LIVE CINEMA · Super 8 & 16mm transferred to HD · 45’ · 2014
Live soundtrack by Sensible Soccers
Commission work for Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival
Premiere July 11th 2014, Vila do Conde, Portugal
Playing with the title of the special programme “Fora de Jogo!” (Out-side), this film-concert will present a new commission work that brings together, on stage and on screen, the band SensibleSoccers, director Pedro Maia and the football. The original soundtrack, the responsibility of Sensible Soccers and their first interactive sound and image experiment, creates a dialogue with an unedited film executed in real time, based on manipulating film loops of extracts from the game when players, the collective and even the ball are removed. It is a kind of synaesthetic ballet in which the interaction between music, film and the deconstruction of a football game marks the kick-off.
NOTE
Using fragments of Super 8 and 16mm football films copies, this film emerges from the chemical and optical manipulation of the celluloid excerpts and explore its specific characteristics, taking advantage of the physical properties of the material which is, at the same time, the medium.
It’s a film that develops in real time, with no prior editing: live cinema, that takes as its starting point footballing episodes of no interest to the average spectator and thus, for 45 minutes, deconstructs the idea of competition, focussing only on the movements of individual players isolated from the collective, and moments when play is suspended, to create a new reading of the idea of the game.
SENSIBLE SOCCERS NOTE
The work for the film-concert is for us a first inter- disciplinary artistic experience, a kind of challenge with both attractiveness and risk, if we take into account the natural difficulties arising from the pursuit of dialogue between artistic expressions. Based on the movements of the footballer, taking out the context, and its sense, it remains a kind of schizophrenic ballet. The player leaves the ball and looks for the music that begins and never ends. The game does not have goals, but we look for the goal at the interaction between movement and sound, as if rehearsed the same play to exhaustion, with different nuances and variations. “Off the strength of his side” is the pursuit of harmony in the absurd.