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Directors Lounge Screening
Bernd Lützeler – Noise and the Voice
Sunday, 25 May 2025, 5 p.m.
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Noise and the Voice
Bernd Lützeler is a dedicated member of the Berlin film community. He is involved with all forms of experimental film, Super-8, 16mm, 35mm and digital video, he is an active member of LaborBerlin, and his films often engage with the popular and everyday culture in India.
Mumbai is one of the few cities in the world that have a striving commercial film industry (therefore, its nick-name Bollywood, referring to the old name of the city, Bombay). Bernd has spent several years in India and still pays frequent visits to the city that plays a central role in several of his projects. While working closely with analogue film laboratories and optical effects veterans, he witnessed the rapid changes the Indian film industry underwent during the transition to digital production. Seeing many friends lose their livelihoods in a country without social security sharpened his perspective on developments in his own country.
Working with analogue film may be mistaken for nostalgia, but not in Bernd’s case. Even when using found footage and very visual ideas, his films address a rapidly changing visual culture and the social implications coming with it, both in India and in Europe.
Fultu Faltu Filim is a found footage film of “nothing”; blank film, but with the impact of time, weather, and storage damage under tropical conditions in Mumbai, digitally rendered and printed back to analogue 35mm film. The film collapses into a digital abyss of magenta at the end.
Vintage Wisdom from the Ether is another hybrid production. Messages emerge from the white noise of an analogue television tube, captured and recorded with a 16mm camera. The way these obsolete media technologies (16mm, the cathode beam and television broadcasting) correlate conveys neoliberal truisms from past decades that continue to impact our global economic system today.
Batagur Baska shows another kind of white noise: people, obviously tourists, act in front of the camera; surrounded by white mist. The mannerisms of the tourists, posing in front of their cameras and filming into the void with their mobiles, become increasingly mysterious, and it becomes more and more doubtful whether anything is visible at all beyond the white fog.
Ein Tonfilm “focuses” on the soundtrack instead of image. It’s a found-footage film, a Super–8 home movie of an unknown West–Berlin family on vacation. Apparently, the camera was broken: All the images are blurry, only the soundtrack explains everything. We don’t need to see the sharp images.
How to Build a House out of Wreckage and Rags is another found footage film, this time originating from India. The film shows images — shot by a young Indian emigrant couple in the United States during the 1960s — who filmed their pursuit of the American Dream with a Super–8 camera and sent the film rolls back to their relatives in India. The images of their modest yet proud new wealth are contrasted by the voice-over from a completely different film: a propaganda reel by an American Christian sect, which exploits the suffering of the untouchables in the Indian metropolis of Calcutta to spread their own missionary message. In the stark contrast between sound and image, racism, global class disparities, and the dominance of American culture become clearly apparent.
“_galore” is an earlier film of Lützeler that presents another aspect of the artists work about India: The streetscape of every Indian city and town is – apart from crowds and vehicles – mainly dominated by products. The bazaar is no longer limited to a certain square or building, it expands into all other parts of the city and claims a large percentage of the available public space.
In addition to the program, Bernd will talk about his ongoing project “Strugglers” and show some excerpts. This project focuses on the thousands of ‘struggling actors’—young people from all over India who come to Mumbai to try their luck in Bollywood. Despite minimal chances of success, many of them only have this one singular goal in their lives. Once they arrive in the city of their dreams, an entire industry is already waiting for them—with empty promises in order to keep them living under precarious conditions for as long as possible…
We are looking forward to Bernd Lützeler presenting all the films in their original formats and being available for a Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.
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