Odd Thomas
TRACES OF GARDEN is a poetic relation about color, shapes, and movement. The pictures based on recorded material with water, trees, landscapes, and a love scene. A key area is, in fact, the time, the…
Odd Thomas
TRACES OF GARDEN is a poetic relation about color, shapes, and movement. The pictures based on recorded material with water, trees, landscapes, and a love scene. A key area is, in fact, the time, the viewer's presence in the visual flow. It is a kind of philosophical time the visitors are invited to join, to disappear in time and space. Structurally the work is based on repetitions, variations, and metamorphoses of the image material - everything repeats itself, and at the same time, it is never identical. The film tells no story in a narrative sense. 18th BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Buenos Aires / Argentina "Lehmann experiments with the image and sound with fruit trees in spring, its branches, and flowers, as a starting point. With a continuous moving image, the original pictures of plants and water mutate, melting in a permanent deconstruction, where the planes fuse, get mixed up, are pixeled, creating a continuity without solution. The soundtrack is also edited with progressive stylization from the bird songs to electronic intuition. The result is a cinematographic trip with great aesthetic value, a state of lyric meditation in which the invariable is the intertwined couple in a bewildered stream of nature." (Josefina Sartora; Otros cines & claroscuros-imagenysonido; april 2016) "Since Wolfgang Lehmann's previous film, the stroboscopic mosaic DRAGONFLIES WITH BIRD AND SNAKE, offered a tour de force to the retinas of brave viewers, it's surprising to see this jump into the mild and pictorial tone featured in TRACES OF GARDEN, a return to the woods in which the director seemingly tries to update the closeness with nature of the first impressionist painters. For 70 minutes, Lehmann's new film takes us through a path of decomposing treetops guided by a constant tweeting of birds, and shows off a delicate hand that calls upon new rhetorical figures like glitch and pixels, digital deformations from which he extracts an unexpected lyrical quality." Fran Gayo, BAFICI Festival 6th Lima Independiente International Film Festival, International Competition, Lima / Peru "It is a sign of risk that in the 6th edition of the Lima Independiente festival a work like Traces of Garden by German Wolfgang Lehmann appear in the international competition, not necessarily because it is an experimental film, but because the proposal of the filmmaker delves, with interest to go beyond the parameters, to explore on a new type of impressionism from digital, through a peculiar sense of time and composition. Some time ago the edition of Desistfilm 010 was in charge of developing some variations on the current version of the Glitch, were the work of artists such as Jacques Perconte were mentioned and analyzed. Lehmanns work and his search within the limits of the Glitch Art interestingly falls within this trend of investigation and the possibilities of the pixel and its playfulness. In one of his earlier works, Drangonflies with Bird and Snake (2011), Wolfgang Lehmann uses archive footage of insects in 16 mm, thus organizing a sort of bestiality and hunting scenes, in superimpositions, juxtapositions and through negative-blinking that allows the sensation of a three-dimensionality and slowed-down motion. There is even a clear work from the analogic perspective, in this "found" material and of transforming it and achieving, for brief moments a small film of horror, of victims and predators, within a bright universe that is, at the same time, spooky. However in Traces of Garden, Lehmann's bet is based on expressive variations of Glitch and pixel, in digital images of flowers in the middle of a forest, recovering so, the idea of a re-composition, but from an evident texture that fragments or objectifies everything. What kind of textures and materials does the pixel allow? The hour and twenty minutes from Trace of Garden seeks the entering of the viewer to this slower pace of the objects, flowers and leaves in the wind, while the sounds refer to a real forest, birds and other wildlife. Thus, the two aspects complements each other in this new materiality of nature, impressions, brush strokes that are blurred or altered, and from the sound that is still able to retain the primeval in this bucolic environment. In this way, Lehmann seems to be proposing subtle variations of this new intervened nature, distorted by the Glitch and the pixel, forming anodyne, colorful landscapes, now only for reference, but that in its own way seem to defend their decorative artificiality." Mónica Delgado desistfilm weblog - film as a poetic object as a unique magical experience. 27 junio, 2016 LIMA INDEPENDIENTE, unofficial translation from the Spanish by Mayra Eriksson
Odd Thomas
Comedy,Fantasy,Horror
Film Details
TRACES OF GARDEN is a poetic relation about color, shapes, and movement. The pictures based on recorded material with water, trees, landscapes, and a love scene. A key area is, in fact, the time, the viewer's presence in the visual flow.
It is a kind of philosophical time the visitors are invited to join, to disappear in time and space. Structurally the work is based on repetitions, variations, and metamorphoses of the image material - everything repeats itself, and at the same time, it is never identical. The film tells no story in a narrative sense.
18th BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Buenos Aires / Argentina "Lehmann experiments with the image and sound with fruit trees in spring, its branches, and flowers, as a starting point. With a continuous moving image, the original pictures of plants and water mutate, melting in a permanent deconstruction, where the planes fuse, get mixed up, are pixeled, creating a continuity without solution. The soundtrack is also edited with progressive stylization from the bird songs to electronic intuition.
The result is a cinematographic trip with great aesthetic value, a state of lyric meditation in which the invariable is the intertwined couple in a bewildered stream of nature." (Josefina Sartora; Otros cines & claroscuros-imagenysonido; april 2016) "Since Wolfgang Lehmann's previous film, the stroboscopic mosaic DRAGONFLIES WITH BIRD AND SNAKE, offered a tour de force to the retinas of brave viewers, it's surprising to see this jump into the mild and pictorial tone featured in TRACES OF GARDEN, a return to the woods in which the director seemingly tries to update the closeness with nature of the first impressionist painters. For 70 minutes, Lehmann's new film takes us through a path of decomposing treetops guided by a constant tweeting of birds, and shows off a delicate hand that calls upon new rhetorical figures like glitch and pixels, digital deformations from which he extracts an unexpected lyrical quality." Fran Gayo, BAFICI Festival 6th Lima Independiente International Film Festival, International Competition, Lima / Peru "It is a sign of risk that in the 6th edition of the Lima Independiente festival a work like Traces of Garden by German Wolfgang Lehmann appear in the international competition, not necessarily because it is an experimental film, but because the proposal of the filmmaker delves, with interest to go beyond the parameters, to explore on a new type of impressionism from digital, through a peculiar sense of time and composition. Some time ago the edition of Desistfilm 010 was in charge of developing some variations on the current version of the Glitch, were the work of artists such as Jacques Perconte were mentioned and analyzed.
Lehmanns work and his search within the limits of the Glitch Art interestingly falls within this trend of investigation and the possibilities of the pixel and its playfulness. In one of his earlier works, Drangonflies with Bird and Snake (2011), Wolfgang Lehmann uses archive footage of insects in 16 mm, thus organizing a sort of bestiality and hunting scenes, in superimpositions, juxtapositions and through negative-blinking that allows the sensation of a three-dimensionality and slowed-down motion. There is even a clear work from the analogic perspective, in this "found" material and of transforming it and achieving, for brief moments a small film of horror, of victims and predators, within a bright universe that is, at the same time, spooky.
However in Traces of Garden, Lehmann's bet is based on expressive variations of Glitch and pixel, in digital images of flowers in the middle of a forest, recovering so, the idea of a re-composition, but from an evident texture that fragments or objectifies everything. What kind of textures and materials does the pixel allow? The hour and twenty minutes from Trace of Garden seeks the entering of the viewer to this slower pace of the objects, flowers and leaves in the wind, while the sounds refer to a real forest, birds and other wildlife. Thus, the two aspects complements each other in this new materiality of nature, impressions, brush strokes that are blurred or altered, and from the sound that is still able to retain the primeval in this bucolic environment.
In this way, Lehmann seems to be proposing subtle variations of this new intervened nature, distorted by the Glitch and the pixel, forming anodyne, colorful landscapes, now only for reference, but that in its own way seem to defend their decorative artificiality." Mónica Delgado desistfilm weblog - film as a poetic object as a unique magical experience. 27 junio, 2016 LIMA INDEPENDIENTE, unofficial translation from the Spanish by Mayra Eriksson.