PhotoFilm! Part 1 – How Much Movement Does an Image Need? May 18, 2012

Photofilms are composed with still photographs and stimulate one’s imagination in an artistic way. Photofilms move between art forms and create a new scope for experimental, animation, documentary films as well as narrative cinema

Curators Gusztáv Hámos and Katja Pratschke will be present for discussion at the screening.

La Jetée (The Jetty) _France 1962, 35mm, 28 min, director: Chris Marker, cast: Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich

Marker’s legendary sci-fi consists solely of photographs, apart from one short moving image scene. After a nuclear war, survivors, living in the cellars of Paris, use a prisoner for their experiments in time travel. Through his memory of a particularly strong mental image, a woman's face, the prisoner manages to travel into the past and meet her. The power of memory to visualise the past and make it present which spans time and space is revealed in the only moving shot in the film, the woman opening her eyes to behold her beloved time traveller. And because one is ultimately unable to escape time, Marker has given the film a circular structure in which the protagonist at the end re-encounters the initial situation, and hence seems to be damned to endlessly passing through the same scene: In a time loop. The fact that the protagonist now appears on an airport viewing platform as a child and adult at the same time and watches his death is not really a paradox. In so far as the scene appears a second time, the film recalls itself. And a film that can remember is a thinking entity. To remember is already a creative act in which transformations of what one has experienced occur, are reassembled, reorganised.

Der Fischmarkt und die Fische (The Fishmarket and the Fish) _Germany 1968, Beta SP, 9 min, director: Leonore Mau and Hubert Fichte

The film reveals the everyday life and existence in the Portuguese fishing village of Sesimbra under the dictatorship of Salazar in 1964. Fichte addresses the fishermen directly and analyses their working conditions as well as their social and political relations. »When spoken in Fichtes voice, the prosaic names of the [fish] become a poetic programme about an aesthetic of sensitivity.« Mau the photographer and Fichte the writer are aware of the shortcomings of their media: »The language and photographic media nevers permit the whole, only extracts and fragments. Something is excluded – something is not revealed, something remains unsaid: A media production is always a violent act as well.« (Ole Frahm)

Beshin Lug (Beshin Meadow) _Soviet Union/USA 1935/67, 35mm, 30 min, director: Sergei Eisenstein, editor: Jay Leyda, Sergei Jutkewitsch

Beshin Lug only exists involuntarily as a photo film. Stalin's film minister Schmujatzki had the work on the film stopped because it was considered to be too formalist and subjective, and then the negative was destroyed during World War 2, only stills and single frames remained. Sergei Jutkewitsch and Jay Leyda used them and an editing list to reconstruct the film which now serves film history as a memory and a recollection. The film is a political parable about the conflict between a father and son that culminates in the (kulak) father shooting his (bolshevik) son to death.-

Fremdkörper (Transposed Bodies) _Germany 2002, 35mm, 28 min, director: Katja Pratschke and Gusztáv Hámos, cast: Patrick von Blume, Oliver Elias, Vera Baranyai

Based on the Thomas Mann novella The Transposed Heads, the film recounts the story of two inseparable friends, Jan and Jon, and their shared love of Marie. Inspired by the affinity and alienation of photos and film images, the film quite deliberately draws a line between the inside and the outside of bodies, between moving and non-moving images, between medical imaging techniques and photography. The protagonists’ bodies, or more correctly the skin that covers them, is the interface between these two worlds. »Although one is invariably forced to think of Truffaut's Jules and Jim, the devouringly suggestive narrative reveals itself to be a highly topical digression on genetics and human identity.« (Daniel Kothenschulte)