first in first out / Novemberregen / Eine Million Kredit ist normal, sagt mein Großvater

Sun 13.09.
19:30

Cinema

Arsenal

first in first out

In FIRST IN FIRST OUT, Zacharias Zitouni films his father with his old video camera, searching for his family’s long-repressed history of imprisonment and deportation. Found-footage vacation films meet contemporary footage; the distortion in the image transform the medium itself into a space of porous perception. The multi-perspective narrative constructs ambiguous statements that create a vast expanse of memory.

November

Taking her 1983 Super 8 feminist martial arts film as a starting point, Hito Steyerl explores the interrelationships between popular culture and political activism in the image-critical essay film NOVEMBER: The rebel in the amateur trash film—her friend Andrea Wolf—was later killed as a Kurdish PKK fighter. The voiceover narrator reads out the cheerful, emancipatory fiction of self-empowerment in retrospect as a document, as if Wolf’s later story had already been laid out in the fictional images of the past. NOVEMBER deals not only with the relationship between images, but also their legacy.

Eine Million Kredit ist normal, sagt mein Großvater

In EINE MILLION KREDIT IST NORMAL, SAGT MEIN GROSSVATER by Gabriele Mathes, the filmmaker’s own family history is unearthed from old Super 8 films. The grainy, faded images paint a picture of seemingly idyllic family joy, which is countered by the voiceover narration: consisting of short sentences, the laconic first-person narrative recounts from off-screen how the family business went bankrupt and has a distinctly apodictic feel due to its frequent use of anaphora.