Goethe Institut, Bangalore in collaboration with Experimenta Film Society, and BAR1 presents, Relocations: A programme of 16 mm films from a living film archive. Curated and presented by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.
23rd May 2012 @ Goethe Institute Bangalore
Cinema is brought to a mountain village, film history is fast forwarded, a New York street view redefines the street, a painting is removed from a studio, and Madame Beudet adjusts a vase of flowers the way she wants it. What happens, when things are removed from their center?
Por Primera Vez Octavio Cortázar, Cuba 1967, 9 min. In 1967, itinerant projectionists of the revolutionary initiative ‘Cine Móvil’ bring the film Modern Times to a secluded Cuban village that has never seen a motion picture before.
Her Mona Klaus Telscher, Germany 1992, 7 min. Klaus Telscher’s extensive oeuvre reveals different stylistic tendencies: in addition to biting parodies there is also a poetic, atmospheric, autobiographical side. In Her Mona, Telscher placed a male Mona Lisa on a rock in front of a waterfall – and simply called it a ‘song contest’.
1933 Joyce Wieland, Canada 1967, 4 min. 1933 shows a street scene in New York, which was recorded through a loft window on the second floor at the end of the sixties. The same scene is repeated ten times in its entire length.
White Rose Bruce Conner, USA 1965-67, 7 min. A relief-like Jay de Feo painting is transported from the artist’s studio to the Pasadena Art Museum. Due to its size and weight a wall has to be broken down and a crane is used to load the picture on a truck.
La souriante Madame Beudet Germaine Dulac, France 1923, 35 min. The film tells the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Her husband amuses himself – and thinks to amuse her – by putting an empty revolver to his head and thereby threatening to shoot himself.
Play Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller, Germany 2003, 8 min. “With their montage of found footage of audiences, Müller and Girardet shape a captivating dramatic arc. It contains condensed suspense with highs, lows, hesitations, peaks, tension and humour; it’s all a bit uncanny, since our imagination can read fathoms deep into the faces.” (Anke Groenewold).
Home Stories Matthias Müller, Germany 1991, 6 min. A collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists.”In Home Stories Müller transforms linear, syntagmatic events into a world of purified emotion expressed in closely related, paradigmatic elements, condensing them into a grand poem of fear.” (Peter Tscherkassky)
About the Living Archive project: Almost 50 years after its foundation, the association Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art now boasts a film collection of over 8,000 titles. It reflects half a century of non-mainstream international film art and the living history of a Berlin institution whose structure is unique in the world. Since the beginning of 2011, Arsenal’s work has been bolstered in Germany and abroad with the epithet “Living Archive”. We believe that an archive can only be significant if it refers to the practices of the present. The “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” project began in June 2011. Over 30 curators, filmmakers, artists and other researchers are invited to develop projects around the archive holdings. The idea is to consciously initiate projects that will carry out archival work as part of their development, so as to link research, preservation and publication in the context of contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. Living Archive thus represents the attempt to undertake archival work that does not serve self-preservation only but is contemporary, creates something new and enables new approaches.
“Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” is funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin.
About the curator: Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film and video curator who lives and works in Berlin. She is Co-Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (with Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler) and Member of the Selection Committee of the Berlinale Forum and Founding Director of Forum Expanded, a section of the Berlin International Film Festival which negotiates the boundaries of cinema. Her curatorial work comprises numerous film programmes, retrospectives and exhibitions. She currently curates the project “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice”. Her texts have been published in ‘Frauen und Film’, ‘The Moving Image’, ‘Texte zur Kunst’, ‘Ästhetik & Kommunikation’, ‘Schriftenreihe Kinemathek’ as well as in various festival and exhibition catalogues. She is the Editor of: Kinemathekheft Nr. 93: “Germaine Dulac” (with Sabine Nessel and Heide Schlüpmann), Berlin 2002; “Who says concrete doesn’t burn, have you tried? West Berlin Film in the ’80s” (with Florian Wüst), Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008.
