Sami van Ingen

History

Sami van Ingen is one of the pioneers of experimental filmmaking in Finland. He has made over 30 short films, mostly dealing subtly with the act of seeing and using various strategies to manipulate found or forgotten footage. His films have been screened at festivals like Edinburgh Film Festival, Image Forum Tokyo, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Buenos Aires and in institutions like National Gallery of Art in Washington, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Movies

Monica in the South Seas
Screenplay
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.
Monica in the South Seas
Director
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.
Pins
Director
Film by Sami van Ingen
Flame
Editor
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.
Flame
Director
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.
Manifest Destiny
Director
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.
Deep Six
Director
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.
The Sequent of Hanna Ave.
Director
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.
Fokus
Director
"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
Study Reel
Director
A film by Sami van Ingen of Bruce Baillie
Sweep
Writer
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.
Sweep
Director
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.
Finnmunka
Director
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.
Hammu
Director
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.
Moving Emu
Director
Film by Sami van Ingen
Butter
Director
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.
Butter
Himself
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.