Teased obliquely through Twitter earlier this month, Kinet, a free online publishing platform for low-budget avant-garde and experimental cinema, launches on the July 25.
The website – kinet.media – is the product of a collaboration between filmmakers Kurt Walker (Hit 2 Pass) and Isaac Goes, the impetus for it being that most modern experimental work in cinema is rarely seen outside of the festival circuit and gallery screenings. In an email announcing the project, they wrote:
“…the site functions to not only to highlight new and boundary pushing avant-garde cinema, but to encourage more to be made.”
Each month they aim to present a new set of films to be hosted on the site, ranging from experimental shorts to feature-length (or longer) work. Submissions to Kinet will open when the site launches on the 25th. The first series of films, which will begin streaming on the same day, are as follows:
Ocean Falls (dir. Ryan Ermacora & Jessica Johnson, 13 min) (online premiere)
This experimental landscape short from Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson had its world premiere at the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival and centers on an almost completely abandoned coastal town. Featuring locked off shots throughout and ambient sound in its first half, Ocean Falls is a prompt for contemplation and triggers an awareness of the processes of film duration (as many great landscape films do).
Ocean Falls follows Ermacora and Johnson’s landscape short E&N, which looked at the Southern Railway of Vancouver Island (formerly Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway) and related it to the issue of indigenous land rights in the area.
Goodbye Philippines (dir. Miguel Mantecon, 25 min) (world premiere)
Photographer and videographer Miguel Mantecon’s short film is a documentary portrait of a Filipino family, though an unusually conceived one. As the program note says, “Goodbye Philippines surveys an undead landscape, textured by phantoms.” Mantecon is based in San Francisco and recently produced Isaac Goes’ black-and-white short Batholith, as well as having directed a music video for Ace Diego.
Love Sounds (Parts I-IV) (dir. Masha Tupitsyn, 770 min) (online premiere)
Michael Chion argued that film is a vococentric medium, we prioritise listening over the images we see. Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Sounds — a 24-hour work comprised of film dialogue excerpts from over 1500 films cut to a black screen with a topic heading in white text — goes some way to challenge Chion’s theory. Tupitsyn, who considers this the third work in a trilogy after her Twitter-derived book of film criticism LACONIA and her mixed media work Love Dog, sees images as distracting from the message of sound and dialogue:
“Images can be crutches for not listening, for not hearing sound. It’s like the difference between relying on the, at times, misleading pleasure of a song’s melody without listening to its lyrics.”1
Catherine Grant sees Tupitsyn’s work as akin to select audiovisual essays, noting that Love Sounds “succeeds in pointing up not only the expressive worth of audiovisual essays for audio/visual studies, but also their performative and experiential potential.”
Kinet will be streaming the first half of Love Sounds from July 25th and will follow that with the second half (parts V-VIII) on August 25th.
I Want a Best Friend (dir. Andrew Infante, 36 min) (world premiere)
An omnibus short film from Austin-based filmmaker Andrew Infante, who recently produced the low-budget amateur wrestling feature Guys Like Us, I Want a Best Friend looks to be in the vein of Isiah Medina’s work, moreso in its layering of sound than images. As per the only note on the film so far, Infante’s short also features Isiah Medina, Kurt Walker, Alexa Harrington, Graham Carter, Zachary KerrHolden, Matt Blais, J.R. Molina and more.
You can find out more about Kinet on their website or by signing up to their mailing list here.