Directors Lounge Screening:
Thorsten Fleisch
Video and 16mm Film programme
Selected from his private Educational Film Archive
Thursday, 1 November 2012, 21h
Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Thorsten Fleisch, artist and filmmaker who lives in Berlin, combines many of his interests and talents in his new film Hex Suffice Cache Ten. It might be astonishing to see the experimental filmmaker and alumni of Frankfurter Städel School making a science fiction film that combines narrative B-movie aesthetics with experimental film techniques and adaptations of Manga, Cronenberg, Splatter Movie and Cyberpunk. On the other hand, the openness of the film's narrative may be read in many ways, and is possibly not only accessible but totally enjoyable for both lovers of the experimental genre and trash film addicts. In certain ways, Fleisch uses old technological artifacts in order to create science fiction, the lately popular steam punk is similar to the artist's esthetic strategies. However, over the course of the film, the dramatic interactions between the characters of the film are almost entirely resolved by some kind of screen, some intermediate interface. Furthermore, those interactions both stay ambiguous and could be characterized as being driven by irrational forces.

At the beginning of the evening, Thorsten Fleisch will show a selection from his archive of educational films. He is collecting all kinds of original silent 16mm films from science, often medical movies and educational films meant to be shown in school. These films, from 30's to 50's in esthetic ways to us often seem to be strange. They receive their new meaning by decontextualization and the alienation of time distance. They may appear funny, but the rigor of their esthetic quality may also be disclosed as having psychotic qualities.  Thus, apart from being curiosities, these collected films by Thorsten Fleisch - together with his new film "Hex Suffice Cache Ten"- may remind us of the influences contemporary media has on our subconsciousness by their mere media qualities. Something that might be harder to perceive if looking with naked eye at most recent renderings of "media normality".

SF Cinematheque in association with the Intersection for the Arts presents:
Fragile Memories: Images of Japan
Thursday, October 25, 2012, 19:30h
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

Ute Aurand In Person

September 3–November 3, Intersection for the Arts presents Lost and Found: Family Photos Swept by 3.11 East Japan Tsunami, a massive display of personal photographs recovered in the city of Yamomoto during post-tsunami clean-up in 2011, collectively displayed in an overwhelming testament to loss and perseverance. In homage and reference to this exhibition Cinematheque tonight screens Ute Aurand’s 2011 film Young Pines (Junge Kiefern), an engaged, stately and patient observance of the urban landscape, a quiet consideration on harmonious overlap between nature and culture. Filmed throughout Japan before the disasters of the tsunami and Fukushima, but edited after, Young Pines’ carries an uncanny and inspiring grace. Also screening are three recent films by Japanese filmmakers which consider similar themes, including Tomonari Nishikawa’s Tokyo—Ebisu a fragmented collage of that vibrant city’s life and motion; Makino Takashi’s Generator (with a soundtrack by Jim O’Rourke), a study in accumulation and dissolution, which, created as a response to the disaster in Fukushima, visualizes Tokyo in a toxic state of decay; and Rei Hayama’s Emblem, a quiet meditation on the fragility of landscape and life. (Steve Polta)