Stan Douglas - Der Sandmann (1995)
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
Originally an installation: Two-track 16mm black-and-white film projection and stereo soundtrack.
The film installation Der Sandmann investigates the intersection of history and memory as witnessed against the backdrop of post–Cold War Germany. Shot on 16mm film in the old Ufa studios near Potsdam, the piece fuses E.T.A. Hoffmann’s eponymous tale, Freud’s citation of it in “The Uncanny,” his study of repression and repetition, as well as the social impulses behind 19th-century German urban planning, which instituted the Schrebergärten, plots of leasable land on which the poor could grow their own food. Projected as two separate but intersecting videos showing the garden at different chronological points—in use during the 1960s and as a construction site some 20 years later—Der Sandmann contemplates temporality and the transformative effects of history. -- Nancy Spector
at 12:34 AM