Each year Umlicht films super 8 project proposes to deepen the knowledge of a landscape. Cinema was born in itinerancy. To do this, we welcome four projects in residence/training, including a scholarship.
Cinema must explore new territories and let itself be lulled by the power of improvisation.
We favor an open reading of the medium without worrying about pre-established genres. The names: fiction, documentary, experimental cinema, hinder a free approach and most often carry an ideological charge, which diverts us from the real issue: the constitution of the individual's gaze within the filmic form itself.
The body of study seeks to amplify this approach and to endow films with multiple creative challenges. However, a single constraint will guide the whole: as the main problem is developed, the films in progress must have to take into account the transparency and opacity specific to the cinematographic medium, and take a stand there.
To pose the problem of cinema day by day is to constantly reinvent cinema, to develop it in the individuality of a gaze that approaches it apart from any norm or preconceived idea linked to production or direction.
As much as we believe that the division of labor is today a mistake, in view of the technical possibilities linked to filmmaking, as much we claim the multiplication of the gaze in an approach where the team becomes the self-organized catalyst around the films.
The participants of each current session thus commit to follow the gestation and development of the films throughout the session, to collaborate on each other's projects, to give their image if this is relevant, and provide technical support for filming as well as the eventual distribution of finished films.
Shootings, the chemical development of the films, their transfer and their editing, are carried out simultaneously by following and respecting the rhythm of the creative impulse of each film, in the bubbling synergy of the whole.
The duration of the film is attached to the extent of the gaze that carries it and to its necessity, in the mastery of the artisanal production framework of film cinema.
The ephemeral dimension of film cinema places us in a hypothetical relationship to the image, giving the gaze an exceptional flexibility. There is no image interposed in the creative process, but an optical instrument—an extension of vision, in search of images.
This artisanal framework places the films on the very threshold of creation, without the constraints of prior editorial lines. The project to be submitted must therefore be able to change without betraying its starting point and its intention. The work therefore seeks in principle to upset the project exponentially by relying on its plasticity.
The projects will benefit from the musical catalog of Umlaut Records.