Tzuan Wu Day

 

‘Tzu-An Wu makes experimental films. For him, so-called “experimental” is not a genre, but a changeable, nomadic status crossing the machineries inside out. He likes to manipulate heterogeneous images, sounds, and texts, to question the construction of the narrative and the selfhood. In recent years he works mainly with Super 8 and 16mm film techniques, while he is also interested in the intersection of both analog and digital techniques of visual reproduction. …

‘Growing under the glittery shadows of the avant-garde cinema, his works collage different kinds of images and texts, aiming to create a circular way of self-communication, production, and reproduction. Although the textures and forms of these works change, they share similar concerns about the fluid, uncertain essence of selfhood and identities. For example, the early work We Can’t Grow Up Together is a lyrical and mad demonstration on how the self changed; Disease of Manifestation discusses the narrative construction of the selves. QUOUSQUE EADEM? (OR A SELF-PORTRAIT) is a self-portrait to see the image-making machinery as the metaphor of the selves. All of these works share the same theme: how to know thyself? How can it be possible? ”

‘These ideas and emotions on the selfhood were preserved, but also annihilated when a work is finished. If the cinema is a form of preserving time and body, (According to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cinema means “ghosts are watching ghosts.”) when screening the works, the memories and the ghosts of the past are summoned, on and off the screen…

“In much of my previous work I used, among others, my own travelogue and diary film footage. Most of these were filmed by chance without purpose. I treated them as found-footage. By taking those images out of their original context. I obtained a set of visual objects that I could freely manipulate with some cinematic techniques.

“For the more recent works … , however, I handled the collected images in a different way. In particular, I chose as filming subjects some of the places near my residency that I had been frequenting. Within these subjects themselves I sought possible textures and rhythms to emerge. They meant to be produced as simple “signs”, as I was told by my former teacher video artist Paul Ryan, “Signs represent something for somebody in some respect”.

“I handled these “signs” with different “process”, This body of work can be seen both as a collection of independent pieces as well as a constellation that marks my everyday life in the residency. In the future, they will quite possibly evolve into another progress that in turn will feed into another project.” — Tzuan Wu

‘He holds a BA in Gender and Cultural Studies from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York. His works have been shown internationally, including BFI Flare (London), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherland), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Xposed International Queer Film Festival(Berlin), Golden Harvest Film Festival (Taiwan), MixNYC (New York), He was awarded the jury prize at Festival of Different and Experimental Cinema (Paris). He is also a member of the cinema collective The Other Cinema and the co-founder of countercultural zine group 後母雜誌 Post-Motherism.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Tzuan Wu Website
Tzuan Wu @ Vimeo
Tzuan Wu @ Facebook
Tzuan Wu @ mixcloud
Tzuan Wu @ Medium
Tzuan Wu @ MUBI

 

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Extras

failed processing

Tulips

l’abjection

 

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13 of Tzuan Wu’s 17 films

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A Girl’s Prayer (1978－2016）
‘Many years after graduation. Some one left earlier while the party goes on. We made a day to visit the green lake together. In that burning afternoon. These fragments of over-exposed, out of focus film were produced without a purpose. Then seamed together by chance. All of these probably are merely a reminder of our rights of indulgence; These are things you should commemorate, these are your memento mori. Thousand layers of Absolute Terror Field. In the center the princess is still praying for maintaining the world. Covered by magic circles, under the urban plan construct with an inverted pyramid shape. She prays in a basement that no one could reach.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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Stargazing (2017)
‘After WU’s arrival at New Zealand, WU has been trying to take a photo of the starry night sky everyday with his phone, whether or not it was clear. The star photos can be interpreted as diaries. Using 16mm Bolex camera to film the stars frame by frame with long exposure. Exposure time was determined by mind. These uneven pulsations of lights corresponds to the starlight changing along with the thoughts were at mind. This film documents WU’s everyday ritual of star-gazing with the related associations and inspirations, and forms a meditative process.’ — TW

Trailer

 

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Audio/Video Letter (2016)
‘Audio/Video Letter between musician Amund Ulvestad and filmmaker Tzuan Wu.’

the entire film

 

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Proxy of Heaven (2015)
‘Documenting, exploring and collage the touristic images of different religious spaces, in Czech, France, and Taiwan. Passing through these passages of the holy experience, witnessing the “memento mori” and the desire of happiness brings us back to the mundane human world.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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伊人 Yi-Ren (the person of whom I think) (2015)
‘Yi-Ren (can be vaguely translated to “the person of whom I think”) is a collaged love letter made of various sources. Such as my super8 mm diaries, karaoke videos, and found-footage from Kang-Chien Chiu (1940-2013)’s films, and poems. It is also an act of homage and a queer reading of Chiu. Reassemble, manipulate the materials, and melt the ready-made and the personal into one. Or, maybe the personal emotions and experiences are actually all borrowed from someone and somewhere… As the line “my moans have a bit of Hollywood in them” suggests, our emotions would not exist without acting, or movies we have seen.

‘This double channel employed the duality of the forms, the images, and the media. They are played in counterpoints, and presented as a metaphor of the mechanism of our emotions. Like the generation loss came from transfer between digital and analogue film. The materials were handled as the ready-made affection. The flowers bloom and wither, the hands caress or grab the air, people pass through and the faces vanishes… Through reproducing and manipulating the lines and images, it generates a floating narrative, a murmur between the subject of lost and the object of desire.’ — TW

Excerpt

 

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World’s Odds and World’s Ends (2014)
‘An experimental ethnography of tourists. Documenting the touristic activities in the medieval town Cesky Krumlov of Czech Republic. Using time-lapse photography to capture the repetition of the paths, the action, and the faces. The alchemy is the metaphor of their psychodynamic, and their doomed quest of the freedom in the odds and ends, at the end of the world.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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Quousque eadem? (or a self-portrait) (2013)
‘When one is holding a camera, it means changes of the way of seeing, distortion of the perception. It’s an opaque state of intermediacy. The image made in this way is also non-transparent as is, changeable but repeating, just as the perception to everyday-lives and to the selves, is hard to determine and trap in the stalemate.

‘This work started as a personal project, a one-man home video, which represents to the certain stage of my life and it was produced only for my own. While started working on it again, I changed the initial goal. Reassemble with narration, HD images and digitalized Super 8mm footages, to transform the (pseudo-) video diaries to a video essay about my reflections on the interrelationship between vision, memory, and the process of image (re-) production.

‘The title “QUOUSQUE EADEM?” comes from the same-name essay in the book “Precis de decomposition” of E. M. Cioran. Which means “How much longer (must we endure) the same things?” I have no mean to reiterate the hatred and helplessness of the essay, however I think the sense of the repetitiveness in the impermanence is suitable to this work.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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Disease of Manifestation 宣(言)癖 (2011)
‘This work is an argument initiated with Wendy Brown’s article Resisting Left Melancholy. She applied Walter Benjamin’s notion of “Left Melancholia” to see the political thoughts and the norms in the left-wing movement/ theory traditions as the notion of melancholia. There is the thingness of the thoughts that can see as the lost object. Extends this idea, the thingness of thoughts, come from one’s personal or collective memories could become the pathological fixation.

‘The passionate political manifestos or the small scale manifestos/ manifestations in our everyday lives, can be consider as the compulsory desire to maintain, to repeat, and to reproduce the manifestos, aiming to achieve an unachievable substance. Melancholia in the Freudian context is defined as the subject tries to maintain the lost object even more then the subject itself, and this causes the notion of disorder. The act of manifestation is to rupture with the present world and the compulsion to change it. Here comes the paradox between outward-looking and inward-looking perspectives of the notion of revolution, which is the initiation of this project, manifestations as the infectious psychosis.

‘This work was composed in a pseudo-automatic writing manner, collaged with the fragments of various forms and contents, of images and words. I trim them with juxtaposition, bad translation, and misreading the different visual, audio or textual references in a machinery speaking… forming the work with heterogeneous qualities with in. The work builds itself towards the anarchistic conditions of the inner scenes, can also be seem as a wrong-manifesto.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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Lip-sync (2012)
‘Starts with the act of the actor translates a recording of a reading of an intimate letter, instantly and repeatedly, while the super 8mm film projected on his face. I try to mixed the actual process of (mis)translation with nostalgic images into a heterogenic impurity, through focus on the materiality and performativity of the images, and the alchemic manner of manipulation of the images. ToUse language as the medium and images as the language to present the in-between-ness of one’s conflicting inner scenery.

‘The video aims to discuss the relationships between outward and inward narratives, and to demonstrate the in-between condition of one’s inner scene, in the space between translation, memory and forgetfulness, and the process of identification. In between the introjection act of the narratives from the outside world, and the projection act of speech and expression keep re-defining the edges of one’s self; In where emotions grow and vanish.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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The Pineapple of A Very, Very Serious Lady (2010)
‘”I believe that a pineapple is the parody of an apple.” A Drag queen wants to be pregnant and this causes an unbelievable tragedy. With demonstrating the notion of schizophrenia, this work aims to re-imagine the boundaries between identities and languages, and the impossibility of being “as a whole”.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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A Comma (2010)
“In the sentence of time, people appears like continuous commas. But you define yourself as a period, aiming for interrupt the sentence.” — E.M. Cioran

the entire film

 

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We Can’t Grow Up Together (2010)
‘Freaks also grow up from little as well. But the things we had lost in time differ. That’s the reason why we can’t grow up together. The film was shot in 16mm, based on a childhood (false) memory, transformed with fantasies and symbolic objects, and performed in a public environment. The elements in the film are both the markers of emotion and time, with montage, the outside world and inner scenery came across to each other.

‘Some events seem to be not important at the moment might became a crucial milestone in a personal sense. Through retelling and rewriting the memory, the pointless emotions turns to the flowing memory, and being able to preserved.’ — TW

the entire film

 

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Talking Cure (人生相談) (2008)
‘Dedicated to the trinity of Lady Larzarus, Ayanami Rei, and Britney Spears. One day I will take you to the exorcist.’ — TW

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** HaveANiceLife, Hi. I knew about ‘Frank Wolf’, but I didn’t recognise him from that photo. Incredibly sad. That’s not the first time I’ve seen his photos coopted by escorts and slaves. Thanks for letting me know. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for the adds. That Nagisa Oshima thing is nuts, I hadn’t seen it before. ** Steve Erickson, Hey. Interesting: your gun related explorations, thank you. Fingers crossed re: your editor. Man, you do have a busy day. Hope it flew by with all parts intact. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ho, Ben. That ink seems like an exciting storehouse. Excited to see what it allows you to do. ** Jamie, Thank you, bud. I wish Niki de Saint Phalle’s work in general was more in that vein, but … well, you’ve seen if you googled her. I’m good. I did inch into the script. Need to pick up the pace today. And yes, had a great visit with Kier and his pal Ottar. They’re here for two weeks so much fun is in the offing. Nothing scary at all? Eerie, surely. But, hey, an unscary horror movie sounds good to me. I think that genre is a lot more unexpectedly exploitable the people give it credit for. Follow your nose, man. Surprise … yesterday … hm. I was surprised that I was looking around on Facebook and someone posted a video of that awful 80s band Europe performing ‘The Final Countdown’ just the other day somewhere and that I was in some kind of weird mood where I thought it would be interesting to learn what it felt like to watch old versions of them perform a song that they’ve undoubtedly performed 80,000 times at this point and that I did watch a good minute or so with only the mildest interest — they look like middle-aged men with really dated haircuts and successfully acted like they cared about the song’s effect — but I was not surprised to find that horrible song consequently stuck in my head for hours. My Wednesday needs to be consumed by script work, and I will try. Ha ha, when I was much younger, I was briefly famous among my friends as someone who could cook up an apparently delicious carrot cake. No frosting. I think you’re probably right about Ryan Gosling and I was surprised recently to decide via a TV interview that Ethan Hawke seems like a nice guy even though his acting makes my teeth grind love, Dennis. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Yeah, like I said up above, I know the very sad ‘Frank Wolf’ story but I didn’t recognise him in that photo. If I had, I don’t think I would have used that profile. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten popcorn at a movie, weird. Back when I occasionally ate during movies, it was always Milk Duds. Do they still exist? Guns and Halloween are like Campbells Soup and 7/10 egg salad sandwiches. Bon day! ** Right. I’m focusing your attention today on the films of the wonderful and not anywhere near as well known as he should be Tzuan Wu. Should you choose to investigate the post, you will have experiences of a valuable and resonating nature. Thank you. See you tomorrow.