Kino B:
Contemporary Cinema by Berlin-based Artists
Curator Caroline Koebel in Attendance
Saturday, October 19, 7:30PM
Location: Aurora Picture Show, 2442 Bartlett Street
Aurora Members Free, Non-members $10
Commissioned by Aurora Picture Show, Kino B initiates viewers into the swarm of moving images made thus far in the 2010s by Berlin-based artists. Curated by Caroline Koebel, this collection of short films will screen on Saturday, October 19th at 7:30PM in Aurora Picture Show (2442 Bartlett Street).
Sylvia Schedelbauer's SOUNDING GLASS, the stunning and astounding experimental short about vision, history, memory, and war that won accolades at Ann Arbor and Oberhausen, centers the outwardly spiraling program. The other projects-curated in situ during a research trip to Berlin-include film, video and installation (transposed to single-channel projection) by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell, Harun Farocki, Isabella Gresser, Bernd Lützeler, Anna Marziano, Deborah S. Phillips, Michael Poetschko, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.
Chosen for their individual merits and seemingly unrelated in their disparateness, the works nonetheless share a command of cinema's potential for experientially transformative critical reflection. Each title, in its own way, acts as an experimental essay on the world as it can be encountered, engaged and repositioned so as to enable a dialogue between self (artist) and others (viewers) on that world.
In addition to curating and writing about artist's film and video, Caroline Koebel makes experimental cinema clashing aesthetics and politics. Retrospectives include Festival Cine//B (Santiago), the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw) and Directors Lounge (Berlin). She has also presented at Scope Art Fair (NYC), Edinburgh International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival (Osnabrack), LOOP Barcelona, and most recently as part of the globally touring 100x100=900 Project sponsored by the Magmart Festival (Naples). She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, and is on faculty at Transart Institute (New York-Berlin).
For more information and images from Kino B, check out: http://carolinekoebel.com/kinob.html
The following films are included in this program:
THE VOICE OF GOD by Bernd Lützeler
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 docu-drama with voice-over in stop-motion and long-time exposure.
NOTEBOOKS ON DISLOCATION, FRAGMENT I by Michael Poetschko
NOTEBOOKS ON DISLOCATION approaches the complexity of the contemporary city 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. Where can we find traces of structural change, signs of life and possibilities of resistance within the 'new urban fabric?' How can we think of another city, another spatiality (anthropological, poetic,...) that "slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city" (de Certeau)?
16MM by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
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.
SOUNDING GLASS by Sylvia Schedelbauer
"With very few images culled from the flood of footage originally taken during World War II, the filmmaker manages to express the incomprehensible trauma of war as a strong visual experience. With a highly compressed use of sound and image, SOUNDING GLASS creates a visceral impact that can only be achieved by cinematic means." - Jury statement, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
AUSTERITY MEASURES by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell
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.
PARALLEL by Harun Farocki
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.
THE MUTABILITY OF ALL THINGS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF CHANGING SOME by Anna Marziano
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?
NIETZSCHE À NICE by Isabella Gresser
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."
HERMAN(N) by Deborah S. Phillips
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.
Pre-Screening Reception with Curator Caroline Koebel
A Members-Only Event
Saturday, October 19, 6:30PM
Free for Aurora Members with RSVP
Before Kino B, Aurora Picture Show members are invited to a pre-screening reception with light bites and cocktails, plus an opportunity to chat with Curator Caroline Koebel.