Directors Lounge Screening
Txema Novelo
Double Feature
Thursday, 22 February 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Double Feature
*Déjalo Ser*
+ *Tercer Ojo, Tercer Mente, Tercer Mundo*

Txema Novelo from Mexico City is joining us for a Berlinale special to present a double feature of his new film „Déjalo Ser“ together with compilation of music videos that he created for alternative rock musicians in Mexico. Since Novelo started creating super-8 films for a punk music label he has managed in Mexico City. In the following years, he expanded his creative production in an exponential curve, with making his own films, with exhibitions of drawings and installations.
Novelo’s production at the same time stays faithful to his own spirit, and you could truthfully say, spiritual search for life, art, music and an alternative way to look at the world, which at the same time is mixed with irony and a good portion of humor.

“Déjalo Ser” is the story of a Rock Mexican band, who’s lead singer is suffering from a lack of inspiration. After a mysterious meeting with a foreign singer, the band embarks with her on a journey to Oaxaca in search of a mysterious psychoactive medicine. A trip inspired by Antonin Artaud exile into Mexico, a search for a primitive, deeper and purer reality.

Shot on Super 8mm with sync dialogues, this guerrilla style road movie, plays homage to George Kuchar’s films and transgression cinema in a unique Mexican way. Produced by LE FRESNOY under the tutelage of invited artist and film legend Bela Tarr, ‘Let it be’ has accomplished in the first six months of its completion a special mention at the Morelia International Film Festival, and a selection for international competition at Clermont Ferrand 2018 in France.

“Tercer Ojo, Tercer Mente, Tercer Mundo” (Spanish for: Third Eye, Third Mind, Third Word) is a selection of recent videos for musician, Novelo has supported for many years. They are shot in different formats of super-8, 16mm, 35mm film and digital video and in one way or the other make reference to avant-garde films. The films, and the music, are inspired by a desire for life and identity in a world of media domination, capital and crime, without ever taking things too seriously. They are full of iconographical quotes to rock and pop of the era that rock music still had a promise, and if it was the three minute fame promoted by Velvet Underground (or Andy Warhol), or when music was “my religion”. On the other hand, to the German audience and between the lines, they also show, a great deal of Mexican life and urban culture from the perspective of contemporary youth. Their relation to nature and Mexican popular culture, and the reality of urban live become the backdraft for audiovisual imaginations.

Artist Link:
http://www.txemanovelo.com/
https://issuu.com/txemanovelo

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Clara Bausch
Momentum
Thursday, 25 January 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Observations through the camera combined in different ways create new realities. Clara Bausch, who is born in Berlin and lives here as artist, strictly works with analogue images in her films, installations and photography. She studied Fine Arts at UdK Berlin and is co-founder of Labor Berlin. It is the ordinary, simple things in life that capture her attention. And it is the combinations of impressions, occurrences and images that create reality. The new realities that Clara Bausch creates in her art work are by no means out of this world. On the contrary, they are different, sometimes very personal views onto our reality. Cinema, or the images of newsletters are as much part of this reality as is ordinary life. Rhythm, the space between, or unexpected combinations of images, all create an intermission, an interval between images, which makes it possible to receive a new meaning – the opposite of information overflow in broadcast and so called social media.

In a number of films, Clara Bausch uses white space between the images, created by clear film. Fully overexposed film, which for example happens if you open the camera; becomes clear during development. In “Blitzen #1”, this is what Bausch does recurrently with her super-8 camera in between taking pictures. She takes a day for herself on the streets of Athens for the 3-minute film, edited in the camera. Glimpses of reflections of buildings and street life on glass, shopping windows, car lights and mirrors are thus being combined as associations of images.

Another series of films work with the overlay of images that happen if you illuminate a newsletter page from the back. “And the smile is red on red” takes this simple technique of image production onto the roofs of Kairo in order to communicate with people from Kairo. The film shows people who gather on the flat roof top of a house in the evening, and at night with flashlights illuminating the newsletter cutouts Clara Bausch had brought from Germany. While editing, Clara creates a rhythm of montage and of spaces between the images, giving the viewer the opportunity to create the story by “reading between the lines”.

“Wald” shows the camera travel-panning over pieces of shrubbery on the edge of the woods. The sound is very present and seems to be original atmosphere sound. Over time, the viewer realizes that the pan travels through different seasons and different weather conditions, and what started as a meditation on nature on a winter day becomes more a more complex story about the city and nature as the time unfolds.

Artist Link:
http://www.clarabausch.de/

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

Hunters For Collectors!

They are places never far away on an cosmic scale, but the luminous chunks of NEW YORK, BERLIN and PRAGUE can still play a game of hide-and-seek where you don’t recognize the most sensation-fixated players at first or only find them later – and maybe miss joining the game. Enter “City Primeval, New York, Berlin, Prague”, 552 pages that can jump-start you into a new sport of visual and (con)textual pleasures, and let you in on the all-out amusements. At turns shiny, sinful, sensitive, senseless – it is all of this and more, a romp through three cities that will kill for art and good times, with 72 key figures taking you on a taste-test of their hangouts, hangovers and hang-ups, with vivid imagery lining the path. Weighing in at 2.6 pounds, it qualifies as an underground bible of sorts, showing how these sweat asylums thrive and interconnect, with a cast of enigmatic oddities including Nick Zedd, J.Jackie Baier, Nat Finkelstein, Max Dax, Lydia Lunch, Julia Murakami, Miron Zownir and many more, including previously unpublished pix and up-close stories of cult(ural) icons like Klaus Nomi, Iggy Pop, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Brian Eno to boot.

Put together with pedantic precision in upscale fanzine style by known-everyone-been-everywhere New Yorker Robert Carrithers and partner-in-crime Louis Armand, the volume is following up its New York MoMA presentation earlier this month with among other things this zoom-in encounter. Back on Earth, six of the contributors will present the book close-up in the best way possible: in the flesh, at BuchHafen in the bosom of Neukölln. Besides Robert Carrithers, sidle up to Carola Göllner, Steve Morell, Mark Reeder, Kenton Turk and André Werner. An evening of feral tales and seductive stories from the earthly reaches of the heavens. Meteorites and falling stars welcome.

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Location: BuchHafen Berlin, Okerstraße 1, 12049 Berlin

 

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pictured:

“Trans women on Ku’damm” (1985, Kenton Turk), taken from “City Primeval, New York, Berlin, Prague”

Directors Lounge Screening:

ANJA DORNIEDEN & JUAN DAVID GONZALEZ MONROY
From Eye to Mouth, from Mouth to Eye

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Anja Dornieden and Juan David Gonzalez Monroy have dedicated themselves to avant-garde film and work together for several years, strictly with 16mm and Super-8.

At the same time they often address society-related questions in their films, with phenomenas ranging from the relation between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, from the nostalgia about East-German puppet houses, to spatial imaginations connected the term private sphere. As members of the Labor Berlin, they have created their own facilities to develop film, but also produce 35mm copies of some of their films. Working with film for them also means to extend the possibilities of single film projection towards a layering of projections, which becomes a performance by itself, in former days also called Expanded Cinema.

Anja Dornieden and Juan David Gonzalez Monroy will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Thursday, 26 September 2013
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Artist Links:
http://www.ojoboca.com/

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