This year’s festival has a complementary No-Film Programme, considering films that can’t be seen, because they’re lost, withdrawn, fragmentary, never-made or completely imaginary. We commissioned film-maker Daniel Cockburn to produce a pair of video essays considering the Goncharov phenomenon and the vanished, Glasgow-filmed Batgirl.
THE INVOCATION
We know what it’s like to procrastinate on a project by surfing the net, letting yourself fall down hyperlink rabbit holes. At least I do. But what do you do when a project requires you to surf the net, when the essential task is to purposely fall down a rabbit hole?
What if you’re making a video essay about the Goncharov phenomenon, that Tumblr thing from a few years back where suddenly everyone started pretending that there was a Scorsese/Garrone movie from 1973 with Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd about the Russian Mafia in Naples, and the internet filled with reminiscences and discussions and exegeses on the topic of this movie that never existed, and now if you care to, you can find endless dissection of its themes and enumerations of its motifs and readings of its coded sexual politics, and so if you need to make a video essay about that, the only way forward is down the rabbit hole, so I repeat my question, what do you do?
If doing the job is surfing and losing yourself in the unending chain of not-really-free association, then every moment of attempted productivity feels like it’s actually just procrastination, and you feel that familiar shame and guilt of avoiding work even though you’re actually working – but if you want to escape that feeling, what do you do? Procrastinate and surf the net? What a mess.
THE ABJURATION
also can we pls talk about the word “canon” and what it used to mean vs what it means now and whether the cultures of fandom and corporate IP have a little more influence on our language & thought than would be optimal xthxbai
Daniel Cockburn
The Invocation and The Abjuration can be viewed in our No-Film Programme, which screens on a loop throughout our festival weekend. The Invocation will also screen with our opening night event, Make Good Choices: An Evening of Interactive Cinema, and The Abjuration with our closing night event, Overchoice: The 5-to-1 Game.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language, and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.