Although Peter Weiss is primarily known as a writer and playwright, he began his artistic career as a painter. After he immigrated to Sweden, it was his feeling of being foreign, his insecurity, and existential distress in exile that governed his exhausting search for new forms of expression. In the 50s, Weiss finally turned his attention to the moving image. He shot a total of 18 experimental, documentary, and fiction films, of which four fragments remain, before he made his long hoped-for literary breakthrough with the short novel The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman. Weiss’s film work marked the transition from an interior view marked by surrealism to an engagement with social reality in the divided world of the Cold War. In his documentaries, a detailed view on people and places emerges, while the meticulous treatment of facts and life stories that would later play such a major role in The Aesthetics of Resistance is also alluded to. Weiss doesn’t create a closed image of history, but rather the actions of his figures are pervaded by individual standpoints and contradictions. Peter Weiss's thoughts on oppositions, "eaten away by the disease of doubt, the difficulty of deciding for one thing, back and forth, fluctuations with work, in the past painting-writing, theatre-film, Swedish language-German language", as he puts it in his notebooks, carry an important productive power in his art. Before this backdrop, this film series, which already began in September, is dedicated to the relationship between aesthetic and political subjectivity in relationship to resistance and social change. The compilation of historical and contemporary films from across the world and short film programs brings several of Weiss's recurring themes up to date – from the eternal exploitation of human work and the power of capital via the battle against repression and inequality, racism and fascism, all the way to the horror of war and the question of violence as a means of revolutionary politics.
