Works by John Greyson, Jorge Furtado, Birgit Hein, Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen, Mosireen Collective, Olga Poliakoff & Yann Le Masson Q&A with the organizers In Person & Online
Microscope is very pleased to present “Call of the Wild,” an evening of six experimental non-fiction films made in six countries, organized by New York-based artists and curators Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen.
Looking back over a history of one hundred years, experimental cinema has rigorously challenged cinematic conventions. To reach beyond telling stories, artists and filmmakers examined the material conditions of their medium, such as light, motion, celluloid and, with the advent of television and video, electronic signals. This relationship with the technical device—whether a camera or a computer—revolutionized the creative process and opened ever new possibilities for critically reflecting the world we live in.
Dates:
Friday, September 11, 2020 (All day) to Sunday, January 31, 2021 (All day)
Microscope is pleased to welcome artist and curator Caspar Stracke to the gallery for a special program he assembled on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the May '68 revolts in France and Europe, loosely centered around protest culture in cinema theaters and tracing the ways in which rebellion in the cinema reflected the political climate.
As a filmmaker, curator, author and teacher, Birgit Hein is one of the most important names of the German experimental film. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, with her then husband Wilhelm Hein, she made some of the most radical works within the so-called structuralist-materialist tradition, in which the film's illusory qualities were rejected and a study of its materiality was instead put in focus.
Birgit Hein belongs to the filmmakers who have had a lasting influence on the history and the present scene of the experimental film. In addition to her films she wrote a number of critical texts that, since the 1970’s, helped to establish in the consciousness of a public, interested in art and film, the genre of experimental film. Birgit Hein argues that film work is impossible without a notion of the actual possibilities and purposes of the film medium, and that every single film project must be based on this general idea.
Belgian experimental film festival L’Âge d’or 'returns' to Brussels on October 8-14. 'Reviving the spirit' of the EXPRMNTL festival will present twenty-three films in competition as well as programmes dedicated to and with the presence of Birgit Hein (president of the jury), Gustav Deutsch (who will also deliver a masterclass), Friedl vom Gröller, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Robert Todd and John Smith. Mark Webber, editor of the recently published anthology of writings by Gregory Markopoulos will introduce two programmes of his works with new prints. The festival will also pay homage to Stephen Dwoskin and Adolfas Mekas and present curated programmes dedicated to the Italian avant-garde, and a double selection of “ethnographic poems”, with works by Raymonde Carasco and Robert Gardner.
The festival's brochure, including the complete programme, can be downloaded here.
Febrile, spinny and shrill, sometimes registering objectively, quietly funny or meditative: The present selection of German-language short films of women from the past 50 years is versatile - just like their makers themselves. Often there were production-technical reasons that prompted them to abandon large budgets and teams and to transform and perfect the alleged "lack" into imaginative film styles. These short films from East and West Germany are both artistic works and important testimonies of film history.
"Film should not be misused for non-filmic messages": Wilhelm and Birgit Hein examine in their films theprocess of reproduction and the film material itself. Rohfilm shows the destruction of the common "film image" and was described by Stephen Dwoskin as a "visual bombing" of shreds, fragments, dirt and leftovers of film editing. Reproductions dissolves photos in greys, 625 films a negative "snow" TV image with different speeds, in Portraits photos are changed by the development and reproduction processes. Materialfilme consists of film starting and ending leaders, the elements of every film that normally are not seen on the screen. W+B Hein's underground film classics deal with the unexplored potentials of the film material which starts to disappear in the digital world.
