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

urban research selection

9 April 2016 //// 16:00
//////////////// Coaty
////////Ladeira da Misericórdia
s/n – ruazinha atrás da Prefeitura de Salvador
Salvador – Centro Histórico, Brazil

Organized by: Projeto Ativa e Blade
OCUPAÇÃO COATY

Urban Research is a film and video program curated since 2006 by Klaus W. Eisenlohr during the Berlin International Directors Lounge festival. Urban Research encompasses explorations of public space, reports of the conditions of urban life and interventions in the urban sphere realized by international film and video artists using experimental, documentary, abstract or fictive forms.

The films of this Urban Research selection revolve around visions of the future city, recent and current movements and developments that take their expression in public spaces, urban studies and metaphoric images dealing with urban life. The mix of experimental and more documentary styles complement each other and create a diversity of connected ideas about urban life.

Pedro Miguel Santos PT
Zigurate 05:52 2013

Marina Chernikova NL
Urban Surfing / Moscow2 01:30 2012

Anna Okrasko PL
Lot’s Wife 05:13 2013

artizinconnu TR
The City and The Memory – Have you seen Sulukule? 08:40 2009

Sharon Horodi/ Cheb Kammerer DE
Simply a Love Song 05:00 2006

Rhayne Vermette CA
Full of Fire 02:15 2013 VP

Sirin Bahar Demirel TR
Living with Leviathan 11:00 2013

Scott Fitzpatrick CD
Places with Meaning 03:00 2012

Monika Rechsteiner CH
Real Estate II 08:30 2013

Jonathan Rescigno FR
Core’ngrato 10:00 2012

Matthew Pell UK
Escence 01:31 2013

Txema Novelo MX
Culpable 05:27 2012

Link:
Urban Research http://urban-research.eu/DL2016/framesUR-Coaty.html
Projeto-Ativa – https://www.facebook.com/Projeto-Ativa-233368730204724
Savador de Bahia, Brazil – https://www.facebook.com/Projeto-Ativa-233368730204724

Caroline Koebel
Drift and Dwell: Film and Video

Directors Lounge Monthly Screening

Thursday, 26 July 2012

21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Caroline Koebel works with a broad range of media and film expressions, bringing together many influences, super-8 experiences, punk, Vaudeville, the vivid Californian avant-garde scene around Craig Baldwin and his Other Cinema screenings, and conceptual references to Valie Export. If trying to trace back the film tradition she is drawing on, it would possibly be the subversive media practice that Amos Vogel started with Cinema 16 in New York from 1947 to 1963, a practice that was most interested in the discourse of different fields of cinema.

Caroline Koebel uses a number of styles and tries to create a dialog between analog and digital, handprocessed found footage meets digital camera and editing, political involvement comes together with poetic film. The program comprises earlier and new work of the artist, and different themes and styles, in the range from poetic film to experimental essay. Caroline Koebel, who is also a critical film writer, curator and an educator at Transart Institute will be present for questions and answers.

Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Links:

http://www.directorslounge.net

http://www.z-bar.de

http://www.richfilm.de

Artist link:

http://www.carolinekoebel.com

Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr

The Sound We See: City Symphonies in the 21st Century

Thursday, 21 June 2012
21:00 Uhr

Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

In the fall of 2010, 37 youth from across Los Angeles, ages 11 – 19, bonded together to document the life, rhythm and movement of the city from their unique perspectives, joining their visions to create a complete 24-hour City Symphony. The filmmakers divided the day into its two-dozen hours, working in pairs to select and shoot locations that best represented each hour of the day (and night) as one minute on film. The result is a spectacular 24-minute trip through the City of Angels as most have never seen it before…

Learning, emulating and redefining the ways and techniques of past avant-garde urban documentarians, the youth filmmakers worked with 16mm cameras and black and white film.

Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr were invited to return to Rotterdam in 2012 to repeat the project with local youth. The Sound We See: Rotterdam was created by a group of 17 filmmakers between the ages of 13 and 42. Once again, local musicians created a soundtrack specifically for the film, which premiered on May 25, 2012. Lisa Marr will be available for Q&A.

Filmmakers Bio
Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr are filmmakers/musicians/writers/educators whose work is a catalyst for creative collaboration and positive social change. Originally from Italy and Canada respectively, they currently live and work in Los Angeles where they run the Echo Park Film Center, a non-profit neighborhood media arts center. As The Here & Now they travel the world, bringing movies and music to the masses.

Presented by guest curator Dagie Brundert and Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Links:
http://www.echoparkfilmcenter.org
http://www.filmmobile.org

Lisa Marr at Directors Lounge

Program Details
The Sound We See: A Los Angeles City Symphony
DV: original format 16mm
28 minutes
2010

The Sound We See: A Rotterdam City Symphony
DV: original format 16mm
27 minutes
2012

Around The World With The Here & Now
DV: original format Super 8 with live musical accompaniment
30 minutes
2003 – present

Pripyat — the Uncanny of Modernity

Thursday, 22 March 2012
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstr. 2
D-10115 Berlin-Mitte

U-Rosenthaler Platz

One year after the Fukushima disaster and 26 years after the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor, the discussion on civil nuclear energy has again reached the “normality” of planning for new power plants. Over the same time, Pripyat the destroyed young Sowjet city, now situated in Ukraine, has gained an eerie attraction. Firstly presented in Freiburg DE, the collected films allow a discussion of the human imagination triggered by nuclear energy and nuclear disasters beyond excited press news.

Presented by Klaus W. Eisenlohr. The film program comprises films representing visions of the abandoned city of Pripyat by artists and documentary filmmakers, and imaginations of futures under the influence of “peaceful nuclear energy”.

Artists list:
Hanne Adam + Thierry Buysse,
Klaus W. Eisenlohr,
Gair Dunlop,
Andrea Slavik,
Vanessa Renwick,
Anders Weberg,
Sarah Breen Lovett,
Nicky Larkin,
Julio Soto

More infos at:
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesPripyat2012.html

OUT OF THE BLUE – Plötzlich wird alles anders

DAY 5, Feb 13th

We are proud to announce Berlin artist, filmmaker and curator Deborah Phillips will treat us again with a program based on film, and mostly presented on 16mm film. The artist is one of the most active promoters in Berlin in sharing her love for film and analogue techniques. The program for sure will comprise rarely seen treasures. And, we are expecting the world premiere of her new film “PFFFHP TT!”

Here is link to the program on 13 Febr:
https://directorslounge.net/tag/13th%20Feb%202012

Directors Lounge Screening

Michael Brynntrup

meSelf, mySelf and iSelf
film + video works

Thursday, 30 June 2011
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Michael Brynntrup is an artist and filmmaker who has been probing the limits of independent, personal and experimental film since the 80’s. Very early in his art career, he started off with Super-8 films, but soon experimented with multiple projections and collaborations with other artists. With „Jesus, der Film“ his collaboration took the form of a „cadavre exquis“, the joint product of a number of directors who only saw part of the work of their collegues, but who all were asked to have Brynntrup play the main character, Jesus. The resulting feature-long film became a legend, while little later, Brynntrup also became a well known director in the gay-and-lesbian cinema movement. His goal, however, was to never become monopolized by a certain scene, and thus, since his start, he has strived for a diversity of themes and genres in his work. Still, we can find the repeated and ongoing questions of the identity of the self, the questions, how the roles we play in society are being defined by gender and sexual orientation, and how the mirror of the other, and the mirror of death influences our lives. Last but not least, the artist adresses the question how much of an impact the mirror of media does have. (Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr)

Links:

Michael Brynntrup
http://www.brynntrup.de/

Z-Bar
http://www.z-bar.de

More infos (Klaus W. Eisenlohr):
http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/index.html

Directors Lounge Screening in der Z-Bar
Donnerstag, 25.11.2010
21:00
Discreet Structures
Films by
Toby Cornish und Johannes Braun/  jutojo Berlin

Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

 Discreet Structures, the title of the program with Toby Cornish and Johannes Braun, refers to the compositional qualities of their films. It also applies to the linking to local architecture or urban places, and to the ways the artists work with musical scores. Both artists’ work mainly originates in Super-8 or 16mm footage, which they shoot and then process digitally. And most films are product of collaborations with musicians.

Two visits to Sarajevo in 2003 and 2004 gave Toby the opportunity to make a structural film in this historically and politically charged place: Sarajevo Vertical. The bridge, where arch-duke Franz Ferdinand was murdered, which gave way to the declaration of war in 1914, the name Tito on a bridge, and the white graves of killed Muslims from the most recent war, all appear in the film but only as a backdrop, or as the ground on which the visitor stands. If “Sarajevo Vertical” has or needs a symbolical/political reading is up to the viewer. First of all it is the rule of composition of filmmaker Cornish to align every image to a vertical line while shooting and then edit the film on principles of repetition, rhythm, acceleration and size of the vertical line.

Toby Cornish is interested in metric structures, in interferences of loops with different lengths, which due to their complexity might lead to a chance operation, similar to musical structures of John Cage or Steve Reich, and which in the end where the result may surprise the artist as much as the audience. With “Rückbau”, a film about the destruction of the East German parliament building, he takes this strategy further. With the help of digital programming, the film composes itself and anew on each presentation.

Johannes Braun, on the other hand is less interested in chance operations but in the totality of visual-acoustic composition. His film Teufelsberg also shows his background as trained architect. The images unfold his explorations of building structures while he tries to capture traces “of hope and disillusion, of making and destroying, still to be sensed” in the rubble and the left-over walls. They also comment on already past (and forgotten) plans for future developments, including architecture drawings and a former model apartment of the already scattered utopia for a commercial hot-spot on Teufelsberg. The visually dense composition thus not only shows the beauty of the bygone structures but also contains an edge of irony.

With “Gaz”, a collective product, the filmmakers again show their strength of working with compositional structures. Gaz was composed to a graphical score, which the filmmakers and the 2 musicians worked on independently of one another. The film celebrates the early industrial designs around gasometers and gas-lights, still to be found in Berlin’s city center.

http://www.jutojo.de/home/

http://www.directorslounge.net
http://richfilm.de

More infos and film stills:
http://richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesJutojo.html

Ladybugs do not Dream
Directors Lounge Screening
with
Maru Ituarte and Ute Ströer

Thursday, 28 October 2010
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstr. 2
D-10115 Berlin-Mitte
U-Rosenthaler Platz

Ladybugs do not Dream
– Marienkäfer träumen nicht –

Two female filmmakers present their work at Z-Bar, the upcoming Directors Lounge screening. Both show a clear female point-of-view onto their subject without calling themselves feminists. Maru Ituarte, born in Monterrey, Mexico, has recorded and collected images of her surrounding with a critical view onto the violent, destructive and male-oriented aspects of a society that separates the male and female spheres at large. A found box of Hi-8 tapes, meant to be recorded over, became the source for a work called „Mexican Goulash“, which has a stunning similarity to a compilations of those self-obsessed clips to be found on Youtube in our days. It becomes the portrait of a certain part of the middle class.

Ute Ströer’s interest in film is based on her love for fairy tales and horror movies. The filmmaker meticulously works on the look of her images, strives for perfection in color and composition, and with her film characters she tries to achieve the largest band-with of expression and possible interpretation. The narrator we might have believed to hear exists only in the viewer’s head, the story we read only exists in fragments of symbols, a “Glasperlenspiel” of meanings.

Thus, as much as the aesthetic of the two artists may differ, they have much in common. Both invite, even seduce the viewer to follow onto a subjective journey of female perspective, when half-way on seemingly secure roads the viewer realizes, it’s their own imagination that has been triggered, their own story they have lived through, and actually, there is no such simple interpretation.

The artists will be present and available for Q&A.
(Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr)

video program
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/index.html
http://directorslounge.net

Artists Links:
http://maru-ituarte.com
http://www.utestroer.de

Programme:

• Daumenlutscherin     Ute Ströer    12:17
• Schlafende Füchsin    Ute Ströer     15:07
• La Metafisica Del Yoyo    Maru Ituarte    2:30
• Reproduktion    Maru Ituarte     9:13
• Hotel Rex    Maru Ituarte    3:06
• Mexican Goulash    Maru Ituarte    9:55
• Noa Noa Narko Tour    Maru Ituarte    5:01
• Fleisch    Maru Ituarte     6:30
• Phreak Show    Maru Ituarte    10:23
• Matrijoschka    Ute Ströer     7:33

Directors Lounge Screenings in der Z-Bar
präsentiert:
Within Landscape and Time
Video Works by
Elena Näsänen
Mittwoch, 26 Mai 2010
21:00

Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Elena Näsänen
Video Künstlerin aus Finnland

Die große Leinwand, das große Kino und das Bild von Natur in Cinemascope sind Bezüge für Elena Näsänens Video Arbeiten. Sie ist eine der wenigen Künstler, die ausschließlich mit Video arbeiten, und die zudem selten auf der Kinoleinwand zu sehen sind. Stattdessen findet die Öffentlichkeit die Arbeiten der finnischen Künstlerin in Galerien und internationalen Kunstausstellungen.

Ihre Filme beinhalten Strukturen des narrativen Kinos: zu den meisten ihrer Videofilme hat sie das Drehbuch verfasst, es spielen Schauspieler, es gibt einen Kameramann und manche enthalten den Spannungsaufbau möglicher, unheimlicher Erlebnisse, wie sie die Zuschauer in Horror und Kriminalfilmen erwarten. In “Before Rain“ (Vor dem Regen) benutzt Elena Ausschnitte aus Hollywood Krimis, die jedoch nicht aufgelöst werden; in „Night“ (Nacht) folgt die weibliche Hauptfigur ihrem Drang, das Haus bei Nacht zu verlassen und den nahe liegenden dunklen Wald zu durchstreifen; und in „Wasteland“ (Ödland) ist eine Gruppe von Frauen im Hinterland Australien unterwegs, deren Aufgabe und Schicksal am Ende unbekannt bleiben. Überhaupt sind fast immer Frauen die Protagonisten der Szenen.

Zwei andere Elemente zeichnen Elenas Arbeit jedoch mindestens in ähnlich starker Weise aus: Zeit und Natur. Zeit ist gänzlich verbunden mit dem Bild. .Zeit wird ambivalent, wird zur Filmzeit, die entweder still steht oder endlos dauert, ganz abhängig vom Betrachter. Auf der anderen Seite scheint Natur die Szenerie zu dominieren. Vielleicht ist es so, dass Elene Näsenen hier den Blick auf das erhabene „Andere“ wieder aufleben lässt. Natur, so wie sie das unbekannte Andere für uns Bewohner der Städte wurde.
(Kuratiert von Klaus W. Eisenlohr)

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

Directors Lounge
http://www.directorslounge.net
More infos and video stills:
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesElenaNasanen.html

———
ENGLISH TEXT:

Directors Lounge Screenings in der Z-Bar
presents:
Within Landscape and Time
Video Works by
Elena Näsänen
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
21:00

Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Elena Näsänen
Video Work

Elena Näsänen’s reference for her work on video is the big screen, the glory of grand cinema, and with that, the picture of nature in cinemascope. She is one of the few artists who work exclusively on video, and who are rarely shown on a cinema screen. Instead, the audience finds her work in art shows, galleries and international exhibitions.

The films of the Finnish artist who lives in Helsinki contain structures of narrative cinema: most of them are written by the artist, are played by actors, and they are building up a suspense of uncanny possible occurrences, which the audience anticipates to happen. In “Before Rain” Elena uses fragments of Hollywood crime movies that stay unresolved, in “Night” a female character follows an urge to leave the house at night searching through the adjunct woods, and in “Wasteland” a group of women are on their way to an unknown task and destiny.

There are two other elements, however, that seem to mark Elena’s work just as strongly: time and nature. Time is strictly connected with images. If her images stay in our memory, their time seems to persist, thus making time ambivalent, a “film time” that stands still or becomes endless, depending on the viewer. Nature, on the other hand seems to dominate the image, and Elena’s characters. Maybe, Elena Näsänen here revives a contemporary view onto the sublime other: Nature as it has become the unfamiliar other for us city dwellers. And this mystery may be contained by the Australian outback, the Chinese yellow mountains, or the Finnish landscape.
(curated by Klaus W. Eisenelohr)

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

Directors Lounge
http://www.directorslounge.net
More infos and video stills:
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesElenaNasanen.html