DL monthly screenings - Directors Lounge

Directors Lounge Screening
RETURN TO FLUXUS
Remigijus Venckus

Thursday, 29 March 2018, 21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte, Germany

Joining us from Lithuania, Remigijus Venckus will present his work at Directors Lounge Screening at Z-Bar. The artist presents his videos on occasion of an exhibition at the gallery ‘World in A Room’ in Berlin. The films are mostly short captured impressions from daily life, recorded and edited in the style of experimental film with references to films from early 60s and 70s, however, in a much more playful manner and stance.

In reference to the video program of R. Venckus, it may be interesting to remark that Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas, US artists, connected with ‘avant-garde film’ and Fluxus, are both originally from Lithuania and were first connected with the Lithuanian emigration community in the United States. Mekas talks about this in his film ‘Walden / Lost, Lost, Lost’ (1969 / 1976). In his opinion, he arrived in New York, and on the art scene, only after he left the group of expatriates gathering in N.YC. Later on in post-soviet era, after 1989, it seems that at least part of the art scene in Lithuania has embraced the two artists and somehow repatriated them, together with Fluxus.

R. Venckus makes direct reference to Fluxus and the experimental films of the 60’s. In contrast to those artists, however, R. Venckus’ films play with forms and references in a much lighter way than those artists’ from the 60’s, whose humor was acidly addressed at the opposed notion of ‘high art’. Mekas, as director of the Anthology Film Archive, for example, tried hard to create a canon of avant-garde in order to establish the film as a serious art form. Those struggles seem to be far in the past, when looking at R. Venckus’ early films.

However, the landscapes appearing in the artist’s films mostly seem to be dark and grey, not happy. The struggles may be different, less about art concepts and the seriousness of a style, but a struggle with society and with a new kind of conservatism in art and in public discourse, nonetheless. His more recent films address those struggles differently, and in a more direct way. ‘My success story’ (2013), an autobiographical film essay, has never been shown in Lithuania yet. The film talks about the difficulties of fighting against prejudices and homophobia in the surroundings of conservative academia. His newest film ‘The Letter’ (2018), on the other hand, turns a love letter into a poetic sound and image piece of dance by a male dancer intermitted with urban landscapes, and during the winter time. The voice, reading, or better, reciting the words of the letter turn the movements of the dance into a song of praise and lament. The addressee stays unknown to the viewer, or the viewer may find himself being addressed as a possible sender or recipient of the letter.

Remigijus Venckus will be present for Q&A at the screening. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.

‘Return to Fluxus’ is a video art program of Remigijus Venckus created in a period of 2002 – 2018. The program will be presented at the ‘Directors Lounge Screening’ at Z-Bar 29 March 2018, 9pm.

Artist Link:
Ph.D. Remigijus Venckus
http://www.venckus.eu/
http://en.venckus.eu/video/

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat
The Other Side
Thursday, 27 Juli 2017
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, artist couple visiting from North Carolina, United States, will present their films.

Being a Flaneur, walking to explore the city and the society, exploring modernity and the anachronisms of life on foot does not really make sense in the United States. The equivalence in Northern America would be the road movie: comprising the change of media, change of speed, change of surmounted distances. Bill Brown is one of the filmmakers in the US who hit the road many times to make movies. Born in Lubbock, Texas, he has lived in many cities, Chicago being one of them. His movies, not what you would typically call road movies, have the quality of artistic ethnographic research, or one could also say psycho-geography.

“The Other Side 2005” started as a coast to coast trip from Texas to California similar to a trip Brown undertook some years earlier in the United States, along the Canadian border. In the South, the artist was soon confronted with border control, border activism (helping people in trouble trying to cross the border in the desert), abandoned migrant camps and personal stories, walls and fences. When finishing the film, the artist thought, this would be a film about a short term issue, not that it would rise to a political quarrel until now. Bill still narrates the film with the dry humor he used in his earlier film, but the film became intrinsically political, even more so when watching it now, more than 10 years later.

Sabine Gruffat on the other hand is an artist working with two kinds of artistic stance, a rather experimental, almost abstract point of view, and a documentary style, mixed with political demeanor. “A Return to the Return to Reason” is an astonishing remake of Man Ray’s movie from 1923 with means of “art and tech”. Even though it almost looks like hand-knitted, it is made by laser-carving onto real film. A similar kind of hybrid quality between analog and digital also marks “Headlines” which uses animation software to layer and animate newspaper headlines and part of printed articles. Unlike David Gatten, well-known for animating letters on analogue film, the project has a less enigmatic, mysterious quality about the meaning of letters or words, but is a reaction to the discrepancies Sabine found reading the New York Times while living in a remote place in North Carolina.

The couple has been working together for several year. The most
recent and joint project, “Amarillo Ramp” will be a German/European
Premiere. It is connected with Land Art and specifically Robert
Smithson. The film is a tribute to Smithsons work at large, while
dwelling on an earthwork by Robert Smith situated in Texas, which is
less known than Spiral Jetty in Utah and his last work. It could only
be finished with the help of Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Tony
Shafrazi.

Thinking of an American Flaneurism, the Land Art by Smithson is not that far off. For Smithson, his land art was always connected with some kind of industrial use or man-made landscape. It creates a specific relation not only between landscape and earthwork, but between the work, local people, supporters, land owners, visitors and the art public. For the film project at Amarillo, the artist couple visited the site of Amarillo Ramp many times over 7 years, and at the same time, they undertook a close research to Smithsons ideas and writing. The film explores the surrounding of Amarillo, follows a team of local supporters for restoration on the ramp and finally undertakes a few interventions with the project. It could be seen as a documentary about Smithson, but at the same time also as an art project in tribute to Smithson and his ideas to connect the landscapes and rural areas with the city, ideas which become even more important today, in times of a deeply divided country.

Artists Links:
http://heybillbrown.com/
http://www.sabinegruffat.com/
http://www.incite-online.net/gruffat6.html

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Dagie Brundert
Ode an Sommer
Saturday, 27 May 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Ode an Sommer – Ode to Summer
Berlin’s cultural scene would not be the same, if filmmaker Dagie Brundert was not there. The artist started off in the 90’s with some female colleagues as FBI, Freie Berliner Ischen. With ironic and unconventional films they challenged established and artsy art forms, skewed films spiced up with resonances of Camp and Beat, as it reverberated in some young circles in the first decade after the breakdown of the wall. Since then, Brundert stuck to her guns of Super-8 filmmaking with admirable creative productivity. She records everyday occurrences, the obvious things on sight and the things offside, however always dispersing a positive message.

The new program at Z-Bar presents a number of brand new films, one premiere (“Widerstand”, 2017, resistance) and a few rare early films. “Ode an Juni 4 “ (2016, Ode to June), the film giving the name to this program, is one of the few medium long films by Brundert. And, it is part of her favorite seasonal project. She has planned to record a film about June every year. Film developing in biological developer, a trip to the film festival Hamburg, establishing a new dark room, a bath in lake Teufelssee and the hand written numbers of the days are some of the scenes of last years diary, all of which being hand-developed, digitally edited and underscored with summer tunes. It is the small things in the film, the joys of everyday life, which, condensed by a combination of time-lapse and short cuts, makes the film poetic and amiable. It is this delight about exceptional but unspectacular moments, which inform her films, and which still oppose the garish images of the media or the attempts of “going viral” on social media, and which still reminds me of the bearings of the Beats.

In a number of new films, goes back to humorous forms she used back in the past: narrated films (“Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich?…” 2015), using objects as characters ("Lametta” 2016), or games from childhood (potato stamps in “Kartoffel” 2013). Other films follow a more discriptive style. The savvy viewers and the friends, however, do not expect new experimental forms from Dagie, but they like to follow her frame of mind, the lighthearted way to look at life. Her films often have the effect of a line of a pop song that suddenly enters your mind and changes the way you look at yourself or your surrounding.

Dagie Brundert will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.

Artist Link:
http://www.dagiebrundert.de/
https://yumyumsoups.wordpress.com/

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research – Spectra of Space

Thursday, 27 October 2016
21:00 ,
Z-Bar ,
Bergstraße 2,
10115 Berlin-Mitte

The idea of scale in architectural contemplations reflects on the meaning of the space, also scale connects with urban topology and contemporary ideas of social geography. Social, political, or personal impacts may be seen differently if seen from different point of views: looking from a global, national, municipal, personal, community-based or journalistic point of view.

These new films create spatial contemplations or film essays from Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Canada, from a historical literature connection (Kerouac) or even the virtual space of a Si-Fi film series.
The screening presents a diversity of films connected with architecture, urban space and landscape from documentary to experimental, and will create an interesting visual dialogue about urban space in film.

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

Snaps from our monthly Directors Lounge Screenings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
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

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:

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:

Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart
Mountain Time

Thursday, 25 June 2015
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Mountain Time – Films from the Interior of North America

Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart are artists currently living in Colorado (USA). They share an affinity for 16mm filmmaking, they use photochemical processes as a means to explore the interconnectedness of time, history and the landscape. They are currently collaborating on a film investigating the history of uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing in the American Southwest.

The program comprises camera-less films and personal documentaries. They try to connect personal experiences with some parts of the North American landscape, history and nature. All shot in 16mm, it seems they have a mission for simplicity but also for the complications of Native American heritage. The two filmmakers are currently touring Europe with this program, and giving classes for chemical manipulations of analogue film.

Furthermore, on June 24 & 25, Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart will teach the workshop LIFT OFF: An Emulsion Lift Workshop at LaborBerlin. Please contact LaborBerlin if interested.

The artists will be available for Q&A. Curated be Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Links:
http://taylordunne.com/
https://vimeo.com/ecstaticerratic

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