INSTANT CULT: Stefan Kruse Jørgensen

FeKK has witnessed quite a number of films the perspectives of which were – quite explicitly – determined by machines. Last year’s winner of the FeKK YU program, Testfilm #1 (2019) by Telcosystems or the slightly older Cartographer (Kartograf, 2017) by Daria Blažević explore the view and the formative possibilities of modern technologies, such as DCP and Google Earth. On the other hand, Emotions and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (O čustvih in drugem zakonu termodinamike, 2019) by Nika Tomažič, last year’s winner of the FeKK SLO critics’ award, gives us the impression of being inside a transistor, whose stations are incessantly changed or which cannot in itself decide between the radio or internet signals and constantly skips from track to track. Therefore, rather than dealing with the ‘directly’ human, these films deal with the conditions to produce the experience of the ‘human essence’, mostly inside modern technologies.

A similar claim could be made for Stefan Kruse’s films. His The Migrating Image does not ‘directly’ address the migrants and their experience but is a film about the production of images that aid their receivers to organise the understanding of the world. It is hence a disclosure of the production of meaning (or the ideological). The Migrating Image does not show the actual migrant and his or her radical subjectivity, hopes, dreams, fears, social status, etc. but the images of the luxurious Europe produced on the smugglers’ FB page, which encourage migration (and communication with the smugglers). Additionally, it does not ‘directly’ address the European response but draws attention to the various technological means and the audio-visual language used to produce the image of the migrants, migrations, and their meaning (drone aerial shots intensify the migrants’ representation as this terrifying natural phenomenon in the sense of a wave, river, or a horde). In short, the film shows the creation of a certain collective subconsciousness, alerting to the supposedly invisible technologies applied.

Kruse’s latest A Lack of Clarity further stresses the theme of Migrating Image. The production of images also implies visibility or clarity which in both films closely connects to control (and consequently to borders, identity, protection). A Lack of Clarity highlights this from a different angle since it uses shots by surveillance, thermo-dynamic cameras that sense people with high temperature, which means that the border between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ is moved yet again. The invisible turns visible, becoming information that may be used as a new way of setting borders.

Kruse’s films are, on the one hand, documentaries and on the other, a dystopia, which we are already living in. What is typical of all his films scheduled for FeKK is that they effectively filter us through a machine. One such example is his first, slightly lighter, Excessive Bulk (2017), shot in a long take that shows an older printer printing an increasingly longer roll of paper, containing short associative notes mostly about (director’s?) DVD collection. It gives the impression of having been initiated into a personal catalogue with references that are unclear, at the same time lacking the presence of a human being to manage the collection, record the thoughts, or at least press the ‘print’ button. We are left with a machine that prints without any inside or outside human interference the thoughts and notes which, via the materialisation, become accessible to public.

By following the mechanical, which became the medium of human orientation and presence in the world, Stefan Kruse’s films also determine how the manners of this orientation, the images, and their pertaining meaning are to be produced. Despite focusing on the machine perspective, the films include a strong personal note, which is precisely the instance that ceaselessly perceives the manners on how we observe the world, how we are observed, and how we expose and establish ourselves.

Robert Kuret