Directors Lounge Screening:

Spatial Relations
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre
Thursday, 28. July 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Two young artists who recently moved to Berlin present their experimental video work. On a first view their work seems to be very similar as they use associative techniques of montage and editing, and both demand an active viewer who positively combines and completes the offered pictures to their own interpretation or, story.

This applies specifically to two of the films, “The Space In Between” by Melissa Faivre and “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ by Deborah Uhde. Both films seem to work with loosely connected images, which do not easily combine as a story and are brought together by rhythmic editing and a poetic film language. Both films deal with spacial relations, with the space between people and objects, between objects and exterior or interior space and the space between camera and subject.

The film by Melissa Faivre shows two domestic spaces and two people interacting in those spaces, mostly using cameras. One of the spaces has a large bed, a makeshift steel frame and two windows, the other one lots of electronic equipment. The reason for the interaction stays obscure, it may just be a spacial exploration. The gazes from and to the camera distorted by analogue and digital means to reveal secrets about the place or the people or about their relation and it creates some suspense. The interaction seems to follow some performative rule. The viewer is not really asked to analyze the fragments but to put together the pieces of distorted and rhythmically edited information to some visual-poetic experience.

Deborah Uhde’s piece “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ seems to be made of pieces of information about a space in a very different way. Views of a science campus, the “physikalisch-technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig”, are being combined on a double screen and edited in associative ways. The rhythm of the pictures is slow and seems to follow the pace of a documented research, the cataloguing and search for art on the campus as the subtitles state. However, we rarely get to see art, at least no paintings or sculptures but strange constellations of buildings, containers, rulers, marks and construction signs, any of which could be part of some art project but very unlikely is so. The one object that looks very much like a modernist sculpture, a steel object that combines spheres and poles, apparently is an object for measurement as the viewer is informed by subtitles. Deborah’s film thus combines spatial views in a poetical and rhythmical way, but then it seems, she rather asks the viewer to critically engage and make their own distinctions between aesthetic and utilitarian spatial use.

Both filmmakers present a number of very different films, set between the documentary and experimental forms. A program of very fresh new experimental films from filmmakers living in Berlin and coming from France/Netherlands and Braunschweig/Germany.

Artist Link:
http://melissafaivre.com/
http://duhde.de

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Impressions of the Directors Lounge Screening “Spatial Relations” with
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research Special
Topophilia – Landscapes and Harbours | Claudia Guilino

Thursday, 30 June 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Two shorts and one feature about the interference of the technical world of shipping and oil with landscapes and the city. Twice the Port of Los Angeles is the starting point for visual exploration. One goes up north along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the other examines the harbor at night. The harbor of Veracruz on the other hand is the place for a histographical reconsideration of the Mexican harbor from a very personal point of view.

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Topophilia by Peter Bo Rappmund surveys the 800-mile length of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and travels alongside the conduit as it bobs above and underground from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields to its terminus at Valdez. The extreme linearity and continuity of the pipeline acts as a pivot point to reorganize the landscape and offers new and idiosyncratic ways to visually reconsider topography. The film confronts the extreme beauty of the North-American landscape with the seemingly safe infrastructure of oil transport.

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Veracruz Without Ship by Teresa Delgado & Jakob Kirchheim. A documentary melodrama with privatizations and without lovers. A poetic walk through Veracruz, port of European exiles and Mexican oil, of melodrama and of the rhythm danzón. // Since 1938 Lázaro Cárdenas government offered political asylum to thousands of Spanish republicans who were fleeing war and persecution. They arrived to the port of Veracruz, unreachable paradise for the defeated who could not leave Spain. We revisit this myth of the grandparents and confront it with the present in 2014. In this year the PRI government is opening the doors to private investment of multinationals in a natural resource which Mexicans consider their own: oil. Oil plays an important role in the Gulf of Mexico and Mexican oil was nationalized by Cárdenas government in 1938.

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Port Noir by Laura Kraning. Within the machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100 year old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Often recast as a backdrop for fictional crime dramas, the scenic details of the last boatyard evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.

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Program addition:
We are deeply mourning the loss of our close friend Claudia Guilino and will show two videos by her

Stony Sleep  6 min 24s  2011
Abgesang, kupferfarben 3 min 52s 2009

Claudia Guilino was part of the Directors Lounge family from the early days, supporting our project with love and enthusiasm. Claudia passed away on June 26. She will be deeply missed.

Team Directors Lounge

Artist Link:
http://www.peterborappmund.name/
https://peterborappmund.exposure.co/
http://www.laurakraning.com
http://www.jakob-kirchheim.de/
http://www.agencia-tess.de

http://www.calla-mar.com/

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening
Mark Street
More or Less of Me and the Street

Thursday, 28 April 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Mark Street, Filmmaker coming in from New York, has been making films, videos and installations for 30 years.  His work has moved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essays on the urban experience to improvised feature length narratives. Street works in the tradition of street photography, recording images almost every day,  exploring the tension between improvisation and structure. He has shown at places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as venues such as a former strip club in New Orleans called the Pussycat Cavern.

The artist will be present. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Link:
http://www.markstreetfilms.com/
Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening
Alex Ross
Tom Atkins Blues
Thursday, 26 May 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Alex Ross, a filmmaker from the UK who has lived in Berlin since 1993, presents a common story of neighbourhood displacement in the heart of Berlin. Or, we could also describe it, an amiable tale of Prenzlauer Berg from a time almost forgotten. Shortly after Reunification, when most of the houses are already refurbished, the Spätkauf (late-night convenience shop) still provides a place you could call a home, or a community. Alex Ross mixes narrative feature with documentation, not only by including intermittent interviews, but also short scenes which actually occurred in one way or another in the same shop. And he possibly brings his own stories into the film, from a time some time ago when he worked at the very same Spätkauf, shortly after finishing film school in Bournemouth, when he was fresh in Berlin and trying to settle in.

When (in story time) the supermarket suddenly announces it will be staying open until late at night (as it did in reality), the little shop loses its customers and the protagonist his meaning of life. Progress takes its toll. In real life, the shop was converted into a café, which still exists today, while the supermarket (Kaiser’s) closed down a few years later.

Original English-German with English subtitles. Curated by Klaus W.
Eisenlohr. The director will be present for a Q&A.

Artist Link:
https://tomatkinsblues.wordpress.com
http://weakheartdrop.com

Links:
Directors Lounge   http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm   http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar   http://www.z-bar.de

DL | Talk with Alex Ross (DL Deep Feature: “The Two-Edged Tongue”)

NEW! Snaps from the Directors Lounge Screenings at Z-inema, Z-Bar, Berlin: Alex Ross | Tom Atkins Blues
https://de.pinterest.com/directorslounge/directors-lounge-screenings-at-z-bar-berlin/

Directors Lounge Screening
Anastasia Freygang
immer Auge (stimmen hören)

Thursday, 17 March 2016
20:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

immer Auge (stimmen hören) – always the eyes (hearing voices)
Anastasia Freygang shows videos and reads out her texts. The artist, who does not want to call herself a video artist or filmmaker, for several years now experiments with video, which she captures in ordinary life or during meetings with artists and friends. For her, video is a tool to communicate with people, mostly as part of live events.

Freygang has been working on a diversity of fields like poetry, performance, photography and, most importantly, on collaborations exploring and making available places in the city, which would otherwise be empty and forgotten. In these temporary projects, encompassing places in Paris, London, Berlin and Antwerp, she has mostly taken up the role of the curator even though she has included her own art as well. Her kind of collaborative and collective art appears to be very upfront in the arts of today. Her videos on the other hand seem to have references in the earlier avant-garde. For a longer period of time, she has recorded her videos on digital tape without further editing, but combines them live with her poetry. Some parts of the work at DL-screening will feature videos that have been recorded and edited in Berlin, the city where she was growing up after immigrating from moscow. They therefore have an almost autobiographic quality. This may be connected with being back, while living at the same time a cosmopolitan life in several cities, mostly London.

“Old Town DJ” and “Vertical Horizontal (extended)” both remind me of early films of Jonas Mekas. While his sometimes rough recordings of daily life and art events of 1960’s in New York had their origin in his will of understanding his new surrounding as an emigrant from Lithuania, on the other hand, Anastasia’s will is to make people listen in this time of every-day-tohubohu audio-visual and text messaging. Her audiovisual messages of text and film on the other hand, also seems to be driven by a restless will to see, to create relations and meaning, not so different to the style of Beat, whose writers hacked down the words similar to a voice recorder recording the uttered streams of consciousness.

We are looking forward to meeting you at this video and live poetry event at Z-Bar.
Please note the early beginning (20:00 instead of 21:00)

The artist will be present. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

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Artist Link:
http://www.anastasia-freygang.com/
Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening:

The Spaces Between Cities
Thursday, 25. February 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Directors Lounge Screening presents a collaborative project of twenty independent, experimental filmmakers: The Space Between Cities. Presented by Berlin Filmmaker Insa Langhorst.

Last year, Salise Hughes founder of EXcinema, Seattle, commissioned an exceptional project to bring together filmmakers, resulting in twenty films by international experimental filmmakers spread across four continents which were then combined as one feature length road film. The Spaces Between Cities is a collaboration made in the form of an exquisite corpse. Each film connects randomly to the next by way of a series of prompts creating a continuous road trip, or journey that will connect these different parts of the world.

Filmmakers: Amy Bassin, Mark Blickley, Stephen Broomer , Charles Chadwick, Pip Chodorov, Konstantinos-Antonios Goutos, Pablo Molina Guerrero, Salise Hughes, Douglas Katelus, Anna Kipervaser, Kate Lain, Insa Langhorst, Jesse Malmed, Milan Milosavlijevic, Reed O’Beirne, Arto Polus, Ben Popp, Blanca Rego, Margaret Rorison, Dustin Zemel, Robert Zverina

Artist Link:
http://excinemaseattle.blogspot.de/2015/12/the-spaces-between-cities.html
Links:
Directors Lounge  
http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  
http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  
http://www.z-bar.de

Films und Closing Party of the Exhibition Exploring Berlin

Urban Research
Films from Istanbul and Berlin

Sunday, 21 February 2016
18:00

Alte Feuerwache Projektraum
Marchlewskistr. 6
10243 Berlin
U5 Weberwiese

Urban Research Istanbul Berlin presents short films between experimental and documentary exploring the public sphere in different cities. In collaboration with curator Burak Cevik from Istanbul we show films which deal in very personal ways with current and with historical urban developments and their problems.

The very personal point of view of the different filmmakers makes it possible to create a relation between different places and times, between the disappearance of old quarters, the violence that families have to endure in kurdish areas, the circumstance that led to the self-immolation of a turkish immigrant in Germany, and the juxtaposition of the story  of Jewish family in Italy during WW2 against the backdraft of Italo-Fascist Architecture in Rome.

Without addressing it directly, these problems of urban spacial change, political usurpation, experience of violence and personal experiences of social hardship can also be seen in relation to the current so-called “refugee crises” and the last political changes in Germany and Turkey. On the other hand, the films are also characterized by their ease to deal with personal documents and the charming personal observations.

Programm Link:
http://urban-research.eu/DL2016/framesUR-IstanbulBerlin.html

More Links:
Exploring Berlin – Exhibition at Alte Feuerwache Projektraum
– http://richfilm.de/currentUpload/1-framesExploringBerlin.html
Städtepartnerschaftsverein Kadıköy e.V.
– http://www.kadikoey-berlin.de/
Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg von Berlin
– http://kulturamt-friedrichshain-kreuzberg.de/einrichtungen.php?DOC_INST=2
Photocentrum am Wassertor / vhs Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg
– http://photocentrum.de/

Directors Lounge: http://www.directorslounge.net

Directors Lounge Screening:

Jonathan Rescigno
Territorial Transitions
Thursday, 28. January 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Jonathan Rescigno’s film work combines classical documentary film and art. The French born artist from the region Loraine now lives in Berlin, and he presents his work not only in festivals but also as video installations in art shows in Germany, France and Switzerland. However, he is still interested in and connected with Loraine, the industrial province in the East of France. The region, once connected with mining and immigrant workers, and prosperous after WW2, had to undergo a period of de-industrialization in the past decades and has been undergoing a time of antagonism between Migration, Integration and on the other hand right wing political populism. It thus seems to be a natural consequence, that in his new works, Rescigno deals with migration and what in Germany has been called „refugee crisis“.

The films of Rescigno can be distinguished from traditional documentary film by his narrative voice. He never uses the common all-knowing voice-over (God eye’s view). If he talks in first person and as voice-over, he then takes a radical subjective point of view. And, when he gives other people the opportunity to talk, he gives them the space to speak for themselves. Otherwise, he lets the documents speak without comment or voice-over. In addition, he uses techniques of montage in order to confront and combine materials, documents and film images and to create an essay-like structure for his narrative. He does gives the viewer the opportunity and the challenge to draw their own conclusions instead of just consuming given results of the documentary research.

The program thus gives the opportunity to reflect on the very current political subject of territorial , while at the same time opening to a wider local and historical perspective.

Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

More infos, pictures and German text:
http://richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesJonathanRescigno.html

Artist Link:
http://www.jorescigno.com

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening:

Dagie Brundert
going all natural
Sunday, 13 December 2015
20:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Dagie Brundert makes films like singer-songwriters compose songs: with an almost weekly regularity, inspired by the small occurrences of everyday life and always blended with the joys of life and with her own charm. For the artist, who has committed herself mostly to super-8 film, simplicity is a must. Simplicity of means, low budget in production and improvised settings.

It is no wonder that she would discover caffenol and other natural ingredients for her filmmaking, i.e. for the development of her films – often in combination with expired Super-8 films, some of which have been of stock for many years.

In a series of new films, Dagie Brundert thus explores the theme of
exotic developments with natural ingredients in films referring to
their own making. On one hand this would become a kind of minimalist
procedure, if it weren’t for the filmmaker’s captivating humour. On
the other hand it reflects one of the messages of Dagie: DIY and
appreciate the process of making!

We are delighted to present this new series of films by Dagie Brundert, which have been digitally mastered and edited, in combination with a number of old treasures, presented in original Super-8. Expect “Dagie at her Best” – the artist will present and comment on her own films. And of course, she will be available for Q&A.

Artist Link:
http://www.dagiebrundert.de
https://vimeo.com/dagie

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening:

James Harrar
Cinema Soloriens Screening

Thursday, 15 October 2015
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

James Harrar, experimental filmmaker, video artist and musician from Atlanta, Georgia comes to Berlin for this screening. The artist, who mostly collaborates with musicians for live shows under the name Cinema Soloriens, is currently on tour in Europe. His films – and music – take on a lucid form of audio-visual communications with the audience. They are often meditations on beauty, perception, allegory, sensuality and visual phenomena. The material of his videos may be found footage, material he is filming on travels, or dense abstract work that may be digitally created, or just clouds of ink.

Music and film merge together in a trance-like experience for the audience. A kind of lyrical film-poetry that Harrar has pursued since the late 80’s. “Throughout his career, Harrar has tried to give the viewer new visual experiences while challenging fixed notions of visual language and individual seeing. He is exhibiting all over the world at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Yamaguchi Center for Art & Media and The Andy Warhol Museum to name a few.”

James Harrar will personally introduce his films and perform live soundtracks to them. Curated and presented by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.

Artist Link:
http://www.cinemasoloriens.com
https://www.facebook.com/Cinema-Soloriens-213086542062882/

Links:
Directors Lounge
http://www.directorslounge.net
Details:
http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar
http://www.z-bar.de
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