Kadrierter Krieg - Werkstattgespräch mit Heinz Emigholz

Over the course of half a century, Heinz Emigholz (*1948 in Achim near Bremen) has produced a gigantic and unmistakable, even idiosyncratic oeuvre of films, drawings and texts.

What at first glance appears to be completely disparate - compositions of individual images, feature films on queer and urban themes, austere portraits of buildings, graphic cartographies of a nightmarish present - remains remarkably consistent both intellectually and aesthetically. For example, the phenomenological ideas of the relationship between gaze, camera and space, as reflected in the trilogy 'Schenec-Tady' (1972-1975), can be traced back to the monologue of the (fictional) camerawoman in 'The Suit' (2024). In the workshop discussion, some basic principles of the cinematic and graphic work will be discussed. It is worth exploring the complex relationship between drawing and film, especially in view of the two films premiering in this year's dokumentarfilmwoch hamburg program. Based on the "diaries", which do not record everyday experiences but collect linguistic and visual detritus from a monstrous world, intelligently framed visual worlds are created, sometimes without words, sometimes accompanied by sentences that corrode like vitriol. The motifs of war and violence deserve special attention. They are tangible everywhere in the series of drawings 'The Basis of Make-Up', but also run through the feature films and come to the fore with 'The Airstrip' (2014), 'The Last City' (2020) and 'Slaughterhouses of Modernity' (2022) at the latest. The poet Lyn Hejinian wrote that the politics of the difficult can only develop against the backdrop of the cruel.