On the Margins of Film (An den Raendern des Films)

"On the Margins of Film", a workshop for scholars and artists, is organised by the fluctuating images. It focusses on crossing the boundaries between media, and on intermedial experiments with and within films.

Contributions:
Alexandra Käss (Bonn): Film as Lightshow – Lightshow as Film
Lena Christolova (Konstanz): Strange Margins of Shadows
Stefanie Stallschus (Berlin): Modulation of Attention. Models of Interference in Michael Snow´s Work
Barbara Filser (Karlsruhe): Chris Marker´s "La Jetée" – "Photo Novel or Ciné-Novel"? A film on the margins of film
Christian Jamin (Basel): On "Walken Sitting"
Anja Kreysing (Münster): On "Field Locator"
Letizia Werth (Vienna): On "Stop Motion"
Susanne König (Hamburg): "Le corbeau et le renard", on the relationship of film and text in the art of Marcel Broodthaers
Jörn Schafaff (Hamburg): Applied Cinema. On some examples of Philippe Parreno's art
Cornelia Lund (Stuttgart): moving|images – on the relationship of film, dance and space
Kerstin Stutterheim (Würzburg): Video-Theatre
Holger Lund (Stuttgart): Visual Music

Thanks to Oliver Moore for the graphic art on flyers and posters

Concept:
Starting from the observation that film plays a leading role in contemporary art, this workshop reflects on intermedial phenomena in film and on its margins. These margins include art that combines film with other media (eg. expandend cinema), as well as media art that integrates filmic elements or contradicts them. An example would be the slide show, which is situated between film and photography and is becoming more present in contemporary art exhibitions. Nevertheless, this presence remains mostly unnoticed. Merely the exhibition “Dia/Slide/Transparency. Materialien zur Projektionskunst” in the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Berlin, attempted a critical inventory. Same goes for other media or intermedial phenomena, such as the film still as extrapolated photography, or digital video sequences that are being projected to music as a kind of live cinema, or analogue film material that is being integrated into digitally processed films, or contemporary music, when film sequences are not simply added as visual material, but compositions in fact are produced as film from the start.
It seems that not much thought has yet been spent on these intermedial phenomena, nor has the special, central role and function of film in this context been sufficiently recognised. The workshop “On the Margins of Film” wants to explore these contemporary forms more closely and to trace back their historical development: from the Absolute Film, which combines image and music, to the expansion of film into space in the 1960s (Expanded Cinema).

Opening October 22, 2004 - exhibition
Letizia Werth: Stop Motion (film)
Thuja: Field Locator (film)
Christian Jamin: Walken Sitting (video installation)

Letizia Werth: Stop Motion (film projection)
The film consists of almost 500 found photographs. They show women who pose consciously, standing, leaning, etc. The single photos are sequenced as a film. By superimposition individual positions become collective, individual women merge into one person, sometimes acting out tiny movements.

Thuja: Field Locator (film projection)
Thuja played video footage of the countryside on a screen, adding her own music, and filmed the screen with an old S-VHS camera. She held the camera on her shoulder, so that the image trembles slightly, and the spectator is taken along on a trip through the undergrowth.
www.thuja.net

Christian Jamin: Walken Sitting (installation on monitors)
Nine monitors are positioned in a room, connected to nine DVD-players. In each player a movie starring Christopher Walken is being played and paused at a specific moment. Walken is known to be an actor who has the courage to make pauses, dreaded pauses, in which his presence can suck up the viewer into the medium. Walken loves to play scenes seated, to exercise a threatening spell, which gave him the reputation of being a “psycho”.
www.videoplus.ch

Some of the contributions are published online (only in German): please click here