Tonight 8/5/2022: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts: 3022 E 35th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 Instagram. Listen to the audio here. Live Zoom link click here Meeting ID: 867 4296 5027. View a book version of the film here.
All Star Fine and Recorded Arts is not scared to go up against the big guns. So, we are proud to announce that Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock’s film, Mistaken Landscapes, shot from Shinkansen Bullet trains in Japan over six years, will drop on August 5th, the same release date as Bullet Train, a new action comedy starring Brad Pitt.
Based on the 2010 Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train (filmic value yet unknown) is not to be confused with the extraordinary 1975 thriller, The Bullet Train, starring the legendary Ken Takakura and Sonny Chiba. Regardless—Takakura, Chiba, Pitt—we stand our ground.
Like the big motion picture companies, we, too, will bring a sampling of Japanese landscape into American theaters; however, our version emerges from the heartland minus the comedy, less predictably and more abstractly. Mistaken Landscapes will be projected onto the gallery window from inside All Star Fine and Recorded Arts, inverting space and turning the interior of this Minneapolis gallery into a view of the passing Japanese terrain. The corner location and visibility from pedestrians and drivers ideally places All Star Fine and Recorded Arts as the conduit between travelers on different continents.
About the film: the images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2020 and exploit the iPhone’s High Dynamic Range capabilities.
High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since model four came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three different exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.
Even though the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels at speeds up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. The brief lag between exposures causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with misregistration areas appearing featureless, and gray.
As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the world streaking by already appears unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shift pushes the images into territory bordering on hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.
Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.
The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.
