Sami van Ingen

Film by Sami van Ingen

Hate opens up the questions of the way the "other" is portrayed in the depiction of the Finnish national epic Kalevala.

Chance incidents of life and in the darkroom collide, as found footage film strips take new shape under a flashlight. Poetic gestures in the source material and the manipulative body movements of the filmmaker form a new take on depicted relationships, a rite of passage and the artefacts of the process itself. As always gestures become actions, and these determine how we live our lives.

Exactly is some re-arranged found footage with its original sound track re-united. By omitting just the name of the protagonist I have turned this recycled strip of film (cut for recycling purposes from a 35mm screening print into a 16mm leader by an unanimous lab years ago- thus the undulation of images) in to three meditations on the international market economy.

Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.

Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.

Finnish filmmaker Sami van Ingen, a great-grandson of Robert Flaherty, made an expedition to the residence of Bruce Baillie not long after the turn of the century and documented the results of his visit. Study Reel is, as Baillie described it in a letter to the Brazilian magazine Tropico, "filled with commentary on various of the films along with the one-hour video of myself and family".

Wheels where paramount in the conquering of the west, they made possible the transporting of building materials to build towns and cities. Wheels – now in the form of the private automobile – have become a symbol of freedom and the last way to conquer “the big outdoors”. However getting out of ones the car has got more difficult and much scarier.

Experimental. Silent. No dialogue. Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s.

Texas Scramble is based on the notion of memory as the basis for our perception, it progresses through situations and moments consisting of repetitions of varying type. clinging outside narrative and letting chance associations form the path.

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.

Hammu is the name of the hamster I had as a child. It seemed it was my only friend and being to identify with. One day it disappeared from the cage and was never to be seen again, that marked the end of my childhood, of unreserved trust and commitment. This work is a visualisation of the memories I have about the event, of obsession, tediousness and loss.

An amateur set of images, an attempt to make a political documentary about the middle class revolution turns into an essay on the relationship between perception and interest.

"Fokus is a stirring viewing experience. It is based on an extremely minimal visual form: contrasts, textures and glowing colors. Its visual language consists of highly magnified and slowed images. Surface of the film material, the film grain and other anomalies function as integral parts of the whole. Van Ingen's rigorous structuralist methods have produced beautiful, emotionally touching and many-layered results. Fokus is as close to the art of painting as cinema can possibly strive to be. " M.T

Film by Sami van Ingen

The Sequent of Hanna Ave. is the result of my re-workings of some experimental film practices and my enquiries in to the phenomena of the movement-illusionism in the film form. By combining found footage, hand processing and hi-end digital technology, I elevate a few mundane gestures to a new perceptible wholeness, and give some fat fingers and a c-cassette tape all the attention, grace and drama they deserve.

Sami van Ingen continues to explore the Flaherty film family with Cast of Shadows, which questions how much memories, images and end credits can lie.

A documentation of an installation in Oulu 1991: An 8000Kg ice cube. A process where a passerby is faced with something familiar in a way that some element of normality is transformed to abnormal.

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.