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The Rain

Mona Vătămanu, Florin Tudor
Romania, 2005
4 min.

The Rain depicts someone trying to linearly draw on paper, but the rain washes away the traces again and again, the whole semi-performance being filmed on 8mm among real raindrops whose own trace is lost in the black and white of the photosensitive celluloid.

Our very own Straub-Huillet made a charmingly simple film – someone tries to draw something on a piece of paper in a linear fashion, but the rain washes away its traces, over and over again. Adapting the concept of Belgian filmmaker Marcel Broodthaers, used in his eponymous film from the late sixties (La Pluie, 1969), the artistic duo ends up giving more to cinema than Broodthaers did, since his rain was artificial: a powerful, shower-like spray is obvious even on black-and-white film reel, which is usually insensitive when it comes to the supple splash of waterdrops. Vătămanu și Tudor pursue their experiment until they reach a state of ideatic grace – it might just be that their semi-performance captures how nature erases the traces of culture, but, by shooting it all on 8mm, the traces of the (real) raindrops become lost in the black-and-white tones of the photosensitive reel. (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2022)

Date and Location

1st of October, 16:00, Cinemateca Eforie

Tickets

Speculative Ecologies: Romanian Experimental Films Retrospective

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The Rain

Mona Vătămanu, Florin Tudor | Duration 4 min.

The Rain depicts someone trying to linearly draw on paper, but the rain washes away the traces again and again, the whole semi-performance being filmed on 8mm among real raindrops whose own trace is lost in the black and white of the photosensitive celluloid.
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