Sami van Ingen

Polte

Sami van Ingen

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.

Manifest Destiny

Sami van Ingen

Chance incidents of life and in the darkroom collide, as found footage film strips take new shape under a flashlight. Poetic gestures in the source material and the manipulative body movements of the filmmaker form a new take on depicted relationships, a rite of passage and the artefacts of the process itself. As always gestures become actions, and these determine how we live our lives.

Hammu

Sami van Ingen

Hammu is the name of the hamster I had as a child. It seemed it was my only friend and being to identify with. One day it disappeared from the cage and was never to be seen again, that marked the end of my childhood, of unreserved trust and commitment. This work is a visualisation of the memories I have about the event, of obsession, tediousness and loss.

Sweep

Philip Hoffman, Sami van Ingen

Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.

Butter

Sami van Ingen

Tarja Pääkkönen, Sami van Ingen

Experimental. Silent. No dialogue. Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s.

Pins

Sami van Ingen

Film by Sami van Ingen

Deep Six

Sami van Ingen

Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.

Moving Emu

Sami van Ingen

Film by Sami van Ingen

Finnmunka

Sami van Ingen

An amateur set of images, an attempt to make a political documentary about the middle class revolution turns into an essay on the relationship between perception and interest.