DORIS SCHMID.  PROJEKTIONEN
Book Presentation
Friday, 20 October, 19.00
Echo Bücher, Berlin
Grüntalerstrasse 9, 13357 Berlin

Introduction: Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Concert by Katharina Klement (Zither, Elektronic)

Doris Schmid is a Berlin artist who has contributed to Directors Lounge screenings and festivals for many years. The book is connected with a screening of Doris Schmid at Directors Lounge Screenings in September 2014. The discussion with curator Klaus W. Eisenlohr after the screening was recorded and resumed on another day. The edited version of the conversation gives a valuable insight of the ideas, background and process of filmmaking of Doris Schmid. The book altogether has become an art project interweaving filmstills, photographs, texts and responses of divers musicians and authors.

DORIS SCHMID.  PROJEKTIONEN
Artist book, 2017, Hardcover
Deutsch / Englisch, 192 Seiten
Schlebrügge.editor Verlag für zeitgenössische Kunst, Wien

With contributions by Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Katharina Klement, Klaus Merz,
Jürgen Palmtag and Thomas Peter

Grafik design: Petra Egg, Translation: Helen Adkins

Echo Bücher
Grüntalerstrasse 9, 13357 Berlin
www.echobuecher.com

Looking forward to see you at the book presentation!
Doris and everybody involved

www.schlebruegge.com/de/content/doris-schmid-projektionen
www.dorisschmid.net
www.echobuecher.com

Directors Lounge Screening:
Crooked Beauty
Films by
Ken Paul Rausenthal

Ken Paul Rosenthal, filmmaker from San Francisco will present his films at Lichtblick, Berlin

Lichtblick-Kino
Kastanienallee 77
10435 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

Crooked Beauty (2010, 30 minutes)
This internationally acclaimed poetic documentary chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara’s transformative journey from psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area.

In Light, In! (2013, 12 minutes)
A haunting, visual essay about the awkward and angry junctures where our culture struggles to manage its emotional distress. Images recycled from 1950’s-era educational films are accompanied by original compositions by world-renowned cellist, Zoe Keating.

Director Bio
Ken Paul Rosenthal is a cinema artist and mental health advocate whose current work explores the geography of madness through the regenerative power of nature, urban landscapes, home movies, and archival footage from social hygiene films. His films are visually sensual, emotionally intelligent works of art that also function as tools for personal and societal transformation. His films, Crooked Beauty and In Light, In! have collectively won eighteen awards, screened in sixty film festivals, and been presented in person at dozens of peer support networks, universities, mental health symposium and community events worldwide.

http://www.lichtblick-kino.org/
http://directorslounge.net
http://www.kenpaulrosenthal.com

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
Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman
Drone Drama – Music for the Dead
Thursday, 29 June 2017
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Drone Drama – Music for the Dead
Film of 11 Episodes by  Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt (Chicago/Berlin) and Cecilia Chapman (San Francisco)
And two addiditional films “Déjà vu” and “fear don’t knock” by Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman

Live Music by accidental guitarist Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Elle Peril poetry & performance.
Readings by Miriam Glinker and Heike Klar will be from the stories that are published with the new album “Musik Für Die Toten”

Followed by the Album Release of:
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt & Globoscuro – Musik Für Die Toten (2017)
by Hortus Conclusus Records with written stories by Anne Hahn, Miriam Glinka, Heike Klar and Odessa Selestina Marquardt & poem by Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt
Published June 9, 2017
https://www.archive.org/details/Musikfrdietoten_HCR2017

Drone Drama – Music for the Dead is a collaborative project of Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman. The project will be presented by Cooper-Marquardt as Berlin Premiere at Z-Bar together with live music and with a reading of texts that were inspired by episodes of the film. 

Cooper-Marquardt, originally from Chicago and living in Berlin for 34 years, is an artist who mainly works with music but who has been engaged in many projects, collaborations and festivals. It may be the influence of his earlier times of playing free jazz and early house music in Chicago that makes him seek many collaborations. He also likes to play with different versions of the same piece, created by himself or by collaborations. His preference for this kind of iterations, may be more related to the influences of fine arts in Germany than from music: Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt just released a record by the same title, Drone Drama – Music for the Dead, including the same chapters as the film, however with completely new compositions and adding two more chapters. He also asked writers, to contribute short stories to the project Drone Drama – Music for the Dead, some of which will be read while Sean will improvise music during the reading.

The film Drone Drama – Music for the Dead consists of 11 chapters. Each chapter has a rather poetic title, like “I Love Watching the Movement of your Limbs when they Tremble from the Wind’s Gentle Caress (chapter 1)” or, “When Eating the Fruit, Remember the one who Planted the Tree (chapter 9)”. And, it is rather exceptional to see films, which are based on music, where music is the inspiration for the images.

The film starts with a section of a woman in an orange dress lying on a branch of a massive tree on the edge of a valley. The images are clearly metaphorical, but the recording is a very clear high-definition image. The orange color of the dress will reappear periodically in the film. The music is dominated by a drone sound, a hum from electronic or radio noise and some reverberated music. This is intercepted with some tonal electronic sounds. Everything appears to be soft and dreamlike.

Chapter 2 starts with the orange colored dress as background and the title “Things that never die have never lived.” In opposite to the first chapter, the filmmaker now uses blurred and electronically distorted images, clouds in pink, patterns, a hairline cross view of a sky with a jet fighter passing, sparks of an explosion, color streaks in water and fume rising up in the sky. The sound on the other hand is quite similar, only not as smooth.

The differences between two chapters introduces the viewer into the variety of images created by Cecilia, and into the more subtle nuanced changes of the music by Sean. It also introduces the associative relation between title and content of the story in the film.

Thinking about the multi-faceted associations, the collaborative project of Cooper-Marquardt and Chapman evokes, it may also be interesting to know how their collaboration evolved further. The two artists exchanged ideas about the places in San Francisco to be used as locations over the internet, without him knowing those places before. Cecilia shared her experiences during the production with Sean, and everybody interested, in the diary of a Facebook Page, which can still be visited. https://www.facebook.com/ChapmanMarquardt/

The reading of texts about Drone Drama together with the music, and finally the films of Sean and Cecilia will create a very inspiring evening, which can be interpreted in many different ways, poetic and political, metaphorical and associative. And of course, it will be great to see the different collaborative pieces of Drone Drama come together in one evening.

Artists Links:
http://www.stadtsprachen.de/en/author/sean-derrick-cooper-marquard/
http://www.ceceliachapman.com/

Also check out:
https://seanderrickcoopermarquardt.bandcamp.com/
Music Album:
https://yeahiknowitsucks.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/sean-derrick-cooper-marquardt-music-for-the-dead/
Elle Peril: http://www.feminanongrata.tumblr.com/

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

Album Release of:
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt & Globoscuro – Musik Für Die Toten (2017)
by Hortus Conclusus Records
with texts by Miriam Glinker and Heike Klar, Anne Hahn & Odessa Selestina Marquardt

Directors Lounge Screening
Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman
Drone Drama – Music for the Dead
Thursday, 29 June 2017
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

“Music For The Dead” originally arose as the third act of the Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt’s Drone Drama Trilogy, which was previously released in three acts, on three seperate labels, and which includes “The Radiant Child : First Act The Awaking Assiduous Awareness”, “God`s DNA” and finally “Music For The Dead”.

The third act has been recently put to film by the director Cecelia Chapman and has now premired in the city of Cologne and soon at various international film festivals, the album Music For The Dead has been also released and translated in the following languages: English, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Croatian, French. This German Album Release is something completely different due to the fact that is has been re-worked, re-arranged and re-recorded with totally new compositions molded and shaped by the artistic embrace of Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt and Emiliano Pietrini aka Globoscuro and also includes a pdf booklet with four stories by Anne Hahn, Heike Klar, Miriam Glinka & Odessa Selestina Marquardt plus a poem by Sean himself. To crown and wrap this album with another veil of beauty there is the ambigous and wonderful cover art created by the magnificent and talented italian photographer Linda De Luca. The album contains 13 tracks of variable duration between 1 minute and maximum 3 minutes (no second is allowed) that sail like a roaring turbine among sounds devoted to the musique concrete, electroacoustic, psychedelic, post-rock, dark ambient and noise. The sound passage seems to be metaphorize a polidimensional journey in which the listener encounters significances, geometries, emotions and visions that interweave and alternate creating a labyrinthic yet strangely well-defined landscape. Like stories inside the same story that fight to spread their desperate voice but far from the constraint of the word.

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
Thanos Chrysakis
Amber Gaze

Thursday, 27 April 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

The artist, musician and composer Thanos Chrysakis was born in Athens. He lived for sixteen years in London until he moved to Belarus in 2015. He is a trained musician who performs his music internationally in festivals, in concert halls and alternative places. He always had a strong connection with images and thus has created his own videos, or has found people for sound/image collaborations. Since 2007 he operates the record-label ‘Aural Terrains’ focusing in electroacoustics, composed and improvised music.

The program thus presents the composer/musician – Thanos Chrysakis – working with his own visuals and with the audio-visual collaborations of film director Félix Brassier. In our perception of video, or film, of audio-visual material, sound guides the reception of images, sound creates the continuity of space and time or its disruption more than any visual effect, even though the sound editing rarely comes to the surface of our perception. Chrysakis with his sounds on the other hand loves to work with the thresholds of our perception, with the fragility and ambiguity of sounds, and the edges of discernibility. The images of his films, and of those of Brassier, thus play on a similar congenial level of ambiguity on the picture layer, as Chrysakis’ sounds. The visuals may even take up some of the functions, “music for film” traditionally has: a marker for the continuity of space and time. However, the stream of ambiguous consciousness between industrial urban spaces and dreamy imaginations the films provoke, are a product of a fine tuned balance of sound and image creation.

image
image

Artist Link:
http://auralterrains.com
http://www.auralterrains.com/chrysakis/en/bio/

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

Snaps from the screening:
https://www.pinterest.de/directorslounge/directors-lounge-screenings-berlin/

photo: Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Directors Lounge Screening
Ana Bilankov
Night Riders
Thursday, 30 March 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Ana Bilankov, Berlin based artist with Croatian background, creates videos connected with peculiar places in different European cities, Moscow and New York, connected with the geographies and stories of those places, mostly interwoven with her own biography or experience. Her short films often combine a brittle visual poetry with rarified narratives on the soundtrack. Her training in art history and German studies in Zagreb together with her Master in Art in Context in Berlin seem to give her the intuition to pick out places and situations that become metaphors for things unspoken or stories untold. It may also have been her biography, which sensitized her for the hidden traces in human geographies, namely her escape from war while it spread over former Yugoslavia. The artist on the other hand calls it her “search for Roland Barthes’ punctum” in the geography of the city.

Her video pictures are conceived like extended snapshots that unfold, and become meaningful over time. Sound and text work complementary and associative to the pictures and are often from more divers sources than the image. When she points to the former Transatlantic slave trade connected with the sugar manufacturing in Bristol in her film “Sweet Home”, to the poisonous wreckage of Newtown Creek of East River NY in “New Town Future Film”, or to the story of an old broken Jewish House in Vienna (“I want to get out”), the artist never uses a traditional documentary style or storytelling. Instead, the films often comprise a poetic multi-layered audio-visual composition that leaves it open to the viewer to follow all the laid-out traces or to create their own associative connections.

Her film “U Ratu i Revoluciji / In War and Revolution” goes back to Croatia to visit her grandmother and to look for the traces of a book about education during the resistance against the Nazi occupation written by her grandfather, which disappeared as “communist and inappropriate” during political changes an the war of the early 1990s in Croatia. Her grandmother’s fading memories become a metaphor for those lost historical memories of the past, when books are eliminated from the libraries.

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

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

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

Snaps from our screening

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research – Private Affair
Thursday, 26 January 2017 | 21:00
Z-Bar | Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

In the times of public intrusion into the private sphere, right wing populists and religious fundamentalists threatening the freedom of expression and diversity, and conservative politicians pressing for control and surveillance, the expressions of private life become a political affair again. Related to the slogan of 1968 “The personal is political”, the here presented films talk about personal or private affairs in relation to the public sphere and the urban space.

Many of the Urban Research films submitted in 2016 are dealing with private stories, that are related, in one way or the other, to the urban space and expressing the importance of freedom and solidarity for the divergent, the subversive and the liberal mind. The films present the small stories with high artistic aspiration, the nuanced views and the subjective diversity, which are even more important at times when populist positions start to replace distinguished sentiments in culture and politics.

A fine selection of Urban Research films shown at 48h Neukölln in addition to a brand new film by Penny Lane. And, films by Petra Lottje, Vladimir Turner, Rob Santaguida, Anna Okrasko, Doris Schmid, Salise Hughes, Eleonore de Montesquiou, and Ezra Wube

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

Snaps from this screening

Directors Lounge Screening
James Edmonds
The Material Question
Thursday, 24 November 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

“The cinema of James Edmonds (1983) explores the complexities of the real not as a mere substance named ‘reality’ but in its most fluctuating and Turnerian correlation, in those uncertainties that make it impossible to fix it in any specific point in space.”(Toni D’angela, La furia umana 28, 2016)

James Edmonds is an artist filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin and London. His practice centers on a personal poetics in which the nature of recording, when approached from the materiality of analogue film, offers a tangible surface for what is intangible and fleeting – our personal experience, inner worlds, thoughts and reflections.

He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Fronteira Festival Brasil, The Temenos Screening Kino Xenix Zurich, Another Vacant Space Berlin, Mystetskyi Arsenal Lavra Kiev and ACCEA Armenia. Since 2015 he also curates the monthly film series Light Movement in Berlin.

PROGRAM
– Movement and Stillness, 2015, super 8, 11min, colour, silent
– Inside Outside, 2008/2015, super8, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– Sternwarten der Welt / Sun Documents, 2010-11/2016 (in progress), super8 double projection, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– OVERLAND, 2016, super 8, 22min, colour and black+white, soundtrack
– Patterns of Summer, (in progress), super8, 3 mins, colour, silent

Artist Link:
http://jamesedmonds.org
http://light-movement.blogspot.de

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