrózy
Composer - Kostas Chanis
Sound camera - Guillaume Mazloum
Technical support - Boris Belay

quoted works:
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation (1966) © London : Penguin Classics, 2009

Internegatives and effects
 Etienne Caire (MTK Grenoble)
 Guillaume Mazloum (L'Abominable Paris)
 Miki Ambrózy (LABO BxL)

Release prints
Color by DeJonghe, Kortrijk

Produced by Brecht Debackere
Produced with the financial support of the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF)

Fascinated by the pulsing, running nature of projected film, I begin to assemble traces of words, objects, meanings and impressions and print them onto film. Hidden within these gestures lies my wish for a state of serenity.  The pieces of film pass through my hands:  in search of balance between word and image. They move along our obsolete machinery in the filmlab. Even when I resist, the traces keep generating.

Written over the period of two years, Rites of Resistance is based on a loose collection of autobiographical poems. Through a method of distillation, I have been driving towards a minimum of language that would satisfy my self-imposed criteria for a sincere text, one that manifests without self-consciousness about matters of the everyday. I used 16mm experiments with film to feed my desire to re-print text, meaning and image in a simple, direct form, without the paraphernalia of narrative construction. When I give no intention to my words, something starts moving inside the text.

As every artist working with celluloid knows, film commands its own time of making - I believe this is a force more decisive than the often mentioned fragility of celluloid. Rites is a handmade film which feeds on the never-ending joy of watching an image materialize, of viewing a strip of film straight out of the dryer, of evaluating a result in the light of experience. A pulsing, running experience - on the path of looking for solutions that lead to new problems.

Fabric of Time (Foszló idő) was filmed as part of a personal research into memories and traumas in my family’s constellation. Taking fragmented elements such as our family photo archive, KGB-style bugged telephone conversations, abandoned and crumbling physical spaces where we grew up, and the ruthless Soviet-style gymnastics ritual of my father, the film constructs a poetic reflection on how memory is constructed and how fate runs through a Central-Eastern European family.

Written and directed by Ambrózy Miki
Performed by Ambrózy György, Ambrózy Virág, Darvas Ilona Katalin, Alexis Tsiamoglou, Caroline Daish, Maxim Daish-Belay
Photographed by Boris Belay, Ambrózy Miki (Hungary) Cinematography by Sebastien Koeppel (Belgium)

Sound mastered by Patrick Codenys
Edited by Rudi Maerten
Music by Kostas Hanis
Choreography by Andreas Hannes

Screenings & Awards

Winner of the Wildcard for filmlab in 2013 (Vlaamse Audiovisueele Fonds)

Avant-Premiere | Cinema Aventure: Four Films | 16/10/2013 | Brussels, Belgium   |   Masters Screening | Sintlukas-Gallerie (in a loop) | 29/10-8/11/2013 | Brussels, Belgium   |    VAF Wildcard (filmlab) Screening | International Short Film Festival Leuven | 7/12/2013 | Leuven, Belgium   |     SIC Public Presentation 2013 | 19/12/2013 | Beursschouwbourg, Brussels | East in the West – Short Films by Graduates – Balassi Institute Brussels | 30 January 2014    |    Extrapool Nijmegen: The Cinema of Gestures|  15 February 2014    |    Athens Video Dance Project (“Endgame”)  |  23 February 2014    |    KASK cinema Het grote ongeduld xtra | 27 February 2014 | Ghent, Belgium    |     KK Gallery Brussel Selectie Belgische eindwerken experimentele kortfilm & multimedia| 20 March – 3 April 2014 (in a loop)   |    Le Cube: Anthropologies Numériques 2ème edition| 19 March 2014 | Paris, France

16mm color, DCP, 7 minutes

Endgame is a performative re-enactment of childhood memories, with three performers and the 16mm film camera on the dolly as the fourth performer. As a cinematic experiment, the film implicitly talks about the author’s point of view on his family’s history and domestic conflict, while constructing memories for the years purposefully forgotten. The subtle, piercing music of Kostas Hanis completes the experience of the beauty and horror of the gestures of a breaking relationship.

Directed & written by Miki Ambrózy
Choreographed by Andreas Chanis
Performed by Alexis Tsiamoglou, Caroline Daish, Maxim Daish-Belay
Cinematograhy by Sebastien Koeppel and Boris Belay
Live sound performance by Patrick Codenys
Sound mixing by Patrick Codenys
Edited by Miki Ambrózy

The One to be Taken / Home

The One to be Taken Home is the first of my series on family and memory. It is a video work I made while spending some weeks with a Medanese family at a temporary urban settlement in North-Sumatra.

In the work I attempt to become part of a place unknown - to explore a landscape like a naive ethnographer, if that's possible at all. The film invites the spectator to experience simply being there, sitting by and walking with the family members.

After this film I chose to abandon the idea of the documentary form in favour of more implicit forms of the moving image.

Image/Sound/Direction - Miki Ambrózy
Artistic coaching/sound mixing - Patrick Codenys
Music compositions - Janis Strapcans
Editing coach - Ben Russell
Produced with the support of the SoundImageCulture workspace

Notes to the film

Julie told me she was 12. I first saw her on Youtube in a video made by a group of older street musicians. They portrayed the heroic nature of being an anak jalan, or child of the street.

The choice to focus on the evils of the world in one place instead of another is contingent. We, humans, seem to go where we feel we are needed, where our sense of purpose is felt, lived, satisfied.

Through this video work I attempt to participate in the dynamic of one place. My intention is maybe naïve or futile: to explore the unknown with the unconditional seeing of a child, not having a shared language to speak with. The only way for a lived experience of this nature was the utopic desire to become one kid among many, being their apprentice.

In the making, the video became a site of exchange between our vulnerabilities. My world was suddenly devoid of meaning beyond the intention to explore, and Julie’s vague, playful hope for a change of fortune.

The street is claimed by all of us, yet it belongs to none of us. My images are but associative responses to Julie’s singing, to her sense of ownership of the place, to her family’s way of being in the world, all in the imaginary frame of one night and one day.

What I wish for the spectator is to experience being there without recourse to narrativity or explanation. A transsensorial gesture that steps away from locked formats. Like a child, I follow the desire for unconditional seeing. Traditional modes of producing documentary knowledge must be peeled away: language, narration, synchronicity, and the visual base.

I knew the means and the end: HDV video, a few reels of super8 and 21 days between arrival and departure. The rest of the work was unknown.

Until the moment I was first told about the intersection.

Screenings

20/12/2012 Avant-Premiere Beurschouwbourg SIC Public Screening |  08/04/2013 Soundimageculture  | 29/3/2016 Cinema Oscar Antwerp

Five Lives by Silence observes the narrative of everyday life in remote corners of the Turku Archipelago. Using poetic association, the film creates a moving portrait on the subject of silence, loneliness and routine in the Finnish-Swedish summer landscape.

This film is produced by NisiMasa.
Directed by Miki Ambrózy

Co-director & Sound Recordist | Nicholas Shaw
Photography and Editing |Miki Ambrozy
Additional editing & script | Begum Gulec
Titling | Judit Kajel and Miki Ambrozy

Aution is a short experimental film about the connection between the body’s motion and sound. The presented textures, movements and soundscapes are part of an attempt to research the filmmaker’s fear of his own body through gazing at others.

co-photographed by Miki Ambrózy
directed by Andreas Hannes | 2012