Strategies of the Short Contemporary German Film and Video Art
curated by Ulrich Wegenast, Stuttgart
PROGRAM SPONSORED BY THE GOETHE INSTITUT-CHICAGO
Friday, March 7 at the Chicago Cultural Center 6:30pm
Saturday, March 8 at Heaven Gallery 5:00pm

In the field of experimental film and video art, the running length of a film has been, from the beginning, an economic as well as an aesthetic question. Today, given the reduced attention span demanded by commercials, music videos, and broad band online films, the strategies of film makers have become more and more oriented to the running time of a piece. Artists have developed different strategies to deal with the aspect of brevity. Artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila, for example, are producing pure narrative short films that tread the line between film and art. Other artists and film makers have tried to push the envelope regarding a nearly canonized running length. Andy Warhol and Douglas Gordon are two examples of artists who have played around with the extension of cinematic time. Fascinated by the attraction of mass media, artists (David Lamelas and others) have quite often attempted to work within the parameters of commercial television and cinema. But, as this program proves, short films and videos don’t automatically evoke fast cuts, compressed information, and overstimulation.

This compilation of German short films and videos does not, however, merely thematize time and duration. The works are conceptual and narrative as well. In “The Sleeping Girl” Corinna Schnitt uses a single camera movement from a crane to depict a scenario that oscillates between alienation and banality. In contrast to “The Sleeping Girl”, Hito Steyerl, in her conceptual and documentary essay “Normality 1/2/3", juxtaposes the clip format with the musical aesthetic of Arnold Schoenberg. Duration plays a quite important role in the collective film “a-clips”. This actionist, low-budget work was produced to be shown as one of the "commercials" that precede the main feature in German movie theatres. The people from “a-clips” asked the projectionist to voluntarily screen their spots against privatization and racism, in the hope of disturbing the flow of consumerism. The first series of “a-clips” spots will be shown in this program. The restrictive parameters of home movies have also been of interest to film makers (Jonas Mekas, Ann Charlotte Robertson). The cheap Super 8, 8 mm,and 16mm format, as well as the fixed duration established by a reel of film, have inspired artists to work in small sections and episodes. This limitation has been particularly explored in diary films. An impressive example is the work of Jan Peters, who in his narrative feature and short films works with the visibility of the film stock itself.

“Without Title” by the young German film and installation artist Eva Teppe uses another (old) filmic strategy to analyze the relation between amateur film and newsreels with a simple film consisting of found footage. Annette Hanisch aka annette hollywood connects found footage from mainstream cinema with performance. Subverting gender roles in cinema, she also tries to depict the simple desire to get in touch with the actors and to be incorporated into cinematic reality. Coming from the “Super 80es” (Jim Hoberman) movement Hanna Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe now work with digital video and animation. It seems to be a logical extension of their Super 8-work, which was based on low cost, speed, artistic anarchy and trash minimalism, to move on to the simple methods of digital video. Nevertheless, the little piece “Pa Tak” by Nordholt/Steingrobe also examines the possibility of working with collage and experimental animation in the “age of digitalization”. Video artist Bjoern Melhus also deals with the question of reproduction in a playful manner. Melhus, who, like Matthias Mueller, studied at the Braunschweig College of Art, appropriates the affirmative aesthetic of music videos to create a strange, short video about reproduction, identity, and virtuality. In contrast, Matthias Mueller, well-known through his Hitchcock installations with Christoph Giradet and his found footage films (“Home Stories”), is still working with the blurriness and porosity of Super 8 film stock. By using traditional experimental techniques, Mueller's work, like that of Jan Peters, delineates the area from which the short film and video have arisen and where these “poor” films have survived, since this format has played no supplemental role in the history of feature film. Because these formats have been ignored by mainstream movie theaters, producers of short art films and videos were forced to develop different, vivid strategies to get their works presented and distributed. As this program tries to bring out, this vitality and diversity is not restricted to finding distribution among different institutions, festivals, galleries, clubs, and online movie portals. It’s not a mere “consumerism of difference”, nor a postmodern “anything goes” approach in which the chief principle of film making becomes heterogenity and diversity of content as well as pluralistic methods and forms. There is only one thing that shorts can’t avoid, which the audience appreciates as well: they’re short.

Das schlafende Mädchen (The Sleeping Girl)
Corinna Schnitt
Germany 2001, 8:30 min., 16mm on DV, color, German with English subtitles
With a single camera movement from a crane, the viewer is presented a remote family estate. The compound of pretty houses has the character of an architectural model: a clean ideal, empty of people and deserted in a spooky kind of way. Only at the end of the film is the charged atmosphere broken by a voice on an answering machine.

Normalität 1/2/3 (Normalitiy 1/2/3)
Hito Steyerl
Germany 1999, 9:00 min., Betacam SP on DV, German with English Subtitles
Music: Arnold Schönberg
In the winter of 1998, the grave of Heinz Galinski, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Berlin, was bombed, which unleashed a series of antisemitic acts of violence.

a-clip
collective
Germany 1997, 10:00 min., Betacam SP on DV, German with English Subtitles
“a-clips” were made to comment on current urban developments and were made available to downtown movie theatres.O.T.

(Was denkbar ist, ist auch möglich) (Without Title)
Eva Teppe
Germany 2002, 2:50 min., Super 8 on Video
A slow camera movement zooms in on the World Trade Center in New York in 1978. The film material is found footage (amateur film) that inadvertently stumbles against history.

Pa Tak
Hanna Nordholt, Fritz Steingrobe
Germany 2002, 3:50 min., b&w
A declaration of love to three poets and their passion for sound equipment.

Snowworld
Annette Hanisch
Germany 1998, 8:55 min., video, color, English
A scene from “Desire” is the basis of an attempt to get in touch with the protagonists of that film. A game between reality and fantasy.

No Sunshine
Bjoern Melhus
Germany 1997, 6:20 min., Betacam SP, color
You always want something you know you shouldn't have. The more you know you shouldn't have it, the more you long for it. And one day you get it, and it feels so good.

Nebel (Haze)
Matthias Müller
Germany 2000, 12:00 min., 35mm on DV, colour and b&w, German with English subtitles
Ernst Jandl’s poems to childhood are written in a kind of infantile language containing stylistic incongruities, faults and banalities, as well as echos of nursery rhymes and prayers. This is not so much about childish language itself as an attempt to evoke the adventurous world of children as perceived by an aging man.Wie ich ein Höhlenmaler wurde

(Kurzfassung) (How I Became A Cave Painter (short version))
Jan Peters
Germany 2001, 20:00 min., 16mm, German with English subtitles
“‘How I Became A Cave Painter (short version)‘ is a cinematic diary about booze, pills and bad knees that examines the question: "If I were a caveman with bad knees, what would the clan have done with me?"

Born in 1966 in Stuttgart, Uli Wegenast studied history and art history at Stuttgart University (M.A.), postgraduate studies in culture and media management at the Berlin School of Music “Hanns Eisler”. In 1987, he was a founding member of Wand 5 and Stuttgart Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media. Since then he has worked on the selection committee for film/video and new media. Since 1993, he has acted as program curator for the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. He has also worked for the Munich Filmfest in the VideoArt & Experimental Film section, the Berlin art forum and as a distributor (films and videos by Monika Treut, Sophie Calle and others). He has given lectures and performances in Beijing, Bilbao, New York, Madrid etc. He was member of various funding foundations for film, video, and interactive content (Hessian Film Funding, Media and Film Association Baden-Wuerttemberg). Additionally he has published articles about film and video, performance and new media in various international books and magazines. When he’s not curating film and festival programs, Wegenast is working on his Ph.D. at the Braunschweig School of Art.