GOL unplays Whale Hunting
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The Whale Hunt
Cinémémoire, a film institute of family and amateur films, collects, digitizes and archives Super 8, 8mm, 16mm and 9,5mm films. This pool of raw documents pulls together a shared audiovisual memory made of particular souvenirs and shadowy images. This is how a few exceptional films like this one come back to life. It was given up to Cinémémoire in 2007 by a Californian anthropologist whose uncle worked for the United Nations, and used films like this to illustrate conferences on world maritime economy. This particular one was shot during a Japanese whale hunt in Antarctica. It shows a hundred men board about thirty ships, perform the line-crossing ceremony, sail through icebergs, harpoon, cut, cook, freeze and bring back tons of cetaceans. The images go from ocean blue to blood red, from beautiful landscapes to atmospheres as much mechanical as organic. “Photography grain and colours are already music, you just need to add the print of will to it.”
GOL strives to expose the supernatural dimension of this expedition by mixing and confronting it with sound.
The GOL ensemble was founded in 1988 in Paris, France, by Jean-Marcel Busson, Frederic Rebotier, Ravi Shardja and Samon Takahashi. After numerous concerts and a LP released in 1993 (Gol 01) the band dismantled for a long break of nearly 10 years. In 2002, they reformed for occasional recording sessions and a few live shows. GOL use flutes, horns, guitars, violin, toys, homemade instruments, tapes, turntables, voices, various percussions, and electronics. Their music, acoustic-oriented but highly electric, is entirely improvised and is reminiscent of the violent stillness of the countryside in mid-summer. It is hard to define, but could be described as ‘corporate mambo’, ‘hard cool heavy lethal’, ‘psychedelic disco’, ‘electroacoustic flask’ or ‘tropical experimentalism’. www.myspace.com/corporatemambo
Screening(s)
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Le Romandie 21 Oct 2010 20:30