Directors Lounge Screening:

Distruktur –
Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn
perspectives – on moving

Thursday, 28 May 2015
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

A program of shorts by the artist couple Melissa Dullius and Gustavo Jahn with some new and rare films. Distruktur – Dullius and Jahn – claim a space fluctuating somewhere between the big and small cinema. Consequently working with analogue film while shooting and mostly also developing their own material, their films seem to create a kinematic time-space that is distinct from the ordinary even though they often use film settings of daily life.

The films could be described as experimental-narrative, as they use script, actors and often costumes, both artists often act as protagonists of their own film, but they avoid the conventional dramaturgy of mainstream and its psychological realism that mostly leads to melodrama. The film “Abril (2002)” in some short scenes seems to be a direct quote of Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”. It is an early film, from the time when Melissa and Gustavo were not working together as directors and which has not been shown in Berlin, yet. The moment of “trance” – or mystery – though disappears and becomes resolved as it did not really happen, as it is just a memory that stays but cannot be explained in rational ways.

Time seems to be ambiguous in the movies of the director duo. Even though Triangulum (2008) and Time Machine (2015) are set “in the future” as the narrated texts explain, they make no direct references to science fiction movies. The action does not pretend to be from the future, but the time of the narrative could be the past, the present or the future. Are we looking into the future, or looking back from the future to the past, to the present?

This ambiguity gives the film Triangulum, which is set and was shot in Cairo and Alexandria, an interesting contemporary perspective. With the background of the more recent “Arabic Spring”, the radical political movements in Egypt and wars in Near East – and the not so long ago longing for a mythical Orient prevalent in the West, the film has a surprising actuality.

It will be even more interesting to think about the references given in the films of the program, as Melissa and Gustavo have more recently created films that could be placed in the past. Not in any exact historical past, but in a past of myths. “Don’t Look Back ⁄ Labirinto”(2014, German Premiere) has been filmed in Berlin and obviously references the antique theme of Orpheus, while “In the Traveler’s Heart”(2013) was shot in Nida, Lithuania and seems to present a protagonist from an indigenous Latin American background. However, the narrative time of both do not try to create a realistic story. Time does not seem to proceed as a clockwork – on a narrative timeline, nor does it seem to be a dream. The image seems to be contemporary and timeless at the same time. This ambiguity of time, space and narrative the artist couple is creating, together with the atmospheric image of hand processed analogue film makes a unique viewing experience with many possibilities of interpretations.

Artist Link:
http://distruktur.com

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Jan Soldat
Vom Rande her

Thursday, 26 February 2015
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Jan Soldat
Peripheral Vision
Vom Rande her

In his films, Jan Soldat portraits people whose private life defer from the social norm. The practice of sadomasochism, or love to animals does not find understanding by many, and thus these persons have been confronted with social marginalization. Watching the films of Jan Soldat may be even more disturbing, because he does not work with theater-like enactments as it is known from many trendy productions about the SM scene. Jan Soldat meets his leading characters in their private life. Instead of creating the illusion of sexual phantasies or fulfilled desires, the filmmaker is interested in the ordinary routines of daily life. And here, he creates exceptional captivating pictures, as he meets these men at eye level and gives them space to express themselves, making them true protagonists. And, the ways he frames and later on edits the scenes with much love to those details, he creates the attention that is needed to listen to the stories told and depicted in front of the camera.

(German Text)
Jan Soldat nähert sich in seinen Filmen Menschen, deren Privatleben von der sozialen Norm abweicht. Gelebter Sadomasochismus oder Liebe zu Tiere fällt bei vielen Menschen auf Ablehnung und führt entsprechend zu gesellschaftlicher Ausgrenzung. Verstörender noch können die Filme sein, weil Jan Soldat nicht auf theaterhafte Inszenierungen setzt, wie wir sie als bekannte „Szenebilder“ kennen, sondern den Menschen in ihrem Alltag begegnet, und gar nicht versucht, Begierde oder sexuelle Phantasien in Szene zu setzen. Viel eher interessiert ihn die Begegnung mit den Menschen. Hier leistet der Filmemacher außerordentliches, indem er den Menschen auf Augenhöhe begegnet und ihnen nicht nur Raum gibt, sich auszudrücken. Sondern auch indem er in der Inszenierung mit der Kamera und später im Schnitt mit Liebe zum Detail ihnen mit jener Aufmerksamkeit begegnet, die es benötigt, um sie als „Protagonisten“ selbst sprechen zu lassen.

°*-*°

The artist will be available for Q&A. German with English subtitles.
Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Programm:
Zucht und Ordnung ⁄ Law and Order 2012 D 8:42 min
Geliebt ⁄ Be Loved 2010 D 15:45 min**
Der Unfertige ⁄ The Incomplete 2013 D 47:53 min

Artist Links:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Soldat
http://www.filmuniversitaet.de/de/filmuniversitaet/alumni/alumni/regie/tma/detail/7032.html

Film Links:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Der-Unfertige-The-Incomplete/170591753144653
https://www.facebook.com/pages/ZUCHT-und-ORDNUNG-LAW-and-ORDER/1428891620657840?fref=ts
http://www.filmuniversitaet.de/de/filmeprojekte/filme/detail/geliebt/0.html
**GELIEBT ist eine Produktion der Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF
www.filmuniversitaet.de – distribution@hff-potsdam.de

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Katya Craftsova
Anthropological Travel Notes

Thursday, 29 Januar 2015
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Katya Craftsova
Katya, artist from Russia, currently works as an artist-in-residency at ZKU Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. Her work is closely connected with a number of residencies and art projects she created in very different countries, such as Norway, Tanzania, Italy and India. Always trying to connect with local people, the artist is always interested in working with the stories the people tell her. With those stories she uses very different genres, like interview, paper-cut animation or straight documentary. And in the same way of personal narration, she also tells about the place her mother lives: Sebastopol.

The artist will be available for Q&A, moderated by Cordula Gdaniec. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.

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

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Bernd Lützeler
Filmi Fundas

Donnerstag, 28. August 2014
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Bernd Lützeler
with Eric Wilhelm Da Cruz

(German:)
Bernd Lützeler arbeitet als Künstler und Filmemacher sowohl mit analogem Film, als auch mit digitalen Medien. In seinen Arbeiten beschäftigt er sich mit der Ästhetik und Wahrnehmung von Bild und Ton und deren Wechselwirkungen mit Technologie und Gesellschaft. Ein weiterer thematischer Schwerpunkt sind die unterschiedlichen Erscheinungsformen des bewegten Bildes in der indischen Alltagskultur. Diese Themen setzt er nicht nur in linearen Filmprojekten, sondern auch in Film- und Raum-Installationen um. Einige der heute präsentierten Arbeiten sind aus Kollaborationen mit anderen Künstlern hervorgegangen, u.a. mit Kolja Kunt und mit seinem langjährigem Kollegen Eric Wilhelm da Cruz, der darüber hinaus auch einen eigenen Film zeigen wird.

(English:)

Bernd Lützeler, artist and film enthusiast who works with Super-8 and 35mm, also combines film and video in multi media installation work. In his work he is concerned with sound and image as distinct interfering media and their relations with technology and society. Also, he takes a specific interest in aspects of the audio-visual pop culture of India. He is a strong collaborator in order to create and exhibit. He worked with Kolja Kunt and Eric Wilhelm da Cruz on several projects. Part of the presentation will be an adapted super-8/video live show of “Eternal Showdown”, and a film by his colleague Eric Wilhelm da Cruz.

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

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Elaine Tedesco
Whispering

Thursday, 31 July 2014
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

This is set of videos by Brasilian artist Elaine Tedesco, a selection of works created between 1988 – 2012 and a work in process that she is realizing in Berlin. Divided into 4 groups: Video performances, domestic video notes, conversations and photography, it shows estrangements on looks at the daily life. Elaine Tedesco currently stays in Berlin at an artistic residence promoted by Instituto Goethe.

Artist Links:
http://www.comum.com/elainetedesco/
http://www.goethe.de/ins/br/poa/ver/res/de12352197.htm

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Philip Widmann und Karsten Krause
Szenario

Thursday, 26 June 2014
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Szenario, a collaboration of the filmmakers Philip Widmann and Karsten Krause appears to be a documentation about a love affair; a chronicle of 3 months in fall 1970, when a married man called Hans starts an affair with his secretary, called Monica, also married.

The main character of the film could be called “the suitcase”, though, a collection of notes, photographs, tickets and other papers from a suitcase, apparently collected by “him”, the male lover. The notes conof diary entries, where Hans meticulously wrote down every date he met with Monica, how long they had sex, and in which position they had intercourse. He also added to the record the places and circumstances they met, yet and always in the spare lasistnguage of a book keeper or bank clerk. The typewritten notes are spoken by a female voice, while the film images show passages of urban landscape of Köln, mostly slow tracking shots, some of them from car, and both at night and at day time.

What looks like a straight documentary at first, however, turns out to be something altogether different if the viewer looks more precisely. It turns out to be a sophisticated narration that keeps irritating by indulging the viewer into the immersions of story telling on one hand, and showing doubts on its own media:
contradictions in sound, picture and story telling. The techniques of irritation or Brecht-like alienation effects start right from the beginning. It is thus worth to try a more close reading from the beginning again, of the opening scenes of the film. A young woman with large red glasses starts reading from a script. -*°°*-  Full text at richfilm.de

Artist Links:
http://www.workscited.de/

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Johanna Domke
with Marouan Omara
Cairo Times

Thursday, 29 May 2014
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Crop is an astounding video piece about a state-owned newspaper building in the center of Kairo. Filmed in 2012 shortly after the revolution in Egypt, the video represents an interesting, historic moment in time, and it is at the same time a reflection on image making and image representation in times of political changes regardless of local bounds or temporality.

Set at the press house of Al Ahram (the Pyramids), a conservative newspaper that has been the national official press organ since President Nasser, the viewer is guided to explore the rooms of the house from the top down, following its hierarchy of places, literally from the representative offices down to the cellars with printing machines and packaging of newspaper bundles. While the camera unfolds step by step the complexities of a building, a photo-journalist talks about the beginnings of photo reportage in Egypt. He tells us he missed the revolution staying at the hospital. He speaks about the restrictions photo journalism has had to face from its beginning both from a conservative islamic society, and a regime controlling every publication. At first the journalist seem to be one person, but that is a fiction. His narration actually is a composition of 19 statements of different interviewed journalists, whose opinions differ in complex ways. The sound track of the film is comprised of two separate layers: the ambient sound that goes along with the passage of places that we follow inside the building, and on the other side the voice-over of the interviewed journalist. This voice-over creates a real contrapuntal montage in the sense of Eisenstein’s statement on sound film, whereas the ambient sound creates a poetic flow of images, a narrative of space.

The film, a collaboration between the video artist Johanna Domke and the film director Marouan Omara, was in several ways a lucky moment. Domke had planned her residency in Kairo at Townhouse Gallery before the beginning of the Arabic revolution, and the filming itself, including all the preparations and necessary permissions, was only possible in that short period of time of changes before the new regime took control again. The film thus represents a unique time in history while at the same time it gives a comprehensible glimpse of what it is like to work as a journalist under the restrictions of censorship. As Johanna told me, the team always asked for where the censorship actually had taken place, and were always referred to a different department. There was no official censorship office or censorship management, it was just part of the system as a whole. In certain ways, the press house depicted in the film truly resembles Kafka’s castle, where the power never manifests. Watching the film on the other hand may also give the impression of utterly familiarity with the building and its subdivisions, its poetry of space, the familiarity of bureaucratic space. In “Poetics of Space” Gaston Bachelard talks about the philosophy of space using a big family house as an example, something I always felt to be imperfect at least in reference to modernity, and in certain ways, the film “Crop” completes the picture of a modern poetics of space.

The artist, Johanna Domke, will be available for Q&A.

Crop by Johanna Domke and Marouan Omara

Program:
Cairo Times 12:23 min, 2013
Crop 47:08 min, 2012

Artist Links:
www.johannadomke.net

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

Directors Lounge monthly screenings

Thursday, 24 April 2014, 9pm

Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte

In attendance of the artist

Jonathan Rescigno works with a documentary approach towards his films, while transmuting into fictional stories. His starting point are day-to-day issues of his close surroundings, which then can shed the light to some greater matter. At the time he combines narrative methods with elements of early Avant-garde and Nouvelle Vague.

His search for a personal language and expression beyond the documentary school urged him to progress from earlier studies at film school to art school in Metz and further to “Film and Creative Documentaries Direction” in Strasbourg, where he finished his Master. His pictures combine a sensitive research of places and people with an essayistic image-oriented montage creating open and atmospherical depictions that give to the viewer space for interpretation.

In his films, Rescigno keeps coming back to themes concerning the region Lorraine, where he grew up. Lorraine used to be the prospering French coal mining area, connected with the German Ruhrgebiet by the so called Montanunion (European Coal and Steel Community) after the Word War II. With deindustrialization, the region has undergone difficult changes still under way. The films of the artist investigate questions of identity in the changing post-industrial landscape, and when the term migration is at risk to change meaning in French society.

Jonathan Rescigno verfolgt einen dokumentarischen Ansatz, den er aber zugleich verwandelt und fiktionalisiert. Ihn interessieren Geschichten des Alltags seiner Umgebung, die aber zugleich von allgemeiner Bedeutung sein können, und er verbindet so Mittel des narrativen, sozial engagierten Filmes mit Elementen der frühen Avantgarde und der Nouvelle Vague. Diese Suche nach einer eigenen Bildsprache brachte ihn auch dazu, von der Filmschule an die Kunsthochschule Metz zu wechseln und schließlich mit Film and Creative Documentaries Direction in Straßburg abzuschließen. Seine Bilder verbindet eine subtile Recherche von Orten und Menschen mit einem essayistischen Bildansatz in der Montage, der eher einer offenen atmosphärischen Beschreibung folgt und dem Betrachter den Spielraum zur eigenen Interpretation läßt, statt in dokumentarischer Manier Fakten zu konstruieren.

Der Künstler ist anwesend und wird in das Programm einführen. Mit anschließender Diskussion.

read more / mehr zu Jonathan Rescigno

Directors Lounge Screening:

Karl F. Stewart
Impressions in Mind
Photographs and Video

Thursday, 27 March 2014
21:00, Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Karl F. Stewart makes a mark in digital photography and video with his saturated colors and his rigorous compositions showing urban landscapes. He works with a photographic hybrid combination between still images and videos that do not hide their origin in their photographic concept. After being a documentary photographer in the 70’s in Pittsburgh, his home town, he worked as an English lecturer in Italy for 24 years, before he took up photography again only 5 years ago, now going fully digital.

San Francisco, his next temporary residency after Italy, became his starting point for his relaunch in photography, where he mostly explored the downtown area. Not just the financial district of San Francisco, but a big part of the highly dense urban areas show an amazing economic growth with glossy surfaces and artificial contemporary green landscaping on one hand, and wide spread poverty of homeless people on the other. “The Unearthly Beauty of Simulated Nature in Contemporary Architecture” is Stewart’s most pronounced piece from that period, presented as a video-photo essay. At the same time, the artist started exploring motion-blur and photoshop cut-outs. “Impressions of Movement” is a series of panoramic works that resulted and which he continued in different countries such as USA, Italy and France. The time-based presentation of digital pictures, that seems to be natural to the medium, led to digital video as his preferred medium at the moment. The artist recently moved to Düsseldorf, where he continues exploring landscapes and urban settings in often unearthly colors. Like with “K-20”, showing a small fountain at the K 20 Museum in Düsseldorf, the examinations of urban-nature relations combined with sometimes witty surprising experiments, seem to propel his creative energy most successfully.

Artist Links:
http://kfstewart.com/
http://impressionsofmovement.com/

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

Directors Lounge Screening:

Gabriel Lyons Loeb
Poems & Trampolines

Thursday, 31 October 2013
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2

10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gabriel Lyons Loeb is in love with pixelation and other digital artifacts as other artists are with the “Wabisabi” of Super-8, and the illuminating technical flaws of “spaghetti-style” developed small gauge film. For years now, he has used an old mobile phone camera to explore his surroundings and the media. He combines his poetry with video “blow-ups”, either coming from his own footage or from footage appropriated from the internet. One may ask if it is his love for a specific aesthetic, or if it is an artistic-bohemian gesture to use the cheapest material and a look that we usually regard as an internet-related shortcoming. It may be both, however, there may be a third motivation: in his final years at university he studied the effects of endless repetitions of footage he found on youtube and other transformative experiments, mainly by exposing himself. As earlier avant-gardists and pop-Artists such as Bruce Conner and Andy Warhol already found out, repetitions have a changing effect on our cognition and psyche.

His film “you smell good now” the longest film in the presentation may have a similar effect on the mind, even if not by repetition. It is a semi-narrative, semi-documentary style blow-up of 176x144px footage of Ann Arbor in winter. Shot during his partner’s three day visit, the film occurs in his favorite places. The fictive characters explore the town in an adolescent flaneurship sometimes becoming a passage à l’acte. In other parts of the film, they seem to conceive spontaneous lines of poetry from their experiences.

“wintersgarden” is another film shot in winter time, this time all around the place where he has lived for a year in Berlin-Neukölln. This time, it is a fuzzy portrait of “Körner Kiez” in winter colors and the chance-encounters on his walks. It uses another technique we know from analog filmmakers: it is edited in-camera, but then combined with big letters that for the viewer may or may not come together as a winter poem. The program will be completed with a number of poetry related films, some of which the author made on demand as part of a service previously offered through his website.

Gabriel Lyons Loeb will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Links:

http://gabrielloeb.com/

Links:

Directors Lounge

http://www.directorslounge.net

Z-Bar

http://www.z-bar.de

Full program details:

http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/