18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film 3/60 Bäume im Herbst [3/60 Trees in Autumn], he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. 18 years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (an homage to the Lumière brothers and their 1895 L'Arrivée d'un train), I embarked on Train Again. This third film in my “Rushes Series” is an homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All aboard!

"Polycephaly in D" is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another. "With 'Polycephaly in D', Michael Robinson brings his pop-archivist sensibility into conversation with the current moment. Suffused with existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells a story of two telepaths through a montage of found footage of natural and manmade disasters, both real and fictional." - Jordan Cronk, for Hyperallergic "What gradually emerges from this roiling cascade of garish imagery—which extends Robinson’s investigations with the detritus of pop culture, while approximating the surreal collisions of everyday doomscrolling—is the terror of being caught in an eternal, undifferentiated present. But as in Onward Lossless Follows (2017), there is in Polycephaly the humorous release of realizing the contingency of a debased present-tense view. In the film’s flashes of illumination, we realize that even amid the flood, we are capable of seeing otherwise." - Lawrence Garcia, for Reverse Shot

JURY DECLARATION:

A sense of anxiety depicted by collage of images collected from found footage. Although we don’t know the nature of the anxiety, whether it is Covid-related or more general one, a feeling of awe to nature is felt throughout via various forms of transmissions, from telepathy, seismic waves and sound waves to epidemics. A timely piece of transgression.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

With "Polycephaly in D", I was attempting to describe and understand the existential drift we’ve all been experiencing over the past few years: losing our grasp on time, and having the parameters and pillars of our lives all jumbled at once. It’s a film about processing trauma, both individually and collectively, and treats media history and personal history as essentially the same thing. Polycephaly is the condition of having more than one head, and I think many of us have had to grow a new head, or a new self, in order to proceed through this era.

Shadow Codex is a study on the abandoned facilities of Turku County Prison (1835–2007), and documents the layers of messages drawn, scratched and burned on the cell walls. The markings are pathways to the shadow world, to the darkness of an individual’s psyche, and expose a maladjusted underbelly which a society simultaneously both generates and hides. The 8mm film becomes the codex of a collapsed civilization and at the same time evidence of a forbidden zone in the centre of the city. The flow of images is punctuated by John Cage’s (1912–1992) composition “Perilous Night”, which has been described as a journey to the nocturnal side of the soul.

JURY DECLARATION:

The image is the wall of a prison in Finland. An image captured with an 8MM camera is directed into peculiar lines. An almost philosophical statement, or an extremely mad statement, a nudity that has been torn apart by a collage, incomprehensible drawings in a defunct prison. Is it an illusion or escape route from imprisonment? With John Cage composition "Perilous Night", this image became like looking into the dark, in the cave from ancient time, decoding what we cannot transcribe, but just imagine, to turn it into stories, hallucinations, or even vinyl covers for an unknown rock band. We are stimulated to invent the stories from this naked murals.
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A woman experiments with a Dream Machine, hoping to escape trouble. Within the light and dark of the machine, violent emotions awaken.

JURY DELARATION:

Put simply, we could say the movie is like sharing a dream on the cloud service between Maya Deren with David Lynch. A young woman turns on her Dream Machine and is trapped in a hallucination of her own with a mysterious man. This is something that only movies can produce, visualization of nightmares. We use our eyes, ears, and all senses to watch the film, to bathe in the flickering light , to stare into the intense darkness and to listen to the terrifying screams. A movie has become more than a picture or story, but an experience.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

have been fascinated by the device known as The Dreamachine for a long time. I first discovered it due to my interest in the art of some of its notable practitioners such as William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Kurt Cobain. The Dreamachine was in fact created by the Beat Generation computer programmer and electrical technician Ian Sommerville. In spite of the simplicity, it was the first technological step towards realising one of mankind’s great ancient ambitions – witnessing one’s own dreams from a wakeful state. The Dreamachine is a kind of Wright Brothers’ ‘1903 Flyer’ for the visualisation and control of dreams. It seems strange, in Western culture, that few other technological advances have been attempted to further this kind of visualisation of dreams. It could be said there is even a cultural fear of doing so. Mankind’s last adventure will not be to Alpha Centauri, but into his own deep unconscious self, and this will require greater courage than any conquistador or spaceman. There may be terrifying truths in our own underworld that have yet to surface. However, it could be said that cinema is a medium of transferring dreams to conscious understanding. My short film The Dream Machine was a brief exploration of this idea, the meeting of Dreamachine and cinema. I’m very glad to have participated in the festival Segni della Notte alongside many other adventurous films that I enjoyed watching. To have been given the main award for Cinema in Transgression by this experienced and knowledgeable jury is an honour. I hope to return in future for another edition.