The Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and the "Neues Kommunales Kino Stuttgart" association are presenting a lecture series entitled CINEMA EXPANDED during the winter semester. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus will be speaking on December 6 on the subject of "Sprachverlust: Nach der Kunst-Kino Debatte" (The Loss of Language: After the Art / Cinema Debate). Three of our Living Archive participants are also giving presentations: Constanze Ruhm (November 15), Volker Pantenburg (December 13) and Heinz Emigholz (December 20). The other speakers are Sabeth Buchmann (November 22) und Ulrich Wegenast (November 29).
On December 7 Sandra Naumann introduces the films by Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983). In the 1930s Bute was one of the main pioneers of abstract film in the US and in the 1950s she was one of the first filmmakers who worked with electronic -image production. In her short films she investigated the transfer of musical composition into visual material and experimented with different possibilities of connecting image and sound. In her search for a suitable medium she first -collaborated with Leon Theremin on technologies with which acoustic signals could be -transformed into optical signals until she found film to be her ideal means of expression.
Like every month a public screening will be taking place on December 13, at which we take a look into the holdings of the Arsenal collection. Entrance is free, with the program being announced shortly beforehand.
First the smoking chimney, which the telephoto lens draws up close to us. Then the trains, the clouds and the flocks of birds, the panorama of the city viewed through a wide-angle lens. Airplanes. Time-lapse. Slow-motion. Later, dark rain clouds, sun, snow, moonlight. The street in front of the building: warehouses before which junk is sorted, wine is delivered, a party is thrown. Burning cars, a terrible motorcycle accident. A young woman who day for day picks up her mail and the newspaper, crossing into the frame from the left and returning from the right. In all the years, she never seems to notice the man standing at his window with a camera watching her, recording life as it unfolds in front of his studio. It is only through the messages on the filmmaker’s answering machine that the viewer notes the passage of time. In the beginning these messages seem a bit funny: calls from happy or disappointed girlfriends, holiday greetings and congratulations. At that point, they are still without any context – but the context soon becomes clear. From then on, every message takes on a historical significance. Illness, death, pregnancy, birth, a break-up, successes, failures. It comes as a shock when we realize that we are in the middle of a life that is more dramatic than any fiction. (Christoph Terhechte)
ONE WORLD BERLIN
The ONE WORLD BERLIN Film Festival for Human Rights and Media takes place for the eighth time in 2011, with a total of 15 film programs being shown from November 24-30. A range of discussions and conversations with directors, human rights experts and other guests will provide an accompaniment to the program.
Do human rights even mean anything today at a time when wars are fought using remote-controlled attack robots, complex personalities are distilled to social network profiles and even the question of what it means to be human has become subject to a shift in meaning?
Magical History Tour – Body Images
Since cinema began, part of the fascination of the moving image has stemmed from the way in which the bodies of the people acting on the screen are represented: it’s no coincidence that the first ever film footage shows contented workers, men exercising or boisterous children. It wasn’t long until Méliès extended these short documentary scenes by adding cinematic (corporeal) experiments of a fantastical or dramatic nature: images of elegant dancers that disappear as if by magic, images of headless skeletons on the prowl or of heads that inflate like balloons and explode. With these two poles as a starting point, the staging of bodies (and body parts) in film went on to become a fundamental means of cinematic expression whose diverse manifestations have had a substantial effect on how we think about human physiology. This month’s Magical History Tour presents notable images of the body from 80 years of film history, showing the special physical presence exuded by bodies of longing, objects of projection, foreign or collective bodies, the reanimated and corporeal hybrids in all their fascination and monstrosity.
"Utopians"
Roger teaches yoga. The relationship with his daughter Zoe, who has just finished her military service, is put under strain by her love for Maya, a young woman who is allegedly a certified schizophrenic. There is tension with the participants of his yoga class when Roger repeatedly comes late and brings along a stray dog. When Roger, Zoe and Maya take on a renovation job on a middle-class home nothing goes to plan and the whole affair is wrought with tension. Three people on the edge: of society, of control, of strength and of collapse. The different realities that Roger tries to get to grips with, metaphors for Maya’s schizophrenia catch up with him in his yoga class when his belief that "we can make our own time" reaches its limits just as fast as his "feel united with the world around you" notion clashes with social reality. For his feature debut, Zbigniew Bzymek has found a form that is remote from social drama – the outline of a story is sketched in a non-dramatic and non-linear way by scenes that are sometimes separated by fades to black. With an idiosyncratic floating atmosphere and one of the most long-lasting guitar improvisations since "Dead Man."
New in Distribution: THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE (Marie Losier, USA/F 2011), which won the Forum Caligari Prize and the Teddy for Best Documentary at the 2011 Berlinale, is an intimate, moving portrait of the life and work of the ground-breaking performance artist and musical pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge – who became famous with Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV – and his other half and collaborator Lady Jaye. You could be mistaken for expecting a film about the history of industrial music, Genesis as the link between the pre- and post-punk eras, and the state of the underground since the 70s. But while the film does indeed cover all this, its story is told from the perspective of a great romantic love. Genesis and Lady Jaye began to have operations in order to become one, a third being they called "Pandrogyn". Influenced like so much in Genesis' work by Brion Gysins and William Burrough's "Cut Ups", it was an attempt to deconstruct two individual identities by creating an invisible third.
Ulrike Ottinger
This autumn in Berlin continues to be all about Ulrike Ottinger. Following the Floating Food exhibition (which continues until the end of October) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) will be showing her unknown early paintings (1963–68), which have never previously been exhibited, to coincide with Ottinger receiving the Hannah Höch Prize (November 26 – January 22). Until January, Arsenal will be inviting audiences to discover the cinematic oeuvre of Ulrike Ottinger in a series of twelve events that includes introductions and discussions. By drawing upon themes, quotes, images and sounds from the exhibitions, the film series reflects and passes comment on the complex nature of Ulrike Ottinger's world of moving images – a world where opulence, stylization, theatrical and ethnographic variations, cultural history, science fiction, reflection and travel all meet.
Guest: Volko Kamensky
In his documentary film trilogy, Hamburger filmmaker Volko Kamensky (*1972) explores the creation of myths, the visualizations of the imagination and stereotypes of shared memory in a formally distinctive manner. A major aspect of his work is the often conflicting relationship between image and sound. DIVINA OBSESIÓN (1999) uses 360-degree tracking shots in order to show roundabouts and their centre islands, while interviews with traffic experts can be heard in voiceover. A series of fires at the Rotenburg an der Wümme local museum and questions of home, history and historiography form the focus of ALLES WAS WIR HABEN (2004). In ORAL HISTORY (2009), a voiceover spoken by several different female voices tells of nature and community while a house on the edge of a forest straight out of a fairy tale is shown in series of slow tracking shots. The connection between the two remains uncertain to the last.
Awards for "Territoire perdu"
TERRITOIRE PERDU by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd is starting in selected cinemas across France next week. The film, which premiered in this year's Forum program, just received the Grand prix at the International Documentary Film Festival in Montréal (RIDM). Earlier this year it had already won the Special Jury Prize at Doclisboa as well as the Grand prix at Jihlava International Documentary Festival. In piercing black and white images shot on 8mm, TERRITOIRE PERDU depicts the plight of the Saharauis in the divided West Sahara, throwing light on a crisis largely neglected by the international community.
Funded by:
Arsenal on Location is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund
The international programs of Arsenal on Location are a cooperation with the Goethe-Institut
