Fatou Åsbakk, En filmerindring i films form – Livet på Frogner (Norway, 2022)

A new video in which Åsbakk reflects on Anne Haugsgjerd’s 1986 film Livet på Frogner.

Frank Beauvais, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (France, 2019, 72 min, digital video, French with English subtitles)

“January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job or any real prospects, surrounded by luxuriant nature, the proximity of which is not enough to calm the deep distress into which I am plunged… I am lost and I watch four to five films a day. I decide to record this stagnation, not by picking up a camera but by editing shots from the stream of films I watch.” – Frank Beauvais

“When his relationship fell apart and his partner moved out, Frank Beauvais was left trapped in the French countryside. He had no driver’s license to escape his depressing surroundings and no money to return to Paris, but he did have a huge stack of films on DVD, which he constantly supplemented with online orders and illegal downloads. Over a period of six months he watched 400 films, from obscure Soviet productions and black-and-white classics to horror and Japanese soft porn. From these images, he distilled a film that is an amalgam of a visual autobiography, a literary confession and a superior sampling composition.” – International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam

The event will be extended with additional content on the PRISMS website.

Watch online: You will be able to stream two recent short films by Fatou Åsbakk, Solanotatene and Hamarøynotatene, for free from 30 May until 12 June.

Listen: A podcast in which Mike Sperlinger speaks with British writer Andrew Key about his weekly email/blog roland barfs film diary, in which he records both his everyday existence and his extensive film-viewing. (Key will also be watching and writing about Life in Frogner (1986), a short film by Anne Haugsgjerd, for this week’s edition of his diary. Sign up to his Substack here.

In the 1960s, the Norwegian filmmaker Erik Borge stated that there was a lack of examples of "free artistic short films" in Norway, which he defined as "the deviant product - the strange, the difficult, the angry".

The Deviant Product is a new screening series that investigates the ambiguous space between fine art and film, and asks what might count as "deviant products" of the moving image today. Guests from the art field are invited to nominate works they consider important, in some way, for renewing a conversation about alternative and experimental moving images in a Norwegian context. The screening series is arranged by the new initiative PRISMS.

This time we are joined by two guests: Rana Issa, board member at Masahat - Open Spaces for Arab Culture in Exile, and Arnd Schneider, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Both have proposed artists' moving images about connections between Norway and other parts of the world.

The screening is supported by Norway's Cultural Council.