Been There

Let’s start from the end of a film that is made of figures – drones, selfie sticks, garbage, graffiti – that meander through it as threads that put the global geography of mass tourism together. The umpteenth «tourists go home» graffiti is now duly deleted, credits are already scrolled, and on the black screen we hear the sound of a spray-paint can ready to take action. The film would be ready to continue indefinitely, as indefinitely massive tourism and its consequences continue to leave their marks on our planet. This precise and keen detail is the best example of how Corina Schwingruber Ilic works, with a maniacal attention to any formal detail of the film. Been There displays a perfect geometry in editing and framing, and makes of the pleasure for geometry the form and the content of this humorous gaze on mass tourism, for the tourists are the first ones childishly playing with geometries in the pictures whose taking pops up in every scene of the film. The tourists are shown as lost in the grandiosity of the landscapes, the relationship to which is reduced to the laborious activity of recording that they have been there. They or, more accurately, each of them separately, because an “anthropological” virtue of the film is its ability to capture the tourists as being a mass of disconnected individuals that do not make a socialisable group. We’ll certainly laugh watching at Been There, with but a bitter smile remaining on our mouth.

Corina Schwingruber Ilic | CH 2023 | 10’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2023, Best Film of the Sparks Competition; Solothurner Filmtsge 2024
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Screenings at the Solothurner Filmtage 2024