VISIONAIR-10 (Carlos Casas + Phill Niblock: Avalanche)

“Avalanche” is part of a ‘work in progress’ by Carlos Casas started in 2006 and dedicated to Pamir (“the roof of the world” in the Persian language), a region between Asia and Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan crossed by the Silk Road, with an average altitude among the highest on the planet. The last time Carlos went there, in 2009, he shot a lot of footage of the scenery, especially of the mountains and the sky, whilst listening constantly through his headphones to “Stosspeng”, a piece by the great American musician and film-maker Phill Niblock, who suggested it - amongst others – as a soundtrack for his video. Thus Casas had a sort of 'live' soundtrack , capable of giving the right tone to his “visual explorations”, bestowing on the images what appeared to be the sound of the mountains themselves. This music became, through some sort of natural destiny, the actual soundtrack of the first part of “Avalanche”, which one could define as visionary (there are some evident echoes of Romantic imagery, especially Friedrich's); the soundtrack generates an osmotic continuity with the images, which correctly adjust to its emotional temperature, returning the same energy but in a different form. The second part of the video has no musical soundtrack but is strongly supported by the sounds recorded on-site, which establish the same kind of relationship with the images. These sounds are made by some of the inhabitants of the village of Hichigh (situated in the province of Badakhshan at an altitude of about 3800 metres AMSL) as they carry out their ancestral motions, repeating them as they do every day, but this time under the watchful and intent eye of Casas. This last part is closer to Casas' 'ethnographical' work, masterfully represented by his trilogy on the extreme locations of planet Earth, which the public of the Torino Film Festival is familiar with. As a matter of fact, the Catalan author has been a regular at the festival for several years already, since 2004, when he won the Prize for Best Documentary for “Aral. Fishing in an Invisibile Sea”.
“Avalanche” will premiere at blank on Saturday 27th November, starting from 6.30 pm, and a second screening will be held on the following Saturday, on 4th December 2010, starting from 5 pm.

Event featured in the official 28th Torino Film Festival programme