Revolving Rounds

Presented only in theatres.

This film is part of the FIFA Expérimental program Ces lieux qui nous habitent.

Befitting its title, Revolving Rounds is a cyclical film in both form and content. Shot at an agricultural field on the outskirts of Vienna (Austria), Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik​’s 3D short begins as it ends, tracking a planimetric path alongside three greenhouses as in the early morning sun.
Shot in 35mm and 16mm film, with two synchronized cameras, the crossing of this humanless space leads inside one of the greenhouses where are gathered a pair of 16mm projectors and a cyclostéréoscope. A midcentury cinematic device that uses a rotating barrier-grid to display autostereoscopic 3D without the need for glasses, the cyclostéréoscope today resembles a piece of industrial farm equipment as much as a premodern line-screen apparatus. This is a correlation that Lurf and Jauernik tease out through a spatiotemporal intervention with both the instrument itself and the subject being animated in its spinning frame: a pea plant which is filmed to the point of legibility and dissolves into a purely granular yet volumetric space. Revolving Rounds is charting a quite unusual course through space, time, and perception. A field trip in every sense. [Excerpts from a text by Jordan Cronk]