Mitte Media Festival

Continuing The Dazzle

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media Festival 2019. More spliters of light and shadow, colour and monochrome, scream and silence are set to crystallize out of the chaos of the cosmos, all this (potentially) before your very eyes. This can only mean Directors Lounge is shaking the sparks out of its treasure box and letting them …

main attraction by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

Directors Lounge Presents: Bizarre, Hypnotic, Wonderful

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media Festival 2019. – Bizarre, Hypnotic, Wonderful – Selected Gems from the DL Archives. Get lost on a visual trip to the surreal, mystical and mesmerizing realm of bizarre, hypnotic and wonderful movies. Including works by Anton Corbijn, John Christopher Gibson, Guy Maddin, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Allan Brown, Roger Deutsch, Masha Godovannaya. …

Directors Lounge Screening. Björn Speidel About the Depths of the Plateau

Björn Speidel | About the Depths of the Plateau

Directors Lounge Screening

Thursday, 28 February 2019 | 9pm 21:00 | Z-Bar

With his experimental films, the Berlin based filmmaker Björn Speidel explores the relationship between image and imaging surface. For several years, he has investigated the image’s depth by the use of stereo 3D.
The screening will include the first presentation of the „Video-Harp“ as a world premiere. … read more

Directors Lounge Screening. Gabriele Stellbaum My House Is On Fire

Gabriele Stellbaum | My House Is On Fire

Directors Lounge Screening

Thursday, 29 November 2018 9pm | Z-Bar

Gabriele Stellbaum creates art films that are performance and story-based at the same time. It is the second time, the artist presents her work at Directors Lounge. Coming from sculpture, she turned to light projections and time-based multi-channel slide projects and finally to video. The program presents a number of very new and more recent works that she created in Berlin. … read more

Directors Lounge Screening
Johnny Welch
Arcane Rhythms

Thursday, 25 October 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Johnny Welch, filmmaker and photographer from Sydney, Australia lives in Berlin for more than 3 years and is an active member of Labor Berlin. Since coming to Berlin, his work has become more strongly connected with the aesthetic of analog film, with the possibilities of optical printing. Even if edited and projected digitally, analog compositing seems to allow him to create a richer image of high density and depth.

Based on black and white techniques (mostly), the films seem to explore sheer blackness, instead of a black and white aesthetic. Strongly connected with punk music, dark wave and electronic noise, the filmmaker achieves a stunning quality of deep black color with his films. Experimental techniques of emulsion lifts and cracks, combined with black ink, sometimes with an additional tint of red or toning with blue, are combined with dark images of male and female characters. The driving rhythm of the sound track enhances the impression of blackness. Another connection is Aleister Crowley, a controversial figure, and a British occultist from the beginning of the 20th century who inspired a number of important artists and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and even Fernando Pessoa. Welch’s film Aurum (super8 / digital) from 2018 is a contribution to Crowley’s Liber 777, a book related to occult or cabalistic games with numbers. For Johnny Welch, the occupation and meditation with occult theory may be a search for liberating ideas, or it may even be used as a release from the haunting personal messages once ago sent by peers. (Discharge Working I and II, 2017/18).

For the viewer, the work has an attracting, maybe haunting quality, tinted with a stunning black color. The black sun (in Aurum) for example is an amazing symbol without the need of occult references, and it is a beautiful image interwoven with blackness of painted film material that may stay in the mind of the viewer as a striking image on its own account.

The artist will be present and available for Q&A after the screening. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Link:
https://www.johnnywelchfilm.com/

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Laurence Favre
Digging the Archive
Thursday, 27 September 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Laurence Favre from Switzerland and living in Berlin, works with photography, film and video on projects. She creates narratives concerned with collective and individual memories, and how they relate to archives or individuals. Found material, 8mm found footage, was a reason for her to visit places, talk to and interview people. In the case of a hospital in South-Africa, a Swiss mission during the time of racial segregation, the construction of a collective memory become problematic, however,  the collection of different stories and divert personal memories may become even more important. The box with films from a missionary working at the hospital, a personal archive in itself, for Favre became a starting point to visit the former hospital in Shiluvane, to find people who were working in the mission or share memories.

Favre’s background in sociology informs her research, her art project shifts towards contemporary ethnographic research with experimental forms that do not attempt to construct an “objective reality”. And she is a member of Labor Berlin. On a first step, she converted the original 8mm films to digital, and created a narrative from it, by repeating images, inverting them, by mixing letters found in real archives with personal comments she writes, in a way her subjective version of the archive. During her first visit, she also collected interviews with local people who used to work at the mission.

And she shoots 16mm (non-sync, in color and in b/w) for her new project: A series of portraits mixed with passages of landscape and combined with fictive letters to the late doctor of the mission by former members of the mission who live in South Afrika. At this screening, Laurence will present “Nwa-Mankamana” the film from 2013, an edited reel called “Shiluvane Talks” and excerpts of “Lettres au Docteur L” as work-in-progress.

The artist will talk about the different facets of working with archives that she became engaged in, and she is looking forward to discuss her work.

Artist Link:
http://lrncfvr.net/
https://dafilms.com/director/9946-laurence-favre

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

CONTEMPORARY ART RUHR, MEDIA ART FAIR, 1 – 3 JUNE 2018

IN AN ALIEN LAND  by  Angela Christlieb and Maria Niro

Montages reveal a journey over time and space, as the film builds to evoke a hovering state of hallucinogenic like pictures of the subconscious.  The protagonist, moving simultaneously between space and time, is at once in an imaginary dream and at other times in a state of reality. The camera, both observational and voyeuristic, follows her on her journey as she crosses waters. We are lulled into a dream state by the film’s lush colors and its Super-8 film like quality. Then the story pivots as architecture and landscape become actors and interact with one another, the protagonist makes it to her final destination; New York City in the midst of a political crisis. Turmoil has overtaken the beautiful landscape and we are at once awakened into reality. The film is accompanied by a sound collage consisting of a minimalist musical element which build with electronic noise, fragments of shortwave radio, and then live sound of human protests.
The film is a collaboration between filmmaker and artist Angela Christlieb based in Vienna and who also stars in the film, and the New York artist, filmmaker, cinematographer Maria Niro. The concept came about during Christlieb’s visit in New York in the fall of 2016, during the presidential elections in the USA.

IN AN ALIEN LAND will be screened as part of the DL program at the contemporary art ruhr video lounge presented by Directors Lounge.

Find the complete program soon here.

Credits: Angela Christlieb and Maria Niro, Directors, producers, editors and sound design | Soundtracks: Hallicrafters (Eric Hubel, Algis Kysz), Chris Janka.
“Secretly sharing the landscape of the living” by Martin A. Smith.

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

Find the Directors Lounge booth and C.A.R. Video Lounge in the SANAA Building, Zeche Zollverein

“A Short History of Abandoned Places” by Ra di Martino

“Mont Royal” by Sandra Becker

“Eine Katze hat sieben Leben” by Maria Felix Korporal

cinematic art and cuts of media experimentation at the C.A.R. Video Lounge!

Dedicated presentations include select moving image work from Experiments in Cinema, a festival designed to bring the international community of cinematic experimentalists to Nuevo Mexico to inspire a new generation of media activists to participate in shaping future trends of cultural representation. On top, we will be screening various animations from the Medienwerkstatt Berlin, an artist-run project of the BBK Berlin offering production facilities for media artists.

Find the Directors Lounge booth and the C.A.R. Video Lounge (Auditorium) in the SANAA building at World Heritage Zeche Zollverein. Stop by, say hello and take in our delectable film selection … See you at C.A.R.!


Participating Artists & Filmmakers (DL Booth and C.A.R. Video Lounge):

Deborah Kelly, Kyra Clegg, Ruth Hayes, Dianna Barrie, Guli Silberstein, Richard Ashrowan, Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker, Reed O’Beirne, Kristen Lauth Shaeffer, Ian Haig, Natasha Cantwell, Patricia McInroy, Salise Hughes, Ra di Martino, Julia Murakami, André Werner, Carola Göllner, Maria Felix Korporal, Laurent Bebín (Carbon Cream), Petra Lottje, Herbert Liffers, Lina Walde, Heike Hamann, Darko Aleksovski, Sandra Becker, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, Weronika Skonieczna, Karen Thastum (Tura Ya Moya), Anett Vietzke & Veronika Bökelmann, Rosanna Chizhova, Lioba von den Driesch, Betty Böhm, Helen Anna Flanagan, Juliane Ebner
.

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contemporary art ruhr, 
the innovative art fair

World Cultural Heritage Site Zollverein XII, 
Gelsenkirchener Str. 181/ 209 

45309 Essen, Germany

Opening hours:
Friday, October 27, 8 pm, V.I.P.-Preview, 6 pm

Public fair hours:
Saturday, October 28, 12 am – 8 pm
Sunday, October, 29, 11 am – 7 pm

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pictured:
”Michael Caine -The look III” by Carola Göllner

We are proud to present a special program curated by our comrade Bryan Konefsky, founder and mastermind behind Experiments In Cinema, at the  contemporary art ruhr, 27-29 Oct. 2017.

Select moving image work from Experiments in Cinema, a festival designed to bring the international community of cinematic experimentalists to Nuevo Mexico to inspire a new generation of media activists to participate in shaping future trends of cultural representation.

Artist list: Deborah Kelly, Kyra Clegg, Paul Tarragó, APOTROPIA (Antonella Mignone + Cristiano Panepuccia), Ruth Hayes, Dianna Barrie, Allan Brown, Guli Silberstein, Richard Ashrowan, Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker and Reed O’Beirne, Kristen Lauth Shaeffer, Ian Haig, Natasha Cantwell, Patricia McInroy, Salise Hughes, Ra di Martino.

Detailed info:
Directors Lounge at the Contemporary Art Ruhr 2017

www.experimentsincinema.org
 

 

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C.A.R. Video Lounge | the complete EIC program:

Deborah Kelly, LYING WOMEN, 4 min, 2016, Australia
Kyra Clegg, Shadow Show, 4.25 min, 2015, Scotland
Ruth Hayes, Copper Perforation Loop Triptych, 3.5 min, 2016, USA
Dianna Barrie, Last Train, 12.5 min, 2016, Australia
Guli Silberstein, Cut Out, 4.5 min, 2014, UK
Richard Ashrowan, Five Angels, 5 min, 2016, Scotland
Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker and Reed O’Beirne TRI-Alogue, no. 2,
3 min, 2016, USA
Kristen Lauth Shaeffer, 349, 3.25 min, 2015, USA
Ian Haig, Analogue, 2 min, 2016, Australia
Natasha Cantwell, The Solar System (In Luncheon Meat), 1 min, 2013, New
Zealand
Patricia McInroy, Stopped in Time, 2.5 min, 2016, Cuba
Salise Hughes, The Swimmer, 4 min, 2012, USA
Ra di Martino, A Short History of Abandoned Places, 10 min, 2012, Morocco

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pictured: “Copper Perforation Loop Triptych” by Ruth Hayes and “A Short History of Abandoned Places” by Ra di Martino