DL X special: Erdal Inci

 Erdal Inci´s mesmerizing loops of cloned motion will be shown on the stage screen in the Lounge area.

You´ll be glued to the screen.

Erdal Inci TR DL X special presentation

Taksim Spiral 0,8s  2013 
Pictogram 1,4s  2013 
Hieropolis Amphitheatre 1,4s  2013
Flood of Light 1,4s 2013
Camondo Stairs 0,4s 2013

pictured: Erdal Inci TR Taksim Spiral 0,8 s, 2013.

DL X program.


DAY 4, Feb 12th

CREATURES OF TONIGHT: A CANARY, A ZEBRA AND PARASITES

There was a time when Sundays were considered, well, less than Saturday, but not in Berlin, and certainly not at [DL8] (a.k.a. the 8th Berlin International Directors Lounge Film Festival) tonight, with “My Sweet Canary” by Roy Sher taking us on a roller coaster romp of a ride through the life of 1930’s chanteuse extraordinaire Roza Eskenazi, the “Diva of Rebetiko”, who inspired male mania and more in Greece and Turkey of the day. Don’t miss it, at 18:00, or the Zebra Poetry Film Festival selection at 20:00, with Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel on hand to present the proceedings. Hear with your eyes and see with your ears…. Then comes “Parasiten der Ohnmacht” (“Parasites of Powerlessness” or “Parasites of Swoon”, depending on how you want to take it) at 22:00, with actor Birol Ünel reading bizarre and nightmarish short stories from the book of the same name by Miron Zownir. Also available as audio book set to music by F.M. Einheit of Einstürzende Neubauten. But live is live!                                                                  

                                                                              KT/Team DL

pictured: Halbdichtheiten by Ralph Kühne as part of the ZEBRA POETRY FILM FESTIVAL, selected by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel

Miron Zownir (left) and Birol Ünel , photo: Nico Anfuso

An Evening with Miron Zownir and Birol Ünel

Actor Birol Ünel (Head On, Soulkitchen) reads bizarre short stories and hard boiled poetry from Miron Zownir’s book PARASITEN DER OHNMACHT.
Empathetic and venturous at the same time, he sets out on a fearless descent into existential nightmares of paranoia, violence and corruption, taking us right into the bleak souls of the lost and twisted…

“Social Beat on the highest level!” OX FANZINE
“Miron Zownir’s parasites have a future and this is frightening.” JUNGE WELT/Literary supplement Frankfurt Book Fair

Birol Ünel liest Miron Zownir-Parasiten der Ohnmacht has also been recently released as an audio book with a soundtrack by FM Einheit (Ex-Einstürzende Neubauten) by Deutsche Grammophon Literatur/Universal.

www.mironzownir.com

Sun 12 | 10pm, admission: 5 Euro

DAY 3, Feb. 11th

IN THE SWIM OF THINGS, AND MORE, DL-STYLE

Tonight’s brand [DL8] round-up includes special guest Simon Ellis (GB), a young filmmaker who has garnered a lot of attention since walking off with the Sundance International Jury Prize and the British Independent Film Award and 35 others for his unsettling and thought-provoking short “Soft”, which will be in the program along with a cross-section of his widely varying celluloid offerings. It’s all rounded up under the title “Swimming in Pictures and Sound”, and expect to do just that… and chat with Mr. Ellis himself. The rest of the evening is no slouch, either: DL Selection III has H.D. Motyl (US) in attendance, presenting “Nudes Descending a Staircase, #2” in Europe for the first time, as well as Alexandra Staples (GB) with “Static Cardiac Rhythms”, two of sixteen (!) premieres tonight. Lorenzo Karasz (AT) will be there in person with his and Florian Kogler’s “Fassadendialog” and George Groshkov (BG) with “Breakfast: Always on time”, too. The evening begins with a surprise program at 18:00 (6:00 p.m.) and Ost West Achse (pt II) providing Balkan Bond Blues” as live diversion starting at midnight. At Naherholung Sternchen, behind Kino International. If that doesn’t sound like something….!

                                                                              KT/Team DL

Thurs 18th 8:15 pm Undo | An evening with Jean-Gabriel Périot

still from: nijuman go borei 200.000 phantoms

When the World Heritage Commission met in 1996 to accord World Heritage Site status to the ruins of Czech architect Jan Letzel’s renamed building – the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima – America objected, concerned at the nomination’s ‘lack of historical perspective’.

Extraordinarily still standing, despite being just 150 metres from the epicentre of the bomb that ended World War II on 6 August 1945, and since a cornerstone of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall is also the indomitable focal point of Jean-Gabriel Périot’s remarkable Nijuman No Borei (200,000 Phantoms).

The film layers archival photographs of the building from 1914 to the present day, chronologically superimposed on top of each other, pivoting around and anchored by multiple views of the preserved ruin as Current 93’s soundtrack teeters on the brink of a potentially didactic bathos. What pulls this work back from a pacifying nostalgia so convincingly is something that is key to Périot’s work as a whole, an indicator of his common themes and the counterpoint to an uncompromisingly expressed emotional sensibility: that the accumulation of images is a history in which we are complicit; that to accumulate images is profoundly to reconsider history not as a stable, received narrative but precisely to expose it as a collection of myriad perspectives.

This is at the core of 200,000 Phantoms’ beguiling simplicity: as images move from black and white into colour, the building’s skeleton becomes the locus of memorialisation as well as a memorial itself – in actuality and here in its sequential, two-dimensional imprint. It remains, amidst the optimism of modern architecture, the subject of repeated preservation attempts and, significantly, as an image repeated to the extent that it becomes simultaneously, defiantly incontrovertible and, along with time and space, radically almost tangible – in fact, the very materialisation of historical perspective.

Nowhere in Périot’s films is such tangibility better exploited than as in Undo (2005), where footage of contemporary disaster, suppressed protests, violence inflicted, human against human, is simply reversed. The naïve optimism of the film’s formal strategy is caustically undercut by the reality of its documentary material – these things actually happened, these people actually died – such that the work’s willful turning back of time becomes pointedly imaginary and poignantly hopeless.

Périot’s work extends from a politics of the self in his early videos that are ironic exegeses of sexuality. It is deeply affecting not just because of the harrowing and explicit images that it sometimes deploys but also because its absolute indictment of all violence, prejudice and destruction appeals to this imaginary while confronting us with the damning recording of events in our time.

21.04.02 (2002) is a torrid taxonomy of images, an immediate present and a direct response to the election success of the right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen on that day.

In Even if she had been a criminal (2006), archival footage of World War II rushes past our eyes until we are confronted with deeply disturbing images, not of Nazi atrocities, but of the French cutting off the hair of every woman suspected of collaborating with the German occupiers. Again, ‘we’ are complicit.

If this work is didactic then it is also unashamed, arguing for the necessity of didacticism: an emotional politics that ultimately disorientates and strangely transcends the subjectivity of which it is defiantly constituted.

Ian White at animatedprojects

Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator at Whitechapel, London and an independent curator, writer and artist.