35mm, 8 min, 2020

The 35mm CinemaScope format is pre-eminently suited to landscapes. Viktoria Schmid puts the surroundings out of frame, turning the screen into a sculpture in the dunes. Widescreen emptiness becomes a projection surface for an interplay between light and shadow, sun and trees. (IFFR)

Viktoria Schmid‘s A Proposal to project in Scope begins with a shot of shallow rolling waves. Images are seen of a deserted beach, overgrown dunes and the brush of a pine forest, accompanied by sounds of the ocean quietly lapping, rustling winds, and birds twittering. Shot in 35mm CinemaScope, the opening of this short suggests a documentary approach characteristic of avant-garde films made in the 1960s and 1970s. However, following upon Schmid ́s A Proposal to project in 4:3 (2017), A Proposal to project in Scope opens a perspective that differs from historical works dedicated to exploring the relationship between the representation of landscape and the medium of film, as found for example in works by Michael Snow and Guy Sherwin. Schmid focuses upon the filmic dispositive as an interrelationship between the filmic work, its production and reception within the context of media history, and she frames this in new terms. A Proposal to project in Scope not only constitutes the recording of a landscape but also a documentation of artistic intervention. In midst of trees and bushes the camera reveals a CinemaScopic movie screen the filmmaker placed in a poetically sparse Lithuanian costal landscape for nature to casts its play of light and shadow upon over the course of a day. In A Proposal to project in Scope, this screen does not merely serve as a contemporary image and object of media history, it also conveys the Deleuzian sense of „a simultaneous presence of abundance and emptiness, past and present, mind and cosmos, inner and outer“, a free and open contemplative space. (Bettina Brunner)