Siberian-born filmmakers Anya Tsyrlina and Sid Iandovka, friends and collaborators over many years, meld the poetic out of a peculiar combination of various formats (archival film, analog and digital video, CGI), often depicting the late Soviet period in their home region. horizōn detaches a short newsreel out of its specific context. By carefully manipulating the narrative and the image, the viewer is left behind unhinged in an undefinable interzone between nostalgic propaganda and ghostly science-fiction.

The Art of Mirrors, shot on super 8, features figures moving in the foreground and background of an empty space, holding mirrors which occasionally flash in the lens of the camera. The images portrayed in the film are reminiscent of Jarman’s abstract landscape paintings of the same period. In his diary Jarman wrote: “This is something that could only be done on a Super 8 camera, with it`s built in meters and effects.”

Derek Jarman’s film portrait of American writer William S. Burroughs was shot in September 1982 during his first visit to England, to attend the legendary Final Academy events at the South London Ritzy Cinema. These were Burroughs-themed art and performance nights curated by Psychic TV. Jarman’s film shows Burroughs on Tottenham Court Road signing autographs with fans and inside a shop buying alcohol. The industrial soundtrack by Psychic TV features a sample of Burroughs repeating “boys, school showers and swimming pools full of ‘em’”.

Derek Jarman is surely the artist-filmmaker who was the closest to the subterranean cultural movement that David Keenan has coined “England’s Hidden Reverse," involving avant-garde, industrial, and experimental music scenes that emerged from the 1970s onwards. In 1980, Jarman invited Throbbing Gristle to provide a soundtrack for In the Shadow of The Sun. The collaboration started long-lasting relationships with members of TG, Psychic TV and Coil. In 1982, Jarman filmed William S. Burroughs during his first visit to London, where he made a cameo appearance for Jürgen Muschalek’s film Decoder (featuring Genesis P-Orridge) and attended the legendary Final Academy events, curated by Psychic TV. Jarman’s film shows Burroughs on Tottenham Court Road signing autographs with fans and inside a shop buying alcohol. The soundtrack by Psychic TV is a magical-industrial dreamscape of broken transmissions, arcane whispers, and psychic residue, featuring a sample of Burroughs repeating "boys, school showers and swimming pools full of 'em'". Additional footage shot by Jarman during Burroughs' visit is reported to have been confiscated by Scotland Yard in 1991 and remains lost. Jarman and Psychic TV would continue to collaborate (“magic bound us together,” Jarman wrote), with Jarman directing the music video for Catalan and starring as the spokesperson in the Psychic TV video A Spokesman for the Temple of Psychick Youth. (SD)

Signal to Noise concludes a number of projects related to the surviving videotapes of schwimmen – an early 1990s teenage experimental industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk. The film creates a dialogue between the established archival record and the slippery poetics of an esoteric culture that inherently resists attempts to be (re)represented or deconstructed – celebrating the grand utopian impulses of marginal artistic practices and forms of life lived otherwise. (Herb Shellenberger)

Russian spoken, English subtitles