Now in its 23rd year, the Image Forum Festival has long since established itself as one of the foremost venues for contemporary avant-garde Japanese film and video credit cards for people with bad credit. Held every (northern hemisphere) spring, the festival is the hallmark annual event for Image Forum, an organisation which also operates an art cinema in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, produces and distributes DVDs by Japanese and international filmmakers, and offers classes in film and video production at its Institute of the Moving Image. The 2009 edition of the festival ran for nine days beginning on April 28 and comprised of 24 programs, an increase from 18 the previous year. The Park Tower Complex in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward once again served as the festival base, although this year an additional nightly screening at Image Forum’s home theatre in Shibuya was added to accommodate the expanded program. The festival was divided roughly in half between domestic and international productions credit card debt relief, with the domestic films further split between the “Japan Tomorrow” program for films in competition, and “New Film Japan”, featuring recent work by established artists. While the focus of this year’s festival was squarely on the avant-garde and experimental work for which Image Forum is known, the festival also included documentaries, animated pieces, installations, performances and a significant number of narrative productions. The formal and stylistic diversity found at the 2009 Image Forum festival demonstrates a catholic approach to programming that was one of the festival’s strengths.
The international portion of this year’s festival contained a sidebar program entitled “The 20th Century Hasn’t Ended”, featuring recent films and videos that reflected on the previous century and its continued impact on the present. Included amongst this work was 7915km scudder mutual funds: On The Tracks Of The Rallye To Dakar by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Ostensibly the video is about the eponymous transcontinental off-road race, however the race never appears beyond images of tire tracks left behind in the desert sand. 7915km begins at a pre-race promotional event in Paris where the competition is packaged via trumped-up exoticism. Once the setting shifts to Africa the race immediately drifts into the background as the video becomes preoccupied with documenting the land and its inhabitants. Beginning in Morocco, Geyrhalter and his film crew follow the racecourse as it makes its way to Dakar, stopping along the way to speak with children in small villages, nomadic goat herders, UN soldiers in the disputed Sahrawi region, and men collecting money from abroad at a Western Union office. As the interview subjects discuss the race and the conditions of their own lives, the film establishes African-European relations as its primary focus. These interviews go a long way in conveying the video’s principal thematic concerns, but what lingers in my memory more than anything is the filmmaker’s unassuming observational approach and the unhurried shots of the quiet desert landscape. In 7915km Geyrhalter once again demonstrates the same compositional facility in filming landscapes that he showed previously in Our Daily Bread, and reveals a documentary style seemingly more informed by the films of James Benning than the direct cinema of Frederick Wiseman chase card services.
Also included in “The 20th Century Hasn’t Ended” was Double Take, a new video by media artist/filmmaker Johan Grimonprez. Double Take places Alfred Hitchcock at the centre of its kitchen-sink collage charting the rise of “fear as a commodity” in the late-1950s through the mid-60s. The video combines footage from that period of Nixon and Khrushchev’s Kitchen Debate, the Sputnik launch, nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, and Folgers Coffee commercials with images of Hitchcock, represented through television appearances as the host of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour”, excerpts from his films (particularly The Birds), and present-day footage of Hitchcock impersonators. These images are then overlaid with a voiceover narrative written by novelist Tom McCarthy and voiced by yet another Hitchcock stand-in. The narrative, a metaphor for mid-century US-Soviet relations, recounts a story in which Hitchcock meets his own double and begins with the instruction that “If you should meet your double, you should kill him.” Double Take weaves together fiction and nonfiction to form a historical construction that privileges the era’s essential qualities over chronology and causality. Hitchcock proves to be an ideal central figure for Double Take’s audiovisual mélange, and his films provide an apt reflecting glass for the tensions and anxieties of the Cold War era. Like all histories, Double Take speaks to the present as much as it engages with the past. The climate of fear it documents has obvious parallels with the world we live in now, a correlation further underscored in the concluding footage of Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous speech about knowns and unknowns.