“I walk towards him with tears in my eyes, climb over the fence, get caught, and fall headfirst onto the gravel path, smashing my glasses. As I hang there, I look at the neighbour, then up, and notice my own dangling genitals silhouetted against the neoclassical sky. ‘Have I always been naked?’ I think for several minutes, staring alternately at my genitals and the neighbour. With a ballet-like turn, I free myself and walk naked and limping towards the neighbour. I embrace him. His wife sees this from the terrace and calls for help. Yet I only want to radiate so-called living human warmth, like an intercession. I climb all over him like a bear cub. For minutes on end he cannot shake me off, so strong is my love. After an eternity that still warms my heart to this day, I greet the officials rushing to the scene and quickly trace my lips with every single finger before I am pressed into the marble gravel—white, forty to sixty millimetres deep—by oversized arms.”

Forms of Memory

The approaches in Wieland’s films vary, but his cinematic style remains recognisable. They also share the theme of memory in the form of accounts of an external reality interwoven with fantastical miniatures, Freudian dream texts, and brief theoretical digressions (mostly also in the tradition of psychoanalysis). In the associative family constellation Family Constellation with a Fox, which also deals with healing from the traumatic effects of male-dominated, colonial-influenced Western art history; a meditation on bird flight and geometry (The Perfect Square); or Oxygen is odourless, tasteless and invisible, memories painted in ink and coloured pencil, including one of a dream in which a boy commits suicide (“My mother died, and my father hits me” – “He jumps. Then I wake”): “Its freedom in the choice of subjects, its sovereignty over all priorities of fact or theory, [the essay] owes to the fact that, in a sense, all objects are equally close to the centre: to the principle that bewitches them all,” writes Adorno.

This all-pervading principle in Gernot Wieland’s essay films is concerned with history. The history of one’s own country, but also with individual psychohistory, which is always a social reality inscribed through the experience of the social, through the incorporation of society into bodies and perceptual apparatuses. If there is such a thing as a centre in these films, it is the artist-subject itself. But not as navel-gazing, rather as the subject of a network of perception in which pieces, fragments and scenes from one’s own history and that of one’s own country become entangled. Stories that flow through it and, as it were, undermine its autonomy and integrity. These films counter the destructiveness of these connections with their own streams of association, offering something that is, in a positive sense, fragile, comical and thus also tender.

Benjamin Moldenhauer

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Screenings

29 April, 5.45 pm, Lichtburg Tickets
29 April, 10 pm, Lichtburg Tickets
30 April, 3.15 pm, Lichtburg Tickets

Additional Links
The artist's website
Interview on Arte Kurzschluss (German/French)

Bilda is best known as a painter and sculptor. She is particularly remembered for her comics and fanzines (truly unusual practices in the context of the visual arts) as well as for her interventions in public spaces, notably the Cathedral of Modernism, a car park signage system in the heart of Vienna’s city centre. Bilda was versatile – so versatile, in fact, that one of her collectors was quite astonished when he discovered whose graphic works he had been parking his car beneath for years.

Elective affinities in Austrian avant-garde film

Bilda had, however, never made a secret of her interest in film. To give just one example: When the Secession Museum in Vienna invited Bilda to hold an exhibition in 2001, she dedicated it to the work of Ernst Schmidt Jr. The affinity with this icon of Austrian avant-garde film—and indeed with the local experimental film culture as a whole—is evident in some of Bilda’s works, most notably Wc (1990s?) with its shifting arrangements of food in the middle of a toilet bowl. Like works such as [Bilderfilm für Nacht aus Blei] (Picture Film for Night of Lead,1987), [Tanz im Dunkeln] (Dance in the Dark, 1990) or Küche 1-3 (Kitchen 1-3, 1991), Wc has a sketch-like, note-like quality – especially when compared to Bilda’s short feature films, the Federico García Lorca adaptation Jungfer, Matrose und Student (Virgin, Sailor and Student, 1989), with which she completed her studies in stage and film design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, as well as the feminist micro-crime story Der Überfall (The Robbery, undated).

Documentary works and collaborations

Bildas’s documentary works are stylistically quite different; they often revolve around her own work, such as [Sammler:innenportraits] (Collectors’ Portraits, 1995), but also include collaborated videos with Ariane Müller, such as the performance recording Zu zweit nach vorn (Two Moving Forward, 1996), in which they re-enact scenes from Laurel and Hardy films, amongst other things. And consistently explore the complexities of collaboration. These and other works from Linda Bilda’s oeuvre will be presented for the first time worldwide at Oberhausen – a real discovery! Ariane Müller will speak about their collaborative work as part of the second programme.

Olaf Möller

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Screenings

2 May, 5.45 pm, Lichtburg Tickets
3 May, 12.45 pm, Lichtburg Tickets

Why are images of butterflies so well suited to non-digital cinema? For example, when they are filmed at close quarters, as in Charlotte Pryce’s film Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature? Perhaps because the transparency of their wings is reminiscent of film strips, or because butterflies also undergo complex developmental processes. Or because analogue images generally evoke associations with the fluttering and swarming of insects. A subjective impression: Swarms of all kinds appear more intense on analogue material than on digital.

Flickering images can trigger similar feelings to crackling vinyl today. In her films, Charlotte Pryce reimagines the analogue as a mode of perceiving the world that seems more closely connected to the natural than the one produced by digital technologies.

The Gloaming begins with crackling sounds and an auditory warmth; the stream of associations that then unfolds in language and images revolves around the sun and a bygone era (“Once upon a time this land was green and my skin was soft”). This is accompanied by the sounds of a modified piano and a soft drone from the cello. The images flicker slightly and wobble gently – physical moments inherent to the film material. 16mm, all of it – but not dogmatic: the source material is analogue, but the post-production is, as is so often the case these days, hybrid, partly digital. This is not a nostalgic re-enactment of some media past. Charlotte Pryce uses the production or reconstruction of an analogue aesthetic as an aesthetic and epistemological tool.

Among other things, we see: plants, insects, fungi, dust, light particles, strawberries filmed down to their pores (and so it came about), texts filmed through a magnifying glass (Looking-Glass Insects), microscopic structures. These recordings are processed in various ways, enhanced with overexposure, flicker and Magic Lantern effects, so that the richness of colour and form in nature merges with the richness of colour and form in analogue cinema. A richness that makes imperfections productive and sets itself apart from the digital, sanitised image: crackling, flickering, noise, lines appearing in the image for a millisecond, too much light or too little. Imperfections are alive; perfection seems rigid.

In Discoveries on the Forest Floor, images of nature and the properties of materials merge through simple visual proximity to such an extent that nature appears like film footage and the film footage like something natural. Thus, Charlotte Pryce’s films also work towards an imaginary resolution of the opposition between nature and technology. Or at least towards narrowing the gap between the two.

Last but not least, Charlotte Pryce’s films are excursions into the microlevel. In The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly, the aforementioned microscopic gaze focuses on a fly, a paintbrush and a drop of water. In truly gorgeous lighting, we see the paintbrush dip beneath the surface of the drop of water without it bursting. Then there are colour mixtures, a fly, the paint being applied to the canvas, though only fragments of the image are ever visible. Charlotte Pryce’s processing of recordings of the world allows us to see it anew. Not as an artificial image, but as a representation: as something that has become embedded in the recording material and can thus preserve the material object’s inherent nature.

Digital cinema can bring anything into the frame and is virtually limitless in its creative potential. In Charlotte Pryce’s films, however, nature remains something that can be brought into view but cannot be captured.

Benjamin Moldenhauer

Each programme will conclude with a Magic Lantern performance from Charlotte Pryce’s “Illuminated Fiction” series.

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Screenings

1 May, 11 am, Lichtburg Tickets
1 May, 3.15 pm, Lichtburg Tickets

Additional Links
Website Charlotte Pryce
 

“No human being is illegal” is one of the central mottos in the struggle for recognition and freedom from repression for migrants and refugees. It embodies a rejection of state violence that seeks to declare people illegitimate in a particular place. They are not allowed to be here.

When one engages with the films of the Belgian film collective Les films de la maison, the phrase can be rephrased or expanded to read: “No one should be made invisible”. The two filmmakers, Mieriën Coppens and Elie Maissin, have been working with the activists of Brussels’ Voix des Sans-Papiers (Voice of the Undocumented) since the 2010s. The “Maison” from which these films emerge and whose residents they depict is a house occupied by the Voix des Sans-Papiers. The result is not agitprop promising identification and pathos, but something unwieldy that takes us back to very fundamental categories of perception: films against repression and, at the same time, against instrumentalisation. Which, at the production level, also means that the people in front of the camera have a say in the creation of the images the camera captures of them.

The 2017 film Carry On shows people waiting, all of whom could be read as migrants. And through endurance and silence – Carry On is virtually a silent film – it makes such an assumption dissolve. The cinematic image as a means of subverting common images and fantasies of migration in the perception of other people’s faces – and thereby returning to something ostensibly universal, ‘purely human’. There is nothing depoliticising about this; it is explicitly a cinematic political act. And this begins with the mode of production, in which those appearing on screen are no longer filmed and staged, but instead have an equal say in the creation of the images they present to the audience.

The focus shifts more towards language in Et leurs lettres (2024), another of the three films in the programme, which, like Carry On, is shot in grainy black and white. People are preparing for their hearing. Hundreds of letters arrive at the Maison, are sorted by Kandé and Taslim, and distributed to the residents who must appear in court. On the day of the trial, those summoned practise their lines in the corridors. In the extensive visual documentation of this rehearsal of speech patterns—which includes role-playing to imitate the language of the state—a third programmatic statement manifests itself: “No one should be silenced”.

Benjamin Moldenhauer

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Both the filmmakers and representatives of La Voix des Sans-Papiers will be present at the screening in Oberhausen.

Screenings

2 May, 12.45 pm, Lichtburg Tickets

Additional Links
Website Les films de la maison
Instagram-Account Collective

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