Twist, Topple, Turn, Twiddle #1

Fasten your seatbelts and level those dolly tracks! Twist, Topple, Turn, Twiddle is an abstract experimental film program centered on movement. Each edition explores a different kind of motion - turning, tilting, panning, falling - offering a boundary-pushing approach to exploring experimental short films. 
Twist, Topple, Turn, Twiddle invites anyone eager to dive into visual experimentation in film and art, letting the senses take the lead.

For Twist, the first part of wysiwyg's quadriptych guest program at Flora, we will be focusing on all things spinning, twirling, gyring, and coiling. If you weren't buzzing by the time you entered the cinema, we guarantee you will be by the time you walk out!
Twist features seven short films from artists and filmmakers who use the camera in their own creative and unusual way.
Sit back and enjoy; we’ll take it from here.

The program:

Gyre | Björn Kämmerer | 2010 | AT | 9 min.
Luminous white, diamond-shaped forms glide from right to left across a jet-black plane in Cinemascope format. Minimal variations in their movement can be seen. The screen gradually lightens, and a roughly hewn wooden structure becomes visible. The light-colored rectangles turn out to be window openings of a log cabin with luminous white interior walls which is swiftly rotating on its axis. Subtle changes in the light and the camera´s distance and angle transform this presumably abstract animation into a concrete setup for a filmic and architectural experiment.

Hypnodrom | Richard Wilhelmer | 2017 | AT | 5 min.
A drive down a lonely country road at dusk: initially the perspective of the film remains coupled with that of the car. But barely after we have calibrated our gaze and adjusted to the motion, the horizontal axis of the image slowly starts rotating. Its increasing velocity soon evokes the analogy of a propeller; the contrast of darkness and light gains speed till the eye can´t keep up with the image. A landscape of buildings and a few flowers flies by, telescoping into an abstract mandala.

Heliocentric | Semiconductor | 2009 | UK | 15 min.
Heliocentric uses time-lapse photography and astronomical tracking to plot the sun’s trajectory across a series of landscapes. The entire environment seems to pan past the camera whilst the sun stays in the centre of each frame, enabling us to gauge the earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. As the Sun’s light becomes disrupted by passing weather conditions and the environment through which we encounter it, it audibly plays them as if it were a stylus. It is usually all but impossible to visualize how the earth moves around the sun, even though we know it to be true. Instead we ‘see’ the sun move around us. The ‘heliocentric’ view of the universe was debated from the third century BC onwards and remained contentious into modern times.

GRID | Alexandre Alagôa | 2021 | PT | 14 min.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

Trypps #7 (Badlands) | Ben Russell | 2010 | US | 10 min.

Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.

Fixed 22 | Dirk Koy | CH | 1 min.

Fixed 23 | Dirk Koy | CH | 1 min.

This series makes us question what we see by displacing the invisible anchor point we unconsciously rely on to follow action. When we watch someone jump or dive, we instinctively assume a position from which their trajectory can be anticipated. Fixed disrupts this internal framework, challenging our expectations of gravity and propulsion. The athletes seem suspended mid-air, as if the laws of physics themselves had paused. Yet despite the visual dissonance introduced by the reframing, movements continue along their intended paths; only our viewpoint has changed. This subtle intervention reminds us that motion is not absolute but a matter of perspective.