ALMANACH
A film currently in production by Monika Czyzyk & Neil Luck
A film currently in production by Monika Czyzyk & Neil Luck
Alamanch: A published volume that collates information about a particular subject
- texts, charts, tables, figures, facts, warnings, stories.
Alamanch is a collaboration between visual artist and filmmaker Czyzyk, and composer Luck, that approaches the authoring of film equally from a visual and sonic perspective. The film is set in a South German Forest, featuring various musicians and performers who work in quasi/magical, transformative ways with natural elements. This includes a pipe organist-angel manipulating air, fire, and water with his hands, a percussionist-magician from the acclaimed Ensemble Ascolta who constructs his own instruments from stones and shells in the pursuit of rich and unique sounds, a Bolivian bamboo flautist-bandit who conflates breath and the spirit, a Peruvian shaman employing music, ritual, tobacco, and other substances as prescient para-technologies, and a Rwandan DJ covered in slime.
Presented as a piece of hybrid docu-fiction these characters are presented, shuffled, confused, overlapped, and merged in a poetic struggle to find connections between bodies, bodies and nature, gesture and sound, objects and semiotics and music, and the mystical transformation of natural elements.
Although spoken language is never used, each character has an individual narrative arc that spills over into others’ realities. Approached sensorially, sounds from the forest infiltrate a skatepark, the breath of an organ resonates with a mossy grove, a techno track produced from the sound of trees and bark choreograph surreal dances in greenhouses, the movement of stones in a controlled sound studio force alterations in the image; cuts, edits, double exposures, changes in grain, aspect ratio, and colour.
A fundamentally synaesthetic experience, Almanach is presented like a mycelial network of individuals, stories, sounds and images. Never didactic or linear in narrative, it opens spaces to consider the potential interconnectedness of a diverse range of individuals, beliefs, forms of spirituality, and artisanal tactile practices. It raises questions about our relationships to each other, to nature, a broad spectrum of cultures, and to our own perceptual capabilities.
Alamanch is a film that sets out to fully engage the audience’s sensorium, using experimental filming and recording techniques, studio and field conditions, vérité and the staged, the real and the fictional, in an energetic intercultural, interspecies ballet.
Runtime c.30 minutes