Kino B: Contemporary Cinema by Berlin-Based Artists

Artist, critic, curator, and Columbus-native Caroline Koebel assembled a provocative blend of nine contemporary experimental films while on a research trip in Berlin. The program includes work by the late luminary Harun Farocki, Guillaume Cailleau (recipient of the Berlinale Silver Bear Jury Prize for Short Film), and Sylvia Schedelbauer, whose 2011 film Sounding Glass won accolades at the Ann Arbor and Oberhausen Film Festivals. The Kino B artists share a command of cinema's potential for experientially transformative critical reflection. Their travels far and wide encompass a specially engineered tracking shot through a rainforest; a young man in the woods amidst harrowing visions of war; an explication of how computer motion-graphics elide differences between real and simulated trees; such authors and philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Marguerite Yourcenar, Hannah Arendt, and Roland Barthes; as well as lived experiences in the streets of Athens, Mumbai, and Berlin. (100 mins., film & video)

Sounding Glass (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2011)
A man in a forest is subject to a flood of impressions; structurally rhythmic waves of images and sounds give form to his introspection. (10 mins., video)

16MM (Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, 2011)
16MM is a continuous single take, a long shot traveling with constant speed through the jungle, going deeper and deeper inside it, for the duration of the roll of film, feet by feet. 16MM is both an essay on cinema and on the forest and the crossings that occur in it. A film about time and the nature of the creative act. An exercise of penetration that is not without psychological connotations. A tactile look. A conceptual and physical work. (5:26 mins, 16mm on video, color, 4-channel sound)

Parallel (Harun Farocki, 2012)
For over one hundred years, photography and film were the leading media. From the start they served not only to inform and entertain but were also media of scientific research and documentation. That’s also why these reproduction techniques were associated with the notions of objectivity and contemporaneity—whereas images created by drawing and painting indicated subjectivity and the transrational. Apparently today computer animation is taking the lead. (17 mins., 2-channel installation on single-channel video, color, sound)

Nietzsche à Nice (Isabella Gresser, 2013)
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Noon and Eternity in times of mass tourism and digital viewing habits. A young tourist is mirroring himself on his tablet PC at the beach while in the air above Nice, up to 49,000 passengers a day, longing for happiness. Down at the beach they can watch themselves flying over. An animated screenplay frames the setting for Nietzsche’s thoughts out of his late work written in Nice. As if the sky embodies a dystopian image of “the eternal return of the same.” (5 mins., video, color, sound)

Notebooks on Dislocation, Fragment I (Michael Poetschko, 2011)
When we speak of the city, we understand it as an open, migrational, and organic system; an assemblage of real, imaginary, and mnemonic spaces; a place of promises, encounters, desires, and control; a product and projection of bodies; a set of dispositifs; as well as a space for creation of subjectivity. Notebooks on Dislocation intends to approach the complex corpus of city/contemporaneity through different perspectives, methods, stories, and optics. Fragment I is conceptualized as an audiovisual travelogue and assemblage of urban experiences, mnemonic itineraries, notebook entries, and philosophical speculations. How can we think of another city, another spatiality that “slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (de Certeau)? What would be its promise? A sketch and a diagram for works to come. (19:44 mins., 3-channel installation on single-channel video, color, sound)

Herman(n) (Deborah S. Phillips, 2011)
I see this part of Neukölln (a district in Berlin) through golden late summer light as an inviting place, which is all the more palatable as manifested on different varieties of film material. I have lived, for more than 13 years, on a side street of the Hermannstraße, first on the one side, then on the other. Gentrification has already commenced where I live, things get busier. It’s as trendy as in many other parts of town now. (8 mins., 16mm, color, silent)

The Mutability of All Things and the Possibility of Changing Some (Anna Marziano, 2011)
This journey into mutability takes place in Abruzzi, Italy, in a territory that was damaged by the earthquake in 2009. By way of fragments of conversations, archive material, and readings in public spaces, the film explores the becoming of individual and social bodies. How should one accommodate the perpetual new beginning of things and continue participating in the transformation of a community? (16 mins., Super 16mm on video, color, sound)

Austerity Measures (Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell, 2012)
A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces—of grafitti’d marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls—hand-processed in red, green, and blue. (8:40 mins., 16mm, color, silent)

The Voice of God (Bernd Lützeler, 2011)
If God would come down to earth and try to earn a living in Bombay, most probably he would very soon become successful as a voice-over artiste, lending his voice to thousands of Hindi movies and even more documentaries and public service films in India. A melo-dramatic docudrama with voice-over in stop-motion and long-time exposure. (9:35 mins., 35mm, color, sound)