DET SNÖAR OM BJÖRKEN

EN FILM AV JOEL GRIPOCH MAURICIO HERNÁNDEZ

Tracting in the digital age

These remarks are a tract, this tract is a film, this film is a manifesto. Do not hesitate to ask for the password to view it wherever you are. The password is valid for a month.

http://vimeo.com/areteya/detsnoarombjorken

Det snöar om björkenSverige 2014 - Fik/Dok - 80 min - Super 8 - 4:3 - Färg &s/v - Med Roland Keijser, Raymond Strid, Niklas Barnö, Joel Grip, Greta Lou Grip (Baby), Lisa Grip (Sibyl), Franziska Hoffmann (Näcken), Per Wålstedt (Bonden), Pedro Sin Cerebro (Oraklet), Leila Colin-Navai (Regias-sistent), Lena Westin (Bagare), Jan Albinsson (Byggmästare) - Kamera Mauricio Hernandez, Joel Grip, Leila Colin-Navai, Lisa Grip - Ljudupp-tagning Leila Colin-Navai, Raymond Strid, Florian Bergmann, Mauricio Hernandez, Joel Grip - Klipp Mauricio Hernandez - Ljudbearbetning Joel Grip Och Mauricio Hernandez - Teckningar Joel Grip - Filmad I Da-la-Floda (Sverige), Nickelsdorf (Österrike) Och I De Omkringliggande Byarna Under Turnen Med Kvartetten Kege Snö 13 - 22 Juli 2013. Spelställen: Snifix (Gagnef), Heakrogen (Mockfjärd), Galleri He’tjärn (Dala-Floda), Festival Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf).

novemberinmymind

This technology: who should own it, and benefit from it? Who should control its evolution?

This was what was at stake, the great question at the end of 20th century.

2084, Chris Marker

Today at a time in which our political space gives way to the closed world of the screen, advertising spreads its crude hegemony over imagination, and the forms of our gaze are reduced by a mercantile consensus, to conceive making film without political engagement is impossible. Since all forms of politics today are mediated by images, images alienate or liberate. Umlicht, transformation gaze, approaches the cinematographic apparatus with the freedom and wealth given to us by the history of forms. It is only within this freedom, acquired in close attention to reality, that cinema, as a form of thought, becomes possible.

Det snöar om björken

Why make a film about free jazz today? And what position should one take in such an adventure? No historical reference could be enough. To observe that the experience of free jazz reappears in the new currents of creative music might quickly become a one-eyed opinion. Nothing could place us at the centre of the claims implied by this simple combination of words, free jazz, in the culture of the 20th century, nevertheless everything was pushing us towards the claim. The journey that would take us from the Swedish countryside to a small Austrian village on the Hungarian border brought forth imme-diately the central question of the film: plural identities. What does it mean to be Swedish, Mexican or European? What is the content of this fragile shell we like to call culture? From the outset the Swedish language emerged as a Bergmanian dimension, and with Bergman other territories. The Magic Flute masterfully traced the breaking of ties between man and nature at the origins of culture, it became an allegory helping us to get out from the surface of the simple cultural event in order to open the body of the image to its multiple mea-nings.

Keijsaren gripen efter strid på Barnö

This cryptic phrase (The emperor is arrested after the battle on the island of children), taken from the name of the musicians –Roland Keijser, Joel Grip, Raymond Strid, Niklas Barnö – gives birth, in free acrostic, to the imaginary character Kege Snö and to the group of the same name. In the summer of 2013 Kege Snö gave a series of concerts along the river Västerdalälven. To promote the event Joel decided to launch an unprecedented Outsider Art campaign in the region, dotting Swedish roads with the portraits of the character – and only the portrait! Over two hundred of these Kege Snö, each one different to the other, sometimes in an open tribute with recogni-zable facial features, finally started attracting the attention of the local press. But the group was going to crown the tour at Nickelsdorf, Austria, in the Konfrontationen festival, one of the most important fo-rums for improvised music. From one landscape to another, through the many faces of Kege Snö, the plot of the film became fictional: Two masters of Swedish improvised music undertook a trip with their followers, from the northern lands to an unlikely no man’s land. We could then advance the risky argument of a latter-day folk music, in so far as the musicians’ exploration attempts to intercede between one generation and another, between the past and the future, transcen-ding the notes, escaping the authoritarianism of pop culture, always looking for grandiloquent novelty. Lucid and melancholic shades were added by Roland:

A nervous music stands, out of fashion, unable to stand still, one night happens to stumble upon three sturdy accents of a more recent model. This clash called for some funny frolics, echoing to this very day in a friendly blue sky now with a fat flow, now gene-rously discreet, yet never without a delirious desire for whims of the moment on top of a couple of ancient songs of sorcery…Please, listen to it in silence and with discretion, tread a horse dance, fall into a trance, grasp the tail of jazz, don’t be stingy– go ahead, go astray, go away anyhow anywhere…

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage

It was Raymond who began to speak openly about identity. He

expressed with great political sense what for us was somehow

uncanny, how the rustle of the Swedish language is inevitably

associated with Bergman’s films. «If I am abroad and I tell

someone what country I’m from, it is thanks to Bergman that I

can be identified; of course they have to know who Bergman is. The problem is what happens

when, as you know is true even in Sweden, they don’t. Is it then

the end of Swedish culture?» But this was outside the field of view, for the time being everyone was adjusting to his role. It was then

that he launched the film (meta-phorically with a discus) into the

facing field where we would meet Per Wålstedt, the poet-farmer. It was him who had the key to the

«savage parade», which would allow us in our turn to take a

position, and to speak. We were approaching the threshold

where agriculture and culture bore no distinction, his bass voice sounded like a hymn to Tor and Freja, while the radio made a coun-terpoint gushing a recognizable rumble: Vi tror på Gud Fader allsmäk-tig, himmelens och jordens skapare. Vi tror ock på Jesus Kristus,hans enfödde Son, vår Herre, vilken är avlad av den helige Ande,född av jungfrun Maria, pinad under Pontius Pilatus... Lena, with her beautiful hands, made the daily bread.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality

Of course the political dimension was not absent in Berg-man. But for us, rather than the idea of looking for cues in his cinema, was born the need to be immersed in one of the most amazing and protean cinematographic œuvre in existence. Links were established quite spontaneously. We needed only to exchange the immolation of the Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War with news from Syria, taking care to censor in the media discourse the only real elements of such a setup scene, not, obviously, to question the reality of such events, but just to refuse that kind of register. We were then the first to be surprised when we found that we had filmed the dream of Birgitta Carolina in Fängelse (The Prison), this forest of tree-humans who Roland would cross playing the flute to protest against the deforestation that is happening around his home. This first idea, somewhat naive, was projected by Bergman to the sphere of mystery, in which Roland became a Papageno/Sarastro. Bergman’s films spread out then in a purely symbolic dimension. When we wanted to make a direct allusion, by repeating shot by shot the incipit of Tystnaden (The Silence), the camera did not properly engage the film and everything became an abstraction. Through an error in development this last spool would be dyed red. Anyway we had arrived in Timoka, this ambiguous place on the border of Austria and Hungary where to raise one’s voice made sense. In an artificial lake the theme of nature and culture became a concrete fact and The Magic Flute its terrible elegy.

Allí abrirás mi cuerpo en dos para leer las letras de tu destino

Poetry is this open body where you spell the letters of your destiny, it awakens in us that primitive state of animism that gives meaning to life, it defines the world and its phenomena establishing a spe-cific relationship to everything. As a rite of passage we approached through friendship an essential poem of the 20th century. Pedro Sin Cerebro is the pseudonym of Pedro A. Vilchis Montes who became the oracle. Written in 1990, Números (figures) depicts a merciless portrait of today’s society. For us it is quite remarkable that the poem begins with an image of music, the seven notes suspended within five rows of the partition go away through the crevasse of the cosmos, the image of time, time as an accident in a space open to possibility. The poem confirms the schizophrenia of our societies in the trance of representations, already announced by Pasolini in the role of the prophet. There is then an acoustic effect of trompe-œil between the air of Sarastro singing brothe-rhood among men after the break he had provoked with Nature and the inventory compiled by Pedro sin Cerebro of a society meowing telepathic messages in heat. It is in this contrast, in this parallel montage, that the poem allows us to approach archival material, which is today a floating mass of signifiers, a Borgesian aleph, a labyrinth of broken mirrors. Certainly Mozart wanted to define music, giving it the status of a cornerstone in culture when Pamina and Tamino manage to cross the chthonic world with the help of the flute. But we must not forget that this flute came from The Queen of the Night. Here are the elements of the ensemble:

Within these hallowed hallsOne knows not revenge. And should a person have fallen, Love will guide him to duty. Then wanders he on the hand of a friend

SARASTRO

In diesen heil’gen Hallen Kennt man die Rache nicht. Und ist ein Mensch gefallen, Führt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht. Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand

Vergnügt und froh ins bess’re Land. In diesen heil’gen Mauern, Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt, Kann kein Verräter lauern, Weil man dem Feind vergibt. Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreun, Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein.

Cheerful and happy into a better land. Within these hallowed walls, Where human loves the human, No traitor can lurk, Because one forgives the enemy. Whomever these lessons do not please, Deserves not to be a human being.

figures

there’s a crevasse to cosmos in the zigzagging fracture of the eggshellthere are 4 cardinal points and as many routes to take

7 notes suspended between 5 lines which a certain cheating sense elevates to square cubic powers evenly trapezoidal executing such act without a safety net

there are far more than 20 characters and no fundamental word to utter

only 6 continents house an absolute emptiness of instinct but are packed with diverse flesh in a jelly-belly collectionbetween and around them 4 different densities stir salty eddies of immense vegetable work or enormous planetary suffering

there’s a watery vacuum through the opening connecting the inner space of owls‘ eyes photographic devices or whichever incubus on full or half moon

there are dozens of official gods and demons a few miracles too many rituals

there is one first person whose boredom we accompany

an extraordinary variety of new words are commonplace among trampswhile an absolute amount of pages that could feed a bonfire immediately absurd around me await in the bookshelves

there are let us say millions of orbs nevertheless it is tungsten filaments that light up with odd-yearly precision the foliage of my neural drought when our father sets in Mictlan

there are one-eyed colors and arched irises without happy ending or gold pot or luminous beginning

there’s also the imminent baldness of ideas shaped against jade horizons like pigmy spears when they hunt stand-stills inside the immeasurable wastelands within museums

there are two genres perhaps three and numerous races but no more than a solidly premeditated clubbing for that third one as well as for the non-white

there are red creeds in clandestine flowers although the rusty roaring of the phobic mother-loads cries indiscrete and there are no vestiges sketching traces of brightness that erase the darkness of a prison cell

there’s a multitude of languages and one meaningthe world is seeded with cemeteries its rivers and atmosphere saturated with the only and unrepeatable death

there are straight streets parallel lives narrow minds acute voices geometry of nausea

radios with insect antennas transmit cicada songs tympanum cancer

elementary sculptors sculpt with metaphysical clay a folded aesthetics like cardboard or glossy paper

non-comprehended pyramids’ stolen science cut angles under a sky ill with cirrhosis

there’s imperfect yellow nowhere diamonds on pinky fingers of virgin prosti-tutes scans indexes of phone books

biblical parables drawing trajectories of mortar cross-fire in the siege of Jerusalem blow a crowd knelt towards Mecca in the inquisitorial style of the Vietnam War

there’s Mayan mathematics calendar of eclipse-Jaguarundecipherable petroglyph chronological wave in the Caribbean

there are reading texts for the blind as the presence of the wind breaks their anguishing dead calm right on their faces

there’s a sun that I can’t distinguish without blinding the transparency of the chromatic rape which originates binary visions conjugated into an united image

there’s also the otherness ever resembling infinite like cartilaginous mirrors face to face

too bad for us you especially since I already was part of this wailing whole that makes us meow telepathic messages in heat

the figures are hordes of zeroes before zero and after the left of nobody’s place structuring the living hours when you save the seat for somebody else in the waiting room of the astrologist.

PAMINA AND TAMINO

Wir wandelten durch Feuergluten, We wandered through the fire’s glow Bekämpften mutig die Gefahr. Fought bravely the danger. Dein Ton sei Schutz in Wasserfluten, May your sound be protectiion in floods So wie er es im Feuer war. As it was in the fire. Dein Ton sei Schutz in Wasserfluten, May your sound be protectiion in floods So wie er es im Feuer war. As it was in the fire.

Ihr Götter, welch ein Augenblick You Gods, what a moment (when) Gewähret ist uns Isis Glück. Isis’ luck is accorded us.

The last line will have to wait for elliptical technical reasons , and cinematic language to resonate with the dream of Birgitta Carolina at the end of the film.

Photomicrographiez vos goûts

The voice of Ghérasim Luca crackles in the bonfire where the auction of culture is burning, everything goes by : Goya, Shubert, Boris Vian, Rimbaud ... «Because there is no place for poets in this world» Ghérasim Luca flows into the Seine again. A Näcken weaves with her violin the last farewell.

Joel Grip & Mauricio Hernández

La primera flauta se hizo de una rama robada

Det snöar om björken is the image of a magical lands-cape that opens its door allowing us to inhabit it. It is the relationship with nature established by Leïla Colin-Navaï in a very privileged way. Det snöar om björken should not be translated, the meaning is simple, an amazingly literal image that is unfolding its time before our eyes.

Das Ohr dagegen vernimmt, ohne sich selber praktisch gegen die Objekte hinauszuwenden, das Resultat jenes inneren Erzitterns des Körpers durch welches nicht mehr die ruhige materielle Gestalt, sondern die erste ideellereSeelenhaftigkeit zum Vorschein kommt

Hegel helps us to herald a film in which sound has priority over image, we can then be lulled by the rustling of his ideas even if we don’t understand German, even if we don’t understand what he says. When he was young he had tried in vain to describe consciousness through the long corridors of a maze, but in this simple description of hearing, in his later work, he almost reached its core.

Umlicht : Transformation Gaze

A film production company founded by filmmakers Joel Grip (Sweden) and Mauricio Hernández (Mexico) in 2014

with base in Stockholm, Paris and Berlin.

Through the frame of Umlicht : Transformation Gaze the whole world is seen as a field, whereas the spectator is

the counter field (spinning of the statement of Guy-Ernest Debord).

Contact:Umlicht c/o Grip

Pontonjärgatan 1011222 Stockholm

Sweden

www.umlicht.com contact@umlicht.com

English translation: Michael Joyce© Photos by Leïla Colin-Navaï

At the dawn of time, explorers set out to examine the world. And even if the geographical limits of our small planet have long since been determined, there are still people who discover the world afresh. Now, the journey just takes an inward direction. Equipped with a Super 8 camera, the directing duo Mauricio Hernández and Joel Grip set out on an exploration in the Swedish free jazz group Kege Snös’s musical universe - and to the Swedish summer idyl in the nature of Småland. Improvisation is another word for freedom, and freedom is celebrated both with images and music in the endearing and slightly trippy ‘It Snows About the Birch’, which most of all resembles a home movie from a summer holiday in a parallel galaxy - and which, incidentally, is dedicated to the surrealist author Gherasim Luca. The music plays, birds sing (what, in the end, is the difference?), and spirits as different as Hegel and Bergman hover above the pine trees in an analogue tribute to the creative urge, summer and days spent in the company of good friends. Trevlig resa!