The Future Is Not What It Used to Be (2002)

Director: Mika Taanila
Duration: 52 min

Future is Not What It Used To Be is the latest documentary by Mika Taanila, the director of Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow (1998). It features never-before-seen archival material from the early years of electronic art, including excerpts from Kurenniemi’s unfinished experimental short films. The documentary entwines the past with the present, i.e. with the protagonist’s manic archival project, in which Kurenniemi records his thoughts, everyday observations, images and objects, constantly and obsessively. All this in an effort to combine man and machine – to reconstruct the soul of man.

Spectres of the Spectrum (1999)

Director: Craig Baldwin
Duration: 94 min
Language: English


Spectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old 'kinescopes' (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties' educational show called 'Science in Action') to create an eerie, haunted "media-archaeology" zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin's film, HAARP is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface, it is a data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail. But in fact, HAARP doubles as one of the most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons arsenal, a particle beam device that can be accurately targeted on specific sites in the ionosphere.

Set in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las Vegas, a young telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges for survival on an old bombing range with her father ("Yogi") who is holed up in a cinder-block pirate-TV station, broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending global electromagnetic 'Pulse'. A solar eclipse gives BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother.

With their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship, the amazed BooBoo is able to catch up with outwardly propagating Fifties' educational-TV broadcasts, affording an accelerated review of mid-century science and science-fiction cinema; and narrating a loose and collage-happy history of heroes and martyrs of the electromagnetic revolution. Commentary on Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Farnsworth, and others comes from Yogi and his 'TV Tesla' correspondents, in a playfully speculative effort to trace the growth of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum. Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, broadcast video, and 'exploded' interviews, the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed, abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal ego/memory, historical representation, and, yes, of spacetime itself.

This science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in opposition to the hegemony of the culture-management industry, tracing a history of media technology from its early days to a 21st century "New Electromagnetic Order" that threatens to take total control of our lives.

Film Before Film (1986)

What Really Happened Between the Images?
Director: Werner Nekes
Duration: 83 min
Language: German

An exhilarating and amusing encyclopedic look at the "prehistory" of cinema. Werner Nekes charts the fascination with moving pictures which led to the birth of film, covering shadow plays, peep shows, flip books, flicks, magic lanterns, lithopanes, panoramic, scrolls, colorful forms of early animation, and numerous other historical artiffices.

Working with these formats, early "producers" created melodramas, comedies, -- as well as lots of pornography -- anticipating most of the forms known today. Nekes probes these colorful toys and inventions in a rich and rewarding optical experience. Film Before Film is a bewildering assault of exotic (and sometimes erotic) images and illusions.

"These primitive special effects retain the power to evoke a childlike wonder." -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice

"An astonishing array...The images are abundantly beautiful." -- Russell Merritt, Film Quarterly

The net (2003)

The Unabomber, LSD and the internet
Director: Lutz Dammbeck
Duration: 121 min
Language: German

Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck’s THE NET explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology – a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of Refusal. For those that embrace it, as did and do the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils. Dammbeck’s conceptual quest links these multiple nodes of cultural and political thought like the Internet itself. Circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, THE NET exposes a hidden matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and conspiracies.

"Dammbeck not only uncovers hidden background stories but also links the unlinked" - Der Tagespiegel

"The right film at the right time" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Dammbeck regards systems of art as systems of power; and systems of power as systems of art" - Die Tageszeitung

Efter brylluppet (2006) - after wedding

20h30, 5 May 2008
20h30, 5 May 2008

Fucking Åmål (1998)

20h30, 25 February 2008

Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

20h30, 18 February 2008

The seventh seal (1957)

20h30, 11 February 2008

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)

20h30, 04 February 2008

A scanner darkly (2006)

20h30, 28 January 2008

Secret sunshine (2007)

20h30, 21 January 2008

Ex Drummer 2007

20h30, 7 January 2008

Oasis (2002)

20h30, 7 January 2008

God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan (2006)

20h30, 10 December 2007

Tropa de elite (2007)

20h30, 4 December 2007

Post reaction:
An action movie based on the daily reality of policemen and drug dealers from Rio de Janeiro that seemed to be trapped in a hopeless world. Extreme violence is the words that remain in my mind after watching this movie. The illegal drug trade problem is seen from a violent angle and no attention is given to any possible solution or existing constructive initiatives.