Together with composer Kaveh Vares, artists Lotte Geeven and Yeb Wiersma invite you to dissect the meaning and use of manipulation in film and music. Using a number of scenes from their recent film project Arise, they look at the mechanisms that lie behind the (sub)conscious manipulation. What stylistic tools and strategies in image and sound 'tweak' reality? How do you play with the viewer's emotions? What is the power and danger of 'twisting'? What is your position when the boundary between 'true' and 'false' becomes increasingly blurred? Afterwards you can watch the first edited version of Arise in preview.
details
The Masterclass is open to everyone and starts at 13:30. The official language is English. At 16:00 there will be a presentation of the first edited version of Arise. This short film lasts about half an hour.
The Masterclass is open to everyone and starts at 13:30. The official language is English. At 16:00 there will be a presentation of the first edited version of Arise. This short film lasts about half an hour.
Arise is a project that was made possible thanks to VERVE. VERVE was initiated by the Dutch Embassy, Dutch Culture, Dutch Performing Arts, Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Mondriaan Fonds.
About Arise
The film essay Arise portrays the power and danger of music when playing with the emotions of the masses. The film forces to the viewer to choose sides in a story full of unreliable testimonies of one specific event. This work is the result of a research trajectory on the role and use of music. It was created in close collaboration with composer Kaveh Vares.
Vulnerable tipping point
The three artists jointly studied musical 'incantation methods' used in warfare, propaganda and protest. Can we unmask the instruments that lie behind military music or national anthems and use them to hypnotise the 'last individual' in the masses? Every word, tone, interval and phrase in this genre has been carefully composed with the aim of bringing our emotions to a point of surrender; the vulnerable tipping point at which we lose our critical self in the masses. Geeven, Vares and Wiersma looked at shifts in rhythms, tonality and intervals. In this way they discovered how and at what moments these shifts play on the masses and how the melody line gradually borrows its way to the centre of our subconsciousness. Arise's challenge is not so much the one-dimensional credibility or indignation of a twisted story as the ambition to convey to the viewer the vulnerability and complexity of all human endeavours.
About the artists
Lotte Geeven makes adventurous portraits about the human relationship to abstract things like the sky or the globe. All over the world she studies how we try to understand and control these complex phenomena. Her work has been shown in various galleries and museums in New York, Berlin, Budapest, London, China, Indonesia and Canada. In 2010 Geeven won the Illy Prize, an award for the most innovative artist.
In addition to orchestral and ensemble music, composer Kaveh Vares regularly composes for film and television. He also teaches composition and film music at the Amsterdam Film Academy and at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He recently created the music for the VPRO series Moja Polska, a series that examines the rise of nationalism in Poland.
In her projects Yeb Wiersma combines film, photography, interventions, performance and text. With her hybrid oeuvre she evokes surprising relationships and realities between different people, living objects, times and places, (un)visible forces. Her works were exhibited in De Oude Kerk, a Story of a Ton, WEST, FOAM Amsterdam, Migrant Journal, Kröller Müller Museum...
