Differently, Molussia and Soviets Plus Electricity

About This Screening

Filmmaker Nicolas Rey will be in Portland to present two nights of extraordinary filmic experience. Night one features the recently completed Differently, Molussia, Rey’s ethereal and expansive hand-processed film based on fragments from anti-fascist novel Die molussische Katakombe (The Molussian Catacomb) by Günther Anders (who was married to philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt). Prior to each screening a random ordering of the “baby blue,” “pink” and “canary” 16mm film reels is determined so that in total, there are 362,880 combinations from which the projection can be assembled. As Rey himself says, each part can be “[a] visual course, a sound atmosphere, and a text: an unlikely classicism.” Night two continues the exploration of distant landscapes with the equally epic 2001 film Soviets Plus Electricity. A travelogue of sorts and filmed on Super-8 stock that has been blow up to 16mm, Soviets recounts a journey across Russia that ends deep in Siberia at the port town of Magadan. As Boris Lehman writes, “[t]he final product is a three-stage, three-hour cinematic journey on the trail of condemned prisoners dragged to the furthest ends of Siberia... Nicolas not only realises his dream and undertakes this impossible, unimaginable journey. He also captures it cinematically as images and sounds, movement, light, colour, black leaders and intertitles.” Nicolas will be in attendance to discuss his work. The Nicholas Rey touring exhibition is supported in part by a grant from Cine2000, a program of FACE.