A portrait of the artist Betina Kuntzsch, who has been creating short films and interdisciplinary projects for over 30 years, on the occasion of the DOK Leipzig premiere of her latest film SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES
HIMMEL WIE SEIDE. VOLLER ORANGEN (SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES) © BETINA KUNTZSCH
“We were so hungry for colour.”
A simple phrase, but one that captures a very strong feeling, a whole state of mind. It is spoken in SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES by Betina Kuntzsch, which just premiered at DOK Leipzig. It’s a film about the first trip of GDR citizens to Mallorca, after the Wall had already fallen, yet before reunification had even begun. A film that is inevitably perceived through the lens of the discussions about East and West and the division of society that have recently flared up again since the elections in Thuringia and Saxony.
The ambivalences of this debate can also be found in Kuntzsch’s work: SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES not only captures the great joy felt by many at the freedom to travel and the hope for a new, better phase of life, but also reveals the arrogance with which many West Germans, including politicians, encountered their new fellow citizens.
The fact that Kuntzsch’s film cannot simply be regarded as a contribution to the debate is mainly due to her very unique style, which makes her stand out in the field of animated documentaries: SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES is a mixed media project created from postcards, photos, travel receipts and old Interflug catalogues, which are repeatedly superimposed and interwoven. Kuntzsch’s self-taught animation emerges organically from the images. The human figures sometimes walk, turn their heads, laugh. But there are no talking heads, no fluid movements. Everything remains fragmentary, broken up, and the construction is always visible. The form is essayistic, the soundtrack a collage. Kuntzsch likes to offer nuances.
HIMMEL WIE SEIDE. VOLLER ORANGEN (SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES) © Betina Kuntzsch
With SKY LIKE SILK. FULL OF ORANGES Betina Kuntzsch, born in East Berlin in 1963, presents a new reflection on the GDR. The subject remains a recurrent theme in her work, with her background also representing a kind of “artistic resource.” She adds:
“I believe I can add other facets to the history book reality – which is definitely needed – above all, everyday life.”
In fact, her cinematic exploration of the GDR began back in 1988 with her graduation film ICH SASS AUF EINEM STEINE (I SAT UPON A STONE) at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where Kuntzsch studied book design. She discovered the moving image during a one-year internship in the graphics department of the GDR television/director’s workshop, which preceded her studies. Among other things, she was responsible for the credits, for which the individual letters still had to be printed on photographic paper, cut out individually by hand, laid out, glued and illuminated; the remaining white “flashes” were then painted over with felt-tip pens.
ICH SASS AUF EINEM STEINE (I SAT UPON A STONE) © Betina Kuntzsch
Her final film was created at her the very space she used as an intern: during the night break in GDR television broadcasts, she was allowed to use the studio equipment because the university lacked the technical facilities.
“The university didn’t even have a photocopier! In those days we made copies with a plate camera, sticking negative film onto glass plates and then exposing them.”
With I SAT UPON A STONE – she was actually the only one at the time to complete her studies with a video – she takes up Walther von der Vogelweide’s poem “Ich saz ûf eime steine” in order to question the meaning of life. The film begins and ends with the ringing of an alarm clock, which in the meantime changes into the soundscape of production and war. She was able to use a friend’s Amiga Commodore computer for the animation – an absolute rarity in the GDR; not even GDR television owned one. In the film, this animation, which Kuntzsch used to complement the medieval book illustration, develops and intensifies, burying everything, but in between it is also volatile and elegant when it comes to art. Art that is perhaps a means of escape. Today she says that I SAT UPON A STONE may have been a little out of date and “too moralising” – for example, we repeatedly see a 1987 GDR poster of two construction workers that was supposed to “motivate people to work” (inscription: “clear course;” “good work, secure life!”) – but without this historical reference, it would be a film that could still appeal today with its optimistic longing for systemic change.
Already at that time, Kuntzsch worked with a female speaker with an “everyday voice”: a thoughtful, calm, somewhat childlike voice that draws the viewer into her narrative – and well-written texts that get to the point very succinctly and often associatively. Kuntzsch narrates many of her films herself, especially when the topics have something to do with her.
HALMASPIEL © Betina Kuntzsch
For HALMASPIEL – CHINESE CHECKERS (2017), in which Betina Kuntzsch deals with her mother’s life during the Nazi regime, the GDR and reunified Germany, it was inconceivable to work with any other voice than her own. It was too personal, too close, and a treasure trove of memories that only later came to light: Her parents had once been imprisoned for attempting to flee the Republic and only told their children about it after the fall of the Wall. Kuntzsch uses the game of Chinese checkers to structure the film – it is sometimes a Star of David, sometimes a pastime in prison, drawn with toothpaste on old issues of Neues Deutschland (the official state-approved newspaper of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) from 1946–1989), and later a neural network. The “players” are repeatedly put into position; the game serves as an analogy to the political system, which gives its players only limited options. Although Betina Kuntzsch describes her father as troublesome and unreliable to those in power, he later even joined the SED in order to further his career as an architect.
“You shouldn’t bring up your children in doubt.“
Kuntzsch’s grandmother had told her daughter.
The couple shared this attitude – and Kuntzsch still understands it today. She always felt she could talk to her parents, and that was the most important thing for her. It’s not that you necessarily needed to know everything about each other.
In her animated sequences of fashion patterns, artificial flowers, Halma figures and more, Kuntzsch uses documents such as file references – and this is another recurring element alongside narration – she isolates text or highlights it. Text and animation are often created in parallel; it is a wild creative process on her desk; she often discards entire sequences at the end. She is particularly interested in the materiality of the document, not just the information. Kuntzsch herself says:
“Documents also have a tactile quality, they tell you so much more, for example if they are faded or have a coffee stain on them.”
For Kuntzsch, delving into the often pre-existing, haptic material with its traces of use is an essential part of her work, which she calls “media archaeology” on her website. In addition to this process of making documents tangible, it also and above all involves dealing with the medium of film itself.
A project close to her heart is the digitisation and animation of old, original 35mm loop films (a film consists of 30 to 60 shots) made around 1900 for the Laterna Magica cinematograph, which Kuntzsch has gradually been buying on eBay. It is a somewhat obscure collection of material – as it is not glass plates, but images printed on film, which were produced as toys (and probably for this reason have not yet been included in film history). Kuntzsch loves the material, which often depicts very simple actions (a waiter carrying a plate, someone skiing, a woman folding laundry), and depending on their condition – through wear and tear – adds plot twists or premature endings to these little stories:
”The ‘plots’ are not rooted in a particular period, they are truly modern, also because of the simple shapes and colours.”
Kuntzsch has been archiving and collecting the film-historical footage for about 20 years; in 2015, she began to work with it cinematically.
WEGZAUBERN – SPIRIT AWAY © Betina Kuntzsch
WEGZAUBERN – SPIRIT AWAY from 2015, which won the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig, is certainly the most prominent example of these re:animations: Kuntzsch was inspired by the works of the Prinzhorn Collection – an archive of works by patients of psychiatric institutions and contemporary psychiatry, mostly from the years 1840 to 1945. WEGZAUBERN – SPIRIT AWAY was preceded by intensive research into the works and their creators, what preoccupied them and who they were. But while the imaginary biography, a collection of basically constantly contradictory life (im)possibilities (‘is released as cured, drowns during a bath therapy’ – a brilliantly written text based on real medical records), had found its written form on paper, Kuntzsch struggled to find suitable images. Then she remembered her archive and set the often naive-looking images in motion, moving them back and forth slowly and repetitively. The result, re:animated from a total of 36 magic lantern films, is touching and resonant: the fragile, simply drawn, shaky images correspond strongly to the restricted and often heteronomous reality of life for many women in the early days of psychiatry.
SCHLEIFENTAGE © Betina Kuntzsch
Other re:animations have been created in this way, such as SCHLEIFENTAGE from 2016, in which Kuntzsch combines excerpts from Emmy Henning’s novel “Branded. A diary.” Hennings was one of the co-founders of Dadaism. Unfortunately, many people today only know her as Hugo Ball’s wife. Her prickly, free life between vaudeville, desk and prison – at a time when women had to overcome incredible opposition to such an autonomous lifestyle – has long fascinated Kuntzsch.
Her film SCHLEIFENTAGE could be described as a loving homage to the outsider Hennings. And outsiders from just that era, meaning the turn of the century and basically the 1920s, are a major theme for her in any case, says Kuntzsch.
The magic lantern theme remains part of her working method, to which she returns again and again. In the meantime, she has scanned some 600 films frame by frame with her slide scanner and made them available to the German Film Archive free of charge – a contribution to film archiving that should be much more visible and promoted.
LOÏE FULLER. DIE ELEKTRISCHE FEE © Betina Kuntzsch
Among the tributes to outsiders is LOÏE FULLER. THE ELECTRIC SPRITE (2022), which is about the unconventional life of the American inventor of the then incredibly popular serpentine dance. Why exactly this time and these protagonists, shouldn’t there also be something to tell about outsiders who lived closer to the here and now? Kuntzsch contemplates briefly.
“There is often this arrogance of the present towards the past, but if you look at what they were fighting for back then … it’s impressive. And basically, we’re still asking the same questions today: how is art created, what function does art have in life? I still find these issues fascinating today.”
For LOÏE FULLER. THE ELECTRIC SPRITE, Kuntzsch uses archive material of photographs and video recordings as well as flickering computer animations with which she captures or evokes Fuller’s choreographies (because there is not a single recording of Fuller in motion) – what Kuntzsch calls video drawing. She understands video drawing as a “working thesis,” an intuitive drawing process in which no concrete intentional form is developed, but rather form emerges from the repetition of drawings and is only then set in motion through loops.
SIGNALE. EIN ZEICHENFELD (SIGNALS. A DRAWING FIELD) © Betina Kuntzsch
She also uses this technique for more abstract works without biographical references, such as l -l – IN SEARCH OF ELA GEMINADA (2008), an interdisciplinary project created during Kuntzsch’s residency at the Nau Côclea Centre for Contemporary Art in Girona, Spain. Kuntzsch took photos and filmed all over the city, wherever she discovered the structure of the l -l *, and subsequently realised 24 video drawings, that is, video and photo sequences condensed into individual images, which in turn provided inspiration: Together with the Catalan writer Laia Noguera i Clofent and the sound artist José Manuel Berenguer, Kuntzsch created a text-video-sound performance at the Atheneu Barcelona. Generally, she often places her video drawings in an installative, collaborative context, most recently SIGNALS. A DRAWING FIELD on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. The video drawing was projected onto a foil on the ground, allowing pedestrians and visitors to explore for themselves the idea that there are many different paths hidden beneath the curb. Whether they were standing outside the projection or walking on it.
VOM SOCKEL DENKEN (THINKING FROM THE PEDESTAL) © Betina Kuntzsch
A project for the public space that also worked well in the cinema was THINKING FROM THE PEDESTAL. THINKING FROM THE PEDESTAL consists of 10 short films and celebrated its world premiere as part of the feature film presentation KOPF FAUST FAHNE at DOK Leipzig 2021. Betina Kuntzsch had won the nationwide competition “Artistic Commentary on the Ernst Thälmann Monument,” organised by the Berlin-Pankow District Office, a project aimed at approaching and revitalising the controversial monument in public space.
The construction of the memorial to the legendary Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, who was murdered by the Nazis, and its continued existence after the fall of the Communist regime has repeatedly given rise to resentment. For the short films, Kuntzsch and Schmidt researched various archives and repositories that are not always easy to access; the film deals with the inauguration of the memorial, the area’s inhabitants, but also, for example, with Ernst Thälmann’s daughter. The artistic intervention consists of five red concrete benches in the proportions of the memorial’s pedestal. They bear relief-like inscriptions – the titles of the 10 short films, which can be accessed via QR codes on the pedestals. Kuntzsch is still regularly on site to ensure that the QR codes are accessible, as many sprayers are also at work here.
For Kuntzsch, it was an important and resonant project, especially in terms of reception:
„Film festivals are protected spaces in themselves. Here, too, people sometimes openly say that they don’t like something for formal or content-related reasons, but they consciously attend the festival because they want to engage with it. That was different here.“
In fact, there were many Ostalgic, sometimes stubbornly ideological voices on social media, but also on site or in the cinemas, who felt that her treatment of the hero of the GDR was disrespectful, confrontational and sometimes insulting. When the concrete pedestals were ceremonially unveiled, there was even a “counter-demonstration.” Yet, the films were never about exposing Ernst Thälmann. It seems as if they saw Kuntzsch’s mere approach – that is, the absence of the FDJ (Free German Youth) banner praise and the non-transfiguration – as an affront.
GASOMETER, one of the short films in the THINKING FROM THE PEDESTAL project, deals with the demolition of the gasometers that preceded the construction of the housing complex that now surrounds the monument. Here, Kuntzsch’s father also makes a brief appearance: Kuntzsch quotes from a very eloquent letter written by her father recommending the demolition. Not entirely voluntarily, as it turns out: Actually an opponent of the demolition of historic buildings, he had been visited by the Stasi, who “suggested” that he write the letter. In recent years, Kuntzsch has spent a lot of time researching the history of her father, who died in 2023. She has access to an enormous amount of material. Too much for a short film, that much is clear. Perhaps this will be Kuntzsch’s next project – a project that is again not meant as a mere contribution to discourse, but offers an animated, intimate portrait to add something different rather than the roaring voices of polarization.
*l·l (Ela Geminada) is a letter that only exists in Catalan. A ‘punt volat’ (interpunct) is placed between the two ls: l·l