Directors Lounge - Aline Helmcke: Time-Framed
Friday July 16th 2010, 21:30h
Galerie Meinblau, Pfefferberg
Christinenstr. 18/19, D-10119 Berlin, Germany

Aline Helmcke either uses the drawing pen or the camera to create her film images. Her last film, “Rehe blicken nicht nach oben”, was realized with actors, scriptwriting and a tangible narration. The drawings, however, are based on photographs, or better saying on media images. The movement that derives from the differences of images – the animation, as we call it – though emphasizes the movements of drawing itself and the differences between one line and another line, but it rarely creates the illusion that we know from other animation films.

What we thus may find here, is the wonderful hesitation of a young artist amongst a world of an rapidly accelerating flood of media images. The hesitation, the slowing-down, may already be a result of the painfully slow techniques of film drawings. (“I think I can call myself a filmmaker now, something I always strived for.” A.H.)

Anyhow, Aline Helmcke conceives images of a poetic hesitation in her films, and it is well worth following their progression and unfolding, thus contemplating Aline’s out-drawn thought process.

A series of films from different artists, selected by the Aline Helmcke, completes the program, all of them either exploring drawing or being composed with frame-by-frame photography. The artist will introduce the program and be available for Q&A. Please feel invited.

Light Industry: Onishi Kenji's A Burning Star
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 , 19:30, 7$
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA

- A Burning Star (Onishi Kenji, 16mm, 1995, 95 mins)

One of the most notorious yet unseen works of Japanese experimental cinema, Onishi Kenji’s A Burning Star operates with an emotional and physical intimacy reminiscent of both the confrontational style of Hara Kazuo and the radically subjective camerawork of Stan Brakhage. Made when Onishi was in his early 20s, the film documents his father’s funeral and cremation through subtle Super-8 lensing and a rigorous sense of real-time. At the funeral site, Onishi undresses and manipulates the corpse, scrutinizing it with his camera, then later records the act of cremation through the furnace’s portholes. This last sequence is the morbidly compelling heart of the film, presenting unearthly images reminiscent of an alien planet's gaseous surface, with flames licking over quasi-organic landscapes that look increasingly less like a skull, a ribcage or a hip bone.

Of A Burning Star, Onishi writes, “my inner conflicts find a cruel form." By fixing with unsettling intensity on his subject, but only briefly focusing on himself, Onishi evacuates his own emotions from the event’s depiction. Instead, he creates a film that speaks through its relentless examination of mute objects—what remains of his father—by capturing the very moments of their inexorable disappearance.