This screening honors the work and legacy of one of Germany’s most pioneering, yet overlooked experimental filmmakers. In the 1960s, the painter Dore O. became one of the first women to work consistently and independently in postwar German experimental cinema. A co-founder of the Hamburg Co-op, she was actively involved in exploring new forms of cinema with her then-husband, Werner Nekes.

Close-Up is thrilled to present a rare programme of experimental films by the German artist Dore O. which occupy a state in-between opaqueness and translucency, hypnosis and clarity. The programme has been selected by Berlin-based archivist and scholar Masha Matzke, who will also introduce the screening.

Dore O.’s films seem to claim a certain uniqueness and independence from the dominant, yet diverse and irreducible currents of German experimental cinema. As the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt declared already in 1988: »Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing ...