T. Minh-ha Trinh - Reassemblage (1983)
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, REASSEMBLAGE reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.
“With uncanny eloquence, REASSEMBLAGE distills sounds and images of Senegalese villagers and their surroundings to reconsider the premises and methods of ethnographic filmmaking. By disjunctive editing and a probing narration this ‘documentary’ strikingly counterpoints the authoritative stance typical of the National Geographic approach.” — Laura Thielan
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T. Minh-ha Trinh - The Fourth Dimension (2001)
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Today, when one goes on a journey, the travel is ritualized through the visual machine. The image, coming alive in time as it frames time, is there where the actual and virtual meet. In the process of ritualizing Japan's "hundred flowers," it is the encounter between self and other, human and machine, viewer and image, fact and fancy that determines the field of relations in which new interactions between past and present are made possible. Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations, including more evident loci such as festival, religious rite and theatrical performance, "rituals" involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the ongoing process of creating digital images at the speed of light.
"Striking visual compositions and juxtapositions and a stunning soundtrack. As we watch and listen to this provocative and meditative piece, we, too, become 'attentive to the infraordinary - an intrusion of eternity.'" - I. Leimbacher, The San Francisco Cinematheque
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T. Minh-ha Trinh - Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
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Of marriage and loyalty: “Daughter, she obeys her father/ Wife, she obeys her husband/ Widow, she obeys her son.”
Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.
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Helga Fanderl - Fragile (2008)
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
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Born in Ingolstadt in 1947. Studied German, Romance Languages and Literature in Munich, Paris and Frankfurt/Main (1967-1973). Studied at the Art School, “Städelschule”, in Frankfurt/Main (1987-1992) and at Cooper Union in New York City (1992-1993). Since 1990 her work is represented in film museums, museums of modern and contemporary art, exhibition spaces, galleries, art house cinemas, and other locations she has selected: Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt/Main.; Arsenal, Berlin; Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.; Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Basel; Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main.; Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, Genf; Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main.; Ausstellungsraum Konstantin Adamopoulos, Frankfurt/Main.; Galerie König and Johanneskirche, Hanau; Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris; Xenix, Zürich; Filmpodium, Zürich; Kino im Kunstmuseum, Bern; L’Entrepôt, Paris; Centre Bruxelles-Wallonie, Paris; Babylon Mitte, Berlin; Cineteca di Bologna; Mal Seh’n Kino, Frankfurt/Main.; Stadtkino Basel; Forum des images, Paris; Studio Galande, Paris; Goethe House, New York; The New York Public Library, New York; Theater in der Garage, Erlangen; Theater am Turm (TAT), Frankfurt/Main.; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris.
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Markus Schröder & Hermann J Höper - Skulptur Projekte Muenster 07 (2007)
Sunday, June 1, 2008
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The sculpture projects muenster 07 have taken place for the fourth time in the summer of 2007. The exhibition presented the works of 36 artists from all over the world. The curators were Brigitte Franzen, Kasper König and Carina Plath.
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Michael Pilz - Facts for Fiction (Index 027) (1996)
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The work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Pilz presented in Facts for Fiction questions the viewer's perception of spatial and temporal structures. Situated between fictional and documentary filmmaking, he discovers mistery and fact on the same road.
Ob er nun sogenannt dokumentarisch oder sogenannt fiktional arbeitet, ob mit 16mm, 35mm oder mit High-8-Video: Für Pilz steht das Wahrnehmen im Zentrum, der Film/das Video als Dispositiv, als Bedingung für die raumzeitliche Organisation einer Betrachtung. Damit ist zunächst das bloße Hinhören und Hinschauen gemeint, aber auch ein Gespür für Begegnungen mit Menschen, für deren Umgang mit dem Raum, in dem sie sich bewegen, mit den Dingen, die sie umgeben. Dieser Sinn für die Wahrnehmung zieht sich durch das gesamte Werk. (Christa Blümlinger)
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Klaus Kertess - Trisha Brown Interviews (2003)
Friday, May 30, 2008
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Trisha Brown was an early participant in the expanded cinema and new dance movements in New York City in the 60s and 70s. For Homemade (1966), she performed a dance with a movie projector to her back that threw a film of her dancing created by Robert Whitman on the wall behind and above her, complementing her movements and fracturing the space of the performance. She continued to have an interest in film and video in reconceptualizing dance and performance art in the 70s and 80s.
This is a companion dvd to the Early Works, 1966-1979 dvd in which she talks with art historian Klaus Kertess about her dance education, her work with the Judson Dance Theater and her fellow choreographers.
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Trisha Brown - Early Works, 1966-1979 (1966)
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Trisha Brown, one of the most acclaimed choreographers of contemporary dance, first came to notice in New York in the 1960s. Along with like-minded artists,Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti, she pushed the limits of what was then considered appropriate movement for choreography, and changed modern dance forever. Founding her company in 1970, Brown developed her own choreography and style with her own unique ideas of movement. The first DVD of this two DVD set presents film and video footage by filmmakers, including Babette Mangolte, Carlotta Schoolman and Jonathan Demme, of eighteen of Brown’s major performances from 1966 to 1979. 
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Olaf Breuning - Home 2 (2007)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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Born 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland; lives in New York, New York
Commingling reality and illusion, authenticity and artifice, barbarism and civility, Olaf Breuning creates photographs, films, sculptures, and installations that draw heavily from popular culture and a collective visual iconography. He combines these contemporary aesthetics with more primal shared drives: violence, sexuality, ritual, and companionship. The divergent impulses collide, often with absurd and hilarious results, as Breuning exploits the thin line between humor and pain.
In his 2007 exhibition at Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Breuning employed art transport boxes as supports for his photographs, drawings, and sculptures. The crates and packing material, which also frame the exhibition’s architecture, take on multiple connotations as vehicles of transport and change. Arranged in a plexiglass showcase, dozens of small ceramic pieces, each incongruously fitted with a pair of large cartoonish eyes, comprise The Collectors (2007). These comical figures, mounted on the side of a carton and staring into the exhibition space, conjure comparisons to the collectors who roam international art fairs, frenziedly purchasing and packaging works. In the chromogenic print 20 Dollars (2007), five young African boys, slightly bemused but smiling broadly, present to the camera $20 bills given to them by the photographer. The detritus of a smoldering garbage heap is strewn around their feet. Mounted on and framed by an oversize shipping crate balanced on a smaller box, the glossy photograph appears broadcast from a largescreen entertainment center, underlining the distance between subject and viewer. The disparities illustrated by the image, especially between the entrenched poverty and easily gained currency, suggest the futility— and perhaps offensiveness—of looking to tourism and globalization as effective vehicles for change in this impoverished scene.
At the center of the Migros exhibition is Home 2 (2007), a video in which Breuning expands on themes of dislocation, homelessness, and cultural identity explored in his 2004 video Home. Here the original narrator, again played by actor Brian Kerstetter, joins a tourist group traveling through Papua New Guinea. He stumbles his way through assorted villages and tribes, variously charming or insulting his fellow tourists and the “natives” he encounters. In this foreign environment his mind is transported to locations of previous travel or fantasy as he sifts through notions of identity and belonging. Home is a universal, but also a specific, construct. “Each has a home they want to go to, like me,” the narrator opines as his journey comes to an end. The viewer is left with the distinct notion that neither the traveler nor the world he has left is enriched by the experience. Contextualizing the helplessness of today’s global citizen, Breuning examines a basic human quest for commonality in an increasingly global, but ever more fragmented, world. STACEY GOERGEN
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at 7:57 PM
Harun Farocki - Gefängnisbilder aka Prison Images (2000)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification. (Harun Farocki)
Full untouched DVD released from Goethe Institut. German audio; Spanish, French, Russian, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Deutsch, Zulu subtitles.
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