Schnitte | Filme, Lesungen, Hörspiel

In the organizer's words:

An evening on the artistic method of editing: Ulrich Gerhardt developed a radio piece from Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's text collages Schnitte, which aims at acoustic correspondences. Katja Lange-Müller, Kathrin Röggla, Kathrin Schmidt, Katharina Schultens and Ulf Stolterfoht refer to this method in their readings.

The short film program with works by Dieter Appelt, VALIE EXPORT, Christoph Giradet and Matthias Müller, Jochen Kuhn, Bjørn Melhus, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Klaus vom Bruch demonstrates that a film can be created without editing and a narrative without narrative montage.

At the finissage, we will open the RaumKlangIntervention "5-5-5-5 cut Raimund Kummer / Daniel Ott" for the last time - a musical-choreographic and visual-sculptural game. The RaumKlangIntervention invites visitors to make spatial and auditory discoveries in the live moment of encounters with the musicians, sculpture fragments and video projections.

Short film program

VALIE EXPORT: Man & Woman & Animal, 1970-73, 8 min

The Austrian artist, one of the most important representatives of feminist and media-critical works, became known in 1968 with her then partner Peter Weibel through the street action of the Tapp- und Tastkino, in which she offered her naked breasts for touching in a box with two openings. In her film Mann & Frau & Animal, she takes an ironic look at cinema as a projection space for male fantasies. Taboos such as masturbating with the jet of the shower in the bathtub, a vagina with blood, sperm and the state of menstruation are thematized and cinematically edited together from three parts.

"It is not allowed to show a man ejaculating semen on television or in commercial movies, but it is allowed to show a birth." (VALIE EXPORT in conversation with Helke Sander, 1976)

Dieter Appelt: Image de la vie et de la mort, 1983, 6:35 min

Dieter Appelt, who began as an opera singer and became known as a photographer and performance artist with his ritual self-staging, is seen cutting his own plaster-wrapped face with a thread under the dried layer, leaving a vertical line and optical division of the body. This action, which is underpinned by the sound of singing cicadas, is associated with a shedding of skin from a shell that has become too tight. Appelt's examination of life and death, which characterizes his entire artistic work, is condensed in a special way in this film, which was also realized as a vertical photo sequence and is based on a motif from the work La cuve a l'eau.

Klaus vom Bruch: The Duracell Tape, 1980, 12 min

The media artist Klaus vom Bruch became known with the videotape Das Schleyerband (1977/78), in which he used a police radio recording of the first day of the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the RAF. The appropriation of external material is characteristic of his working method. In Duracellband, this leads to an extreme video collage consisting of a commercial, images of Nagasaki, an American pilot and the self-portrait of Klaus vom Bruch. The self-portrait was cut in during an action at the 11th Biennale de Paris in 1980. Together with Ulrike Rosenbach and Marcel Odenbach, Klaus vom Bruch formed the producer group ATV in the 1970s.

Ulrike Rosenbach: Puzzle Solution?, 2019, video, 10 min

Ulrike Rosenbach started out as a sculptor and has been working with the then new medium of video since 1972. In her video Puzzle Solution? she also critically examines the image of the failed woman in the Western and bourgeois tradition and takes up well-known themes from cultural history. Based on the novel Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane, thoughts, observations and images are artistically processed in the image collage, which quotes the problem in image and sound with different film and photo material, and collaged with film shots of her own works. Ulrike von Rosenbach formed the producer group ATV together with Klaus vom Bruch and Marcel Odenbach in the 1970s.

Christoph Giradet and Matthias Müller: personne, 2016, 15 min

In their collaboration since 1999, the two artists have created a complex cosmos of found footage-based films in which they examine the grammar of genre cinema. It is primarily Hollywood mainstream films, with their universal symbols, stereotypes and narrative patterns that rely on familiarity and salesmanship, that Giradet and Müller have in their sights. They meticulously collect countless narrative variants, separating and re-orchestrating sound and image. A difficult game with our practiced perception begins. In personne, Müller and Giradet confront the star of French cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant, who shaped many classic crime films with his deadpan expression, with the acting of Gregory Peck or Henry Fonda.

"Personne - that's someone and no one and anyone. It is ourselves in the course of time. Incessantly, in vain. The ego remains a necessary self-assertion." (Girardet and Müller)

Zbigniew Rybczyński: Tango, 1981, 8 min

This animated film by Polish experimental filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński is one of the classics of avant-garde film. The setting is very simple: a room in which various people perform different actions and repeat them repetitively - accompanied and rhythmized by the musical motif of a tango. In the end, 36 actors embodying the life cycle from birth to death act in a confined space in an astonishing and complex choreography, without any overlaps or obstructions. Rybczyński achieves this feat by combining 16,000 painted and drawn templates, which were assembled analogously in a complex process. Space and time are redefined.

Jochen Kuhn: Sunday 3, 2010, 13 min

Jochen Kuhn's beginnings lie in painting. In his animated films, he explores the possibilities of the medium, merging painting and film and allowing them to interact with each other. He paints, glues, collages, blurs, overpaints, intervenes in the material by hand and thus advances the narration with his own flow. The atmosphere is vague. In each picture, the act of destruction or transformation into another is inscribed per se. He contrasts this fluid, unsettling visual language with the gentle tone of his narrative voice. In Sunday 3, the protagonist has a blind date. To his surprise, it is Angela Merkel whom he meets. An occasion for mild and ironic speculation about the feelings and needs of a politician.

Marcel Odenbach: He who suffers, cuts, He who cuts, suffers, 2019, 9:30 min

In his videos, editing templates and large-format paper collages, Marcel Odenbach uses editing techniques to splice together images and texts of events from newspapers and magazines and deals with the German history of colonialism, slavery and racism in his works. On the occasion of the exhibition "John Heartfield - Photography plus Dynamite" at the Akademie der Künste (2020), he developed this video as a spatial montage and gave it the title, extending Jean-Luc Godard's phrase "Cut, my beautiful worry": He who suffers, cuts, He who cuts, suffers. Hitler and Göring as counter-images and a protest crushed by the police on the street are snapshots of the video montage, which are cut together with Heartfield's own recordings in his summer house, text and sound. Odenbach edits found pieces of the real, for example through cut-outs and close-ups, couples them with sounds reminiscent of the Nazi regime and scraps of propagandistic words, separates and merges sound and image and creates kaleidoscope-like panoramas through the rhythmic displacement of mirror images. Marcel Odenbach formed the producer group ATV together with Klaus vom Bruch and Ulrike Rosenbach in the 1970s.

"Right from the start, the sound was as important to me as the image. In other words, I collected images and I collected sounds. And at some point, the images came to the sounds or the sounds to the images. Through film, I very quickly understood how you can influence and manipulate the image through sound." (Marcel Odenbach)

Bjørn Melhus: FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE, 2014, 15 min

The experimental short film FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE by Bjørn Melhus questions the current global ideological paradigm shift towards new forms of religious capitalism by confronting ideas and quotes from the self-proclaimed Objectivist philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand with evangelical content from mainstream US film. This contemporary fairy tale, in which Melhus embodies all the characters himself, was shot partly in a Berlin morgue and in new urban settings in Istanbul. Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neoliberal elitism and a mixture of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse.

Finissage "5-5-5-5 cut Raimund Kummer / Daniel Ott"

With Katja Lange-Müller, Kathrin Röggla, Kathrin Schmidt, Katharina Schultens, Ulf Stolterfoht and others.

With films by Dieter Appelt, VALIE EXPORT, Christoph Giradet and Matthias Müller, Jochen Kuhn, Bjørn Melhus, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Klaus vom Bruch