Setting out in 2014, Gegenkino in Leipzig marked its 10th anniversary this year (missing out in 2020, the year of the pandemic). The film festival has turned into a calendar event in the East of Germany. It is unmatched in its dedication to peripheral film culture–documentary, sleazy underground, sexploitation, and experimental films. But not only. A sustaining attraction of the festival is its choice of screening venues which provide something different, perhaps a sense of the city’s history, that is diminished if not erased in festivals that are predominantly installed in multiplexes or other commercial locations. Take for example the iconic UT Connewitz which has been hosting the festival’s screenings since its very inception. Located on the Wolfgang-Heinze-Strasse (previously Pegauer Strasse), this historical venue at various points in the 20th century has served as an art printing shop, bomb shelter, prom, and hosted underground punk concerts in the GDR. Following many renovation projects and a prolonged closure for nearly a decade in the early years of German reunification, it remains the oldest surviving cinema structure in Leipzig that is known to have presented its first public screening in 1912 when it showed Viggo Larsen’s DIE SCHWARZE KATZE (1912). Equally impressive is the history of Schaubühne Lindenfels, a community owned space that plays host to interdisciplinary art practices encompassing theater, dance, performance, and cinema, whose history dates back to 1876 when it was constructed to serve as an event hall for dances. Though smaller in scale, Luru Kino in der Spinnerei is not to be left behind. Situated inside what used to be the largest cotton spinning mill in continental Europe at the dawn of the 20th century and surrounded by galleries, artist studios, workshops, and other art centers, it best fits the micro-cinema description that serves as a cinephile hole offering an enviable array of genre-movie double-bills all year round, often from its own collection of analogue film prints no less.
Not outdone by the weight of history, the line up itself had plenty to offer of which Kinothek Asta Nielsen’s curated program of ten short films, a retrospective dedicated to German documentary filmmaker Rainer Komers, and a special focus on Rose Lowder’s films stood out.
Kinothek was established in 1999 in Frankfurt to focus on less traveled avenues of Feminist and LGBTQI film histories by combining curation, archiving, and publication efforts. The collective stands out not only in its commitment to films of minority gender identities but also to marginalized film forms– the amateur, the radical, the experimental, and the unclassifiable. Nine of the films shown were made between 1981-1990, a period often considered to be of low yield as far as avant garde film classics go.
Among them was S.M. Rosi’s MAMMA HERMMERS GEHT MIT IHREM PASTOR ZUM LETZTEN MAL ÜBER’N HEINRICHPLATZ: KREUZBERG ADIÖ (1981, 9’), a quaint portrait of anarchist and leftist painted slogans and graffiti (in German and Turkish) in the Kreuzberg neighborhood in Berlin. The film employs a combination of static, pan, tracking, and tilt shots to depict shop windows, street corners, children’s playground, residential and commercial buildings, and demolition sites. The wandering camera and the topographic shots in overcast daylight with saturated color tones are accompanied by Gerhard Weihe’s sparse piano composition in the largely dialogue-less film. Rosi dedicated the film to anarchist-libertarian writer Peter-Paul Zahl, who, at the time of the film’s making, was serving his prison sentence in West Germany.
In FAMILIENGRUFT – EIN LIEBESGEDICHT AN MEINE MUTTER (1981, 11’), Rosi’s fellow DFFB alumni Maria Lang, partly inspired by Jutta Heinrich’s novel DAS GESCHLECHT DER GEDANKE (1977), narrates her complex relationship to her mother mingled in love, sadism, affection, contempt, empathy, and helplessness. The emotional association (or disassociation) is mediated by her indifference towards her father and fondness for her brother. Using her voice to comment upon the kindred blood ties as stills from a family album and documentary shots of her father skinning a rabbit or her mother kneading populate the frame, Lang, points to her emotional fissures and ironises the cozy title of the film by offering a measured rebuttal of the socially valorised middle-class family with its normative gender roles.
Contrasting the documentary style of Rosi and Lang are a number of materialist works, two of which are the high-contrast black-and-white stop-motion films by Viennese artist Mara Mattuschka. In her performance-films KUGELKOPF (1985, 6’) and ES HAT MICH SEHR GEFREUT (1987, 2’), the artist deploys her characteristic single frame animation technique and detail enlargement to intensify the effect of montage that, according to film scholar Christa Blümlinger, “contravenes the portrayal of natural movement”. Tapping into the legacies of Body art, Actionism, and Dadaism, these plastic and witty anarchic films grapple with self-portraiture, linguistic autonomy, and autoeroticism.
Wit and irreverence have long been powerful tools at the disposal of feminist experimental and animation filmmakers as evidenced by Cathy Joritz’s NEGATIVE MAN (1985, 2.5’) where the physical scratching of film comprising negative imagery of a lecturing man on television mutates him at various points into a clown, a Santa Claus, a cowboy, a nun, and a professor among other things, demonstrating a very accessible form of revenge fantasy. Other films are similarly disposed to powerful feminist assertions achieved through modest formal means that undercut the machismo of pioneerism so dear to common experimental film historiographies. KOOL KILLER (1981, 5’) by Pola Reuth deconstructs masculinity through fragmentation, image degradation, repetition, and irony, Eva Heldmann’s JOHNNY ODER DAS ROHE FLEISCH (1984, 4’) satirizes the position of a man loved by woman as a piece of raw, cold meat, Maija Lene Rettig’s TAKE COURAGE (1987, 9’) exemplifies the self-assuring power of diaristic filmmaking while Matthias Müller’s in HOME STORIES (1990, 6’) photographs Hollywood narrative films from the 1950s and the 60s off a television screen, filtering out and repurposing its stereotypical voyeuristic conventions. The only outlier belonging to a different decade was Ula Stöckl’s ANTIGONE (1964, 9’), a stripped down adaptation of the Greek tragedy through abundant use of freeze frames, close ups, shots of barren landscapes, and texts that sharpens Antigone’s valiant resolve to take a stand in a world where the corridors of power are controlled by men.
The mid-length documentaries of Rainer Komers, who now lives between Mulheim and Berlin, was another attraction of the recent edition. Komers designed Warhol-inspired posters in his younger days, first for film clubs and later for political campaigns. He was a friend of fellow Mulheim filmmakers Werner Nekes and Dore O., but chose documentary over experimental film in the post ‘68 landscape in pursuit of a truly democratic society while confronting the legacies of war and racism. For Komers, who was fond of Helen Levitt’s photography, Peter Nestler’s MÜHLHEIM/RUHR (1964) had a formative influence. Later he often did camera work for the films of Nestler and Klaus Wildenhahn and his own filmmaking in the 1980s is best described by the historical category of Direct Cinema – a participatory form of observant filmmaking that avoids different forms of staging (directing, artificial lighting) and forceful use of montage. From this period, his best known film ZIGEUNER IN DUISBURG (1980, 37’) was shown where Komers, through intergenerational testimonies of Romani people living in Duisburg, presents a history of eviction, persecution, stigmatization, state brutalization, and marginalization that the population continues to face. The film combines still images, shots in homes and neighborhoods, spontaneous portraiture, off and on-screen voice, and carefully inserted commentary in a way that foregrounds Komers’ ethical concerns with documentary filmmaking itself. The film stands on trust-building and refuses to trade sympathy for extraction. But nothing in ZIGEUNER IN DUISBURG and the films he later made in the 1980s prepares one for B 224 (1999, 23’) and the films since. Sometime in the 1990s, having spent a year as a student of photographer Inge Osswald, Komers’ interest according to him shifted from “the tracking camera of direct cinema to the ‘photographic’ or ‘framing’ camera”. That and listening to Luc Ferrari on the WDR 3 radio instilled in him a conviction to pursue a mode of dialogue-less filmmaking that worked on an intricate balancing of images with soundscapes following an editing principle where the shot duration would be such that the eye cannot fixate on the frame; a contrasting strategy to James Benning who often deploys static shots lasting several minutes in order to nearly exhaust the field of vision. In B 224, shooting on 35mm – a format certainly not the most popular in documentary – Komers films vignettes of life around the highway in Ruhr that lends the film its title. Turning into a sensitive geographer, Komers accompanies a rhapsody of sound recorded on location with footage of daily work and leisure activities. His experience of making B 224 will pave the way for films like NOME ROAD SYSTEM (2004, 26’), KOBE (2006, 45’), MA’RIB (2007, 30’) – the ‘Earth movement’ trilogy. Filmed in Alaska, Japan, and Yemen pursuing certain leitmotifs (like water and sand), Komers once again followed movements and sounds that either typified or stood out around a road, a coastline, or an oasis. In these films, Komers chases the poetics of anonymous faces, quotidian gestures, and indifferent landscapes.
The third apogee of the festival was a program of films by Rose Lowder whose rigorously structured 16mm films since the 1970s have resulted in a formidable body of work that is singular in its quest for exploring the extremes of perceptual possibilities that the medium of film offers between its photographic and optomechanical characteristics. Lowder has systematically used her filmmaking as a tool for visual research and for inspecting the gap between the physical appearance of an image on the filmstrip and its induced optical effect upon projection. In one of her earliest cameraless films PARCELLE (1979, 3’), a circle and a square shape flicker in the foreground of a color field creating a sense of simultaneity that is absent in the physical film (the circle, the square, and the color field lie on separate frames). The spatial equitability of an emulsified frame no longer holds when projected. The BOUQUETS (1-40) (1994-2022), of which eight were shown in the program, are all minute long films of 1440 frames where a single frame is arduously exposed and scored just like in a musical composition. They are an articulation of the tension between the controllable (what to film, when to film, how to frame, where to place the camera and so on) and the uncontrollable (the light, the wind, unaccounted for events) parameters of filmmaking. Temporal and spatial shifts resulting from changes in these parameters superimpose during the rapid alteration in the frames upon projection. All of Lowder’s films are composed in-camera and are shot in natural surroundings in the south of France where she has been residing since the mid 1970s. In RUE DES TEINTURIERS (1979, 31’), Lowder sets up the camera in the balcony of her home in Avignon where the leaves of a laurel tree block the view of the street below. By merely changing focal points from frame to frame (and accepting the natural changes of light and traffic on the street), Lowder collapses the distinction between back and foreground and is able to significantly alter the stable field of vision as a perceptual phenomenon otherwise impossible. Microscale changes in color, framing (gentle movement of water in an otherwise still quadrate), and light with calibrated variations in shot-duration creates a visual music of laminar streams at the Mont Gerbier de Jonc, the origin of the river Loire, in LA SOURCE DE LA LOIRE (2019-2021, 19’). Lowder describes her filming process in an email correspondence as follows:
“The only planned aspect of the filming was to film each picture (frame and focus) first 3 seconds of film (72 images), then, since when I viewed the reels they seemed very slow, I filmed the source (same pathway) 2 seconds (48 frames), which still seemed slow so I filmed again 1 second (24 frames), then 3 frames (1/8 of a second). So the film shows you frames of the same source held for four different lengths, 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 second and 1/8 of a second, in that order. Of course each time I filmed, sometimes a year later, the images are a little different to what they were previously.”
The sound is held back, until the end of the film when images have ceased. It is then that the musicality of the chirping birds is allowed to blossom against a black screen, sound recorded by Lowder herself on location by sieving out unwanted interference from the surroundings in a short span of two months when the birds visit the area before the weather gets inhospitable. As Lowder mentioned in the post-screening discussion, the films can also draw attention to environmental dangers posed by Capitalist avarice. That she is able to point at that through her analytical approach to filmmaking without conceding to the romantic trope of nature deserves a eulogium of its own.