Cinema 2011 – The film programme at the 24th EMAF
The film and video committee has selected around 110 short and feature-length films, music videos and animation films from more than 2200 entries for the programme at the 24th European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück.The film programme is complemented by specials such as “Japanese Media Art Now”, a retrospective with films by the American experimental artist Standish Lawder and the Media Campus selection.
A trend seen to emerge in recent years is also reflected in the 2011 entries: the time when purely formal experimentation was popular seems to be passé. The films increasingly deal with documentary, narrative topics, whereby the aspect of forms tends now to serve more as a frame or vehicle to transport the cinematic content.
A subject addressed by many filmmakers is the end of an era of belief in progress in the absolute controllability of technical developments and the will to use it to advance into new worlds. Anna Abrahams uses historic footage of an expedition to the Arctic to furnish (counter) evidence of the myths and claims that people had already managed in ancient times to reach the North Pole.
Sputnik, Challenger, Voyager and the recently pensioned off space shuttle are examples of technical adventures that thrilled entire generations. Using historic NASA footage, “The Voyagers” by Penny Lane describes the life and love story of the two initiators whose idea to give the Voyager space shuttle a ‘golden disc’ to take with it continues to amaze us today. Music, language and noises were played onto the disc to give potential extraterrestrial intelligence an auditory impression of our civilised world.
Against our better judgment, mankind apparently still considers itself and earth to be the centre of the world surrounding it. Siegfried Fruhauf has found a beautiful tableau for this with his visually impressive film “Tranquility” – eat your heart out Daedalus!
The videos often also deal with socially critical, political or complex historic interrelations. In the process, scenes such as colonial history are set in the context of one’s own person and socialisation. In her film “Avó (Muidumbe)”, the Portuguese artist Raquel Schefer sets old Super-8 footage in a politically motivated context: she has clothing tailored based on the clothes worn by her grandmother on her journey to what was then the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Dressed in this attire, she re-enacts the partially burlesque scene of arrival.
Re-enactment is also the formal approach in many other films to trace history and stories in a different way. In “?wie?e wi?nie/Fresh Cherries” Anna Baumgart creates the re-enactment of an oppressive – and often suppressed – truth in Nazi concentration camps. In stylised barracks, Baumgart stages the tale of woe of two Jewish Polish women forced into prostitution in Auschwitz. Even 50 years on, they were too ashamed to talk about it.
In his film “Free Radicals”, Pip Choderov presents a review of his own biography and homage to the New Zealand grand master of handmade film Len Lye. Raised in an American household of filmmakers, Choderov already came into contact with experimental and avant-garde film as a youth. Icons such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Robert Breer became his attachment figures; in this film, they express their feeling of new progressive filmmaking and the radical social change of the 1960s in interviews and film clips.
In addition to thematically arranged programmes, it goes without saying that the EMAF will also be screening entertaining works such as the POP Parade, a programme with very special music clips. The Fruit Basket is also anything but a conventional short and animation film programme, and more like a “Tour de Force” through the visual creations of a young art clip generation.The retrospective is dedicated to Standish Lawder who even now, at the age of 75, teaches young photographers and filmmakers in his “Denver Darkroom” how to deal with analogous image composition. As a premiere in Germany, he will present his complete cinematic works –not on DVD though, but as original 16mm copies.
The Japanese programme “Japanese Media Art Now” comprises a selection of new films from the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, motion pictures and a retrospective of one of the country’s leading experimental filmmakers, Takashi Ito.
“So close in the distance” presents films and videos by artists from various Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. The works, which constitute a multitude of aesthetic and experimental approaches, will be introduced by the curator Charlotte Bank.
The film programme at this year’s EMAF explores a variety of contents, and represents experimental Media Art from completely different perspectives. In keeping with the motto: This Is Media Art.
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European Media Art Festival
The EMAF in Osnabrück is one of the most important forums of international Media Art, and is an open laboratory for creative and artistic experiments that help shape media and the aesthetics of their content.As a lively meeting place for artists, curators, lenders, gallery owners and a specialist audience, it has been instrumental in forming the themes and aesthetics of Media Art.
// CONCEPT AND FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT
Hermann Nöring, Alfred Rotert, Ralf Sausmikat.
// SPONSORS
nordmedia - Die Mediengesellschaft Niedersachsen/Bremen mbH
City of Osnabrück
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
German Federal Foreign Office
Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Kulturstiftung der Länder
Foundation of Lower Saxony
Europa fördert Niedersachsen
European Regional Development Fund
EU/Culture Programme
150 Years of Friendship Germany - Japan
University of Osnabrück
Mondriaan Foundation
Canadian Embassy
Grenswerte, funded by Euregio
Cybob Communications
// MEDIA PARTNERS
arte
le monde diplomatique
// CULTURAL PARTNERS
NDR Kultur
// MORE INFORMATION
Kerstin Kollmeyer
Presse(at)emaf.de
European Media Art Festival
Lohstr. 45a
D-49074 Osnabrück
Tel. +49 (0)541/216 58
Fax +49 (0)541/ 28327