Introduced by Robert Beavers

I met Renate Sami when the filmmaker Ute Aurand invited me to show films at FilmSamstag in Berlin in the late 1990s, but it was only later that I experienced the calm directness of her own film and video work, and became acquainted with the emotion at its source. When I moved to Berlin, I learned more: how she came to film and what directions her filmmaking took

Pioneering Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna 1998) is an elusive yet persistent figure in twentieth-century histories of both performance- and film-based experimentation. His practice was idiosyncratic to say the least, staked in experimentation across media communication platforms in film and the visual arts no matter where that took him—from cooperative theaters, midnight screenings at commercial theaters, fringe film festivals in abandoned subway stations, and punk shows in warehouses; to art schools, artist studios, galleries and international art and film festivals, across nations and continents.

Cinema Parenthèse presents Land/Scapes, a series in three programs with films by Claes Söderquist (Sweden), Els van Riel (Belgium), and Werner Nekes (Germany), that seeks to explore the encounter of film and the expanse of landscape. The encounter stages the possibility on the one hand of the investigation of historical and dimensional aspects of space, and on the other, a reflective reconnaissance of the film medium.

Fascinated by the “erratic meetings and schisms” of images, artefacts and histories, Canadian artist Corin Sworn builds her research into “scripts,” sometimes as objects and propositions in a gallery, sometimes as characters and narratives in a film.