Bild: Christin Turner, What Happens to the Mountain (Screenshot)
Christin Turner
Christin Turner is is a filmmaker and video artist whose work seeks to change our ideas of the
past and honoring traditions with a new and more modern outlook. She depicts landscape as
both metaphor and means for traversing psychological terrains, and investigates thepossibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. Turner’s use of color and light has been
described as painterly, impressionistic, and psychedelic.
Turner received an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BA from the
University of California San Diego. Her experimental films have been featured on vdrome and
Frieze, and have screened at a variety of venues including the Museum of Modern Art,
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Karlovy-Vary, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh
International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, 25FPS Festival, Kurzfilmtage
Winterthur and at Kurzfilmtage Hamburg where she was awarded the De-Framed Prize (2017).
Her work has been supported with residencies at MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation and
the Villa Sträuli.
What Happens to the Mountain 12:09 (USA) 2016
The mountain has not yet been a mountain.
The mountain is not yet a mountain.
The mountain will soon be a mountain.
The mountain is almost a mountain.
The mountain is a mountain.
The mountain continues to be a mountain.
The mountain is only just a mountain.
The mountain is no longer a mountain.
The mountain will no more be a mountain.
The mountain will never again be a mountain.
The mountain was never a mountain.
The mountain is a mountain.
— Edvard Kocbek
What Happens to the Mountain draws upon literary sources, late night radio, and ancient legends to conjure a psycho-geographic experience in a sacred landscape. A long-distance driver, a drifter, journeys from a tenuous reality into a vision of the afterlife, called forth by the spirit of the mountain.
Born to be Yves Klein Blue 4:53 (USA) 2016
An image flashes on the screen. Teenage informer Richard Brun, 19, shining a lot on the spot to
which the bodies of the two sisters Gretchen, 17, & Wendy, 13, had been dragged in the desert
by their killer Charles Schmid, 23, but can now not be found.
The film is an improvisation, a poem, a song, blue nights in Palm Desert. Inspired by the films
of Vincent Grenier, magicians, Rebecca Solnit, and “Yves Klein Speaks!”
Vesuvius at Home 14:06 (USA/ITALY) 2018
Volcanoes be in Sicily
And South America
I judge from my Geography—
Volcanos nearer here
A Lava step at any time
Am I inclined to climb—
A Crater I may contemplate
Vesuvius at Home.
— Emily Dickinson
A fantastical journey from the filmmaker’s childhood re-enactment of The Fall of Pompeii, through decades and decline, to the Sibyl’s Cave, wherein she discovers Vesuvius’ symbiosis with cinema, memory, and Giambattista Vico’s spiral of time.
Land Rebel 2:00, (USA) 2018
Winds of change turn the wheels of fortune in Tularosa, New Mexico. Downwind from the atomic bomb site at Alamogordo, a man with flowers in his pocket – A Land Rebel – builds a Buddhist shrine to counterbalance the vortex of power and destruction.
Der Stein zu Wörlitz 5:10 (GERMANY) 2019
“In front of me, Vesuvius. Now throw flames and smoke. An extraordinary show! Imagine a huge firework that doesn’t stop for a single minute”
– Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol
An experiential response to the Wikipedia entry on the artificial replica of Vesuvius in Wörlitz,
Germany, and a document of its final eruption using pyrotechnics, filmed during the summer of 2019.
A Dream in Red 11:07 (UK/USA) 2020
A poetic, time traveling meditation on ecological disaster via a hand processed black and white16mm montage of people in hiding confined in an ambiguous setting and time frame. Joltingfrom the temporal to the primal experience of the unknown, gradual cues subtly suggest that thesetting is Pompeii during the volcanic eruption. In the aftermath, a woman without sight feels her
way to an uncertain future. Non-binary composer Cee Haines’ music project C H A I N E S
accompanies the visual work with a dynamic, modular score using live musicians andelectronics.
