Slow Space
a film and art project by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Premiere at Kino Arsenal/ Friends of German Kinemathek
june 7th 9pm
Arsenal Kino, Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin, U / S Potsdamer Platz

Slow Space takes the viewer on an unusual visual trip through the city of Chicago. The journey goes through places roofed and lit by glass architecture. Scenes set in open urban space and interviews filmed in private homes complement this passage through public and private places.
Slow Space is a film and art project by Klaus W. Eisenlohr. With his project, the artist has investigated the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over the time period of three years. The filmmaker traces a 'Desire for Modernity' in the city's architecture being shaped by pre- and post-modern forces.

Filmed entirely within the urban constructed environment that makes up the contemporary North American city of Chicago, Slow Space is a visually arresting investigation into how space is described, defined and ultimately experienced. Berlin filmmaker Klaus W. Eisenlohr commutes this relationship with the outside 'world' via an array of constructed transparencies in the glass domes and atriums that formed so much of architecture's modernist preoccupation for a constructed inside/outside dialectic. Descriptions and ultimately opinions on the status of public space in Chicago form part of the film's identity via a series of interviews conducted from the participant's private domains. Looking out and sealed behind the glass of their window panes a number of Chicagoans talk about their own experiences on the private/public borders of contemporary urbanity.
Slow Space is a film of many photographs if one considers it's over 3000 edits. Each frame in this 67 minute film it seems has been invested with a quality of aesthetic authorship normally attributed to the production of single images. Employing a staggering depth of compositional artistry Klaus W. Eisenlohr has enabled a joint optic relationship to come into view between maker and film spectator returning the film experience to an almost first time phenomenological encounter. I am, after seeing the film, reminded of my capacity to see, absorb and recognize spaces as images and spaces imagined simultaneously, i.e. to be totally stimulated with my senses activated to the fields of vision being presented. Seeing this film, it becomes apparent how visually stimulating the film experience can be.

Ben Anderson

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