Directors Lounge at Mitte Media Festival, 5 – 6 May, 2017
The lights are on and the gloves are off for this sensory assault of choicest knock-out punches from around the world of DL. Stories are told, implied or avoided in a rush of shorts spread over two venues and three programs. Everything you need to reactivate undernourished cinema-hungry brain cells will be served up – plenty of DL premiere gems in the bunch, plus other bright lights from a slew of bright minds.
We are pleased to participate in the Mitte Media Festival, a two-day, multi-venue celebration of video, film, publication and performance works through a spectrum of media starting on May 5th and ending on May 6th.
We will be presenting two screenings at Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, Berlin at 6 pm and 8 pm, presented by André Werner and Kenton Turk: A buffet of tasty tidbits from 10 years of Directors Lounge, films about self -esteem, aliens, art, moms, toasters and the whole universe. An Urban Research program curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr will take place at the Fata Morgana Gallery.
We will hit you, in the best way possible!
DL at Mitte Media | Program One (80 min) curated by André Werner, 5 May, 6 pm at Z-Bar: all about reception, pictophagia and the autopoietic beauty of images.
Stefan Adamski (PL) Induction 3 min 2007
Neil Needleman (US) Meeskeit 7 min 30s 2009
Jes Benstock (GB) Phosphenes 10 min 2002
Michael Betancourt (US) The Kodak Moment 2 min 2013
Xavi Sala (ES) La Parabólica 12 min 2007
Sasha Waters Freyer (US) An Incomplete History of Pornography, 1979, 8 min 2013
Jean-Gabriel Périot (FR) 21.04.02 9 min, DV, 2002
Faith Holland (US) RIP Geocities 2 min 31s 2011
André Werner (DE) The Custom of Eating Pictures 9 min 1997
Santiago Parres EZO (ES) Sinecdoquanon 7 min 29s 2011
Tokomburu / Zisis Kokkinidis and Ion Papaspyrou (GR) I Am Not Here Now 9 min 30 s 2013
DL at Mitte Media | Program Two (96 min) curated by André Werner, 5 May, 8 pm at Z-Bar: A wild rollercoaster about the eternal question "Have you ever seen an experimental film?"
Alexei Dmitriev (RU) Dubus 4 min 9s, DV, 2005
Coleman Miller (US) Uso Justo 22 min 2005
Matthew Lancit (FR/CA) 16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself 03:32
Alexandru Ponoran (RO) Isac Inca Doarme 17 min 2012
Samuel Blain (GB) In Dreams 3 min 57s 2011
Bryan Konefsky (US) Miss Yummy Yummy 4 min 2012
Guy Maddin (CA) Sombra Dolorosa 7 min 35s
Nina Lassila (FI) Günter und Mutti 3 min 17s 2011 (Distributor: AV-arkki)
Chema Garcia Ibarra (ES) The Attack of The Robots From Nebula-5
6min 20s 2008
Javier Chillon (ES) Decapoda Shock 9 min 15s 2011
Luca Zuberbuehler (CH) Lothar 13 min 2013
Oliver Smith (GB) Bob by Oliver Smith 2 min 31s 2013
DL at Mitte Media | Program Three, curated by K.W. Eisenlohr (91 min), 6 May, 4 pm at Fata Morgana Gallery: Exploring the boundaries where video art and cinema merge.
James Harrar (UK) Vlaamperd 2014, 5:54min
Clemens Fürtler (AT) Bildmaschine 07, Transit 2015 3:30min (silent)
Elaine Tedesco (BR) Leme Posto 2011 2:59 min
James Edmonds (DE) Movement and Stillness 2015 10:52min (silent)
Eric Stewart (US) Rah Rah 2013, 3:58 min
Petra Lottje (CN/DE) Questions to the Moon, 2017 4:46min
Doris Schmid (DE) LEG- 2012 5:00min
Katya Craftsova (IN/DE) Time Conservation 2012, 6:19 min
John D´Arcy & Deborah Uhde (DE/UK) Back ande Vor 2014 5:32 min
Bernd Lützeler & Kolja Kunt (DE) Unterwegs mit Maxim Gorkiy 2014 10:14 min
Sandra Becker 01 (BR/DE) 4 Clips for Loops 2015 01:17min
Mélissa Faivre (DE) The Space in Between 2016 11:48min
Gabriele Stellbaum (DE) Honest Lies 2011 9:45min
Mark Street (US) After Synchromy 2015 5:11min
Felix Brassier.Thanos Chrysakis (FR/UK) Day Two Hundred Seventy Nine Trails 2014 4:22min
The Mitte Media Festival program
Mitte Media Festival partners include: FATA MORGANA, Leo Kuelbs Collection, coGalleries, Last Night in Berlin, Chased Magazine, Directors Lounge, Z-Bar, BRLO and more.
pictured: “Uso Justo” by Coleman Miller; “Decapoda Shock” by Javier Chillon, “16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself” by Matthew Lancit , “Questions to the Moon” by Petra Lottje
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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More spliters of light and shadow, colour and monochrome, scream and silence are set to crystallize out of the chaos of the cosmos, all this (potentially) before your very eyes. This can only mean Directors Lounge is shaking the sparks out of its treasure box and letting them fall to earth where you can position yourself to see them descend and sparkle. Chosen event and venues for this meteor shower: the 3rd Mitte Media Festival, spread between two earthly recepracles going by the names Fata Morgana Gallery and Z-inema in the Z-Bar.
Making an appearance on Earth, shortly after having left it, will be legendary off-the-waller Jonas Mekas, cruising out of another dimension into two dimensions on the big sceen in Peter Sempel‘s Jonas in the Jungle, one of three features Sempel felt impelled to make in his attempt to capture the enigmatic creative force in a format that earthlings can observe. Mekas may have departed after 96 years of sharing our earthbound corridors, but his stamp on the world of avant-garde film art is showing no signs of fading. Sempel, not least a worthy name in his right through his work with luminaries Cave und Bargeld, Hollywood-New Yorkers Scorsese and Hoffmann, stage screamers Hagen and Lemmy, Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno of Japan and conceptual artist Dieter Meier of Yello (and more), will make the trip to be on hand for further illumination of his illumination.
In addition, there will be chips and chunks of the kind of cinematic strangeness that few others besides DL can come up with, including works by Allan Brown, Anton Corbijn, Roger Deutsch, Olivier Dekegel, Masha Godovannaya, Guy Maddin and many others. Your part in the proceedings: be there.
Mitte Media Festival | Directors Lounge Presents:
Radically Subjective
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Friday, April 19th, 9.15-11.15 pm
Fata Morgana Galerie – Front Room
read more
Selected Gems from the DL Archives
– Bizarre, Hypnotic, Wonderful –
Saturday, April 20th, 7-9 pm
Z-Bar Zinema, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin
read more
Peter Sempel – “Jonas in the Jungle”, 2013, 94 min
In attendance of Peter Sempel (Hamburg)
Saturday, April 20th, 9-11 pm | seats are limited!
Z-Bar Zinema, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin
read more
The complete Mitte Media Festival Schedule: www.mittemediafestival.com
Directors Lounge Screening
Maria Korporal
Lines in Between the Maze
Thursday, 28 März 2019
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Metaphors combine beauty with a call for a better life. The Berlin artist Maria Korporal studied in the Netherlands and was working and living in Italy until 2013. Her videos, installations and performances show a strong technical affinity, while at the same time, the content of her works often criticizes the Western and economically oriented civilization. Her films are hybrid combinations of recorded video footage, animated text and digital animations from drawings and photographs. Often inspired by lyrics, they could be read as visual poetry or video aphorisms. The short narratives also remind of fable tales from another age, addressing contemporary issues of love, gender and nature.
The artist will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Directors Lounge Screening
Björn Speidel
About the Depths of the Plateau
Thursday, 28 February 2019
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
With his experimental films, the Berlin based filmmaker Björn Speidel explores the relationship between image and imaging surface. For several years, he has investigated the image’s depth by the use of stereo 3D.
Lately, 3D cinema has become a new hype in the mainstream. The new trend is related to reaching for a more immersive cinema and competing with computer games. Björn Speidel takes a different stance by considering stereoscopic pictures as a tableau with depth. This opens a different approach to the concept of three-dimensional images. Instead of just representing an image of the world, a single picture may unfold a whole world of its own. Within only few image “incidents” virtual sensations start to occur that could not exists outside the image - a fragile utopia.
The films of Björn Speidel often combine several stereo 3D technologies. The topic of woods, of trees, reappear in his films as a metaphor as well as a structure of repetition and noise. The German saying of not seeing the woods because of all the trees may describe the repetitive background noise created by his individual works. These motives (re)appear as a combination of chance and structural montage.
Finally, (experimental) filmmaking is always related to the used apparatus. Thus Björn Speidel is exploring a diversity means of analogue film, analogue video and digital media. The screening will include the first presentation of the „Video-Harp“ as a world premiere.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Directors Lounge Screening
Laurence Favre
Digging the Archive
Thursday, 27 September 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Laurence Favre from Switzerland and living in Berlin, works with photography, film and video on projects. She creates narratives concerned with collective and individual memories, and how they relate to archives or individuals. Found material, 8mm found footage, was a reason for her to visit places, talk to and interview people. In the case of a hospital in South-Africa, a Swiss mission during the time of racial segregation, the construction of a collective memory become problematic, however, the collection of different stories and divert personal memories may become even more important. The box with films from a missionary working at the hospital, a personal archive in itself, for Favre became a starting point to visit the former hospital in Shiluvane, to find people who were working in the mission or share memories.
Favre's background in sociology informs her research, her art project shifts towards contemporary ethnographic research with experimental forms that do not attempt to construct an “objective reality”. And she is a member of Labor Berlin. On a first step, she converted the original 8mm films to digital, and created a narrative from it, by repeating images, inverting them, by mixing letters found in real archives with personal comments she writes, in a way her subjective version of the archive. During her first visit, she also collected interviews with local people who used to work at the mission.
And she shoots 16mm (non-sync, in color and in b/w) for her new project: A series of portraits mixed with passages of landscape and combined with fictive letters to the late doctor of the mission by former members of the mission who live in South Afrika. At this screening, Laurence will present “Nwa-Mankamana” the film from 2013, an edited reel called “Shiluvane Talks” and excerpts of “Lettres au Docteur L” as work-in-progress.
The artist will talk about the different facets of working with archives that she became engaged in, and she is looking forward to discuss her work.
Artist Link:
http://lrncfvr.net/
https://dafilms.com/director/9946-laurence-favre
Joining us from Lithuania, Remigijus Venckus will present his work at Directors Lounge Screening at Z-Bar. The artist presents his videos on occasion of an exhibition at the gallery ‘World in A Room’ in Berlin. The films are mostly short captured impressions from daily life, recorded and edited in the style of experimental film with references to films from early 60s and 70s, however, in a much more playful manner and stance.
In reference to the video program of R. Venckus, it may be interesting to remark that Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas, US artists, connected with ‘avant-garde film’ and Fluxus, are both originally from Lithuania and were first connected with the Lithuanian emigration community in the United States. Mekas talks about this in his film ‘Walden / Lost, Lost, Lost’ (1969 / 1976). In his opinion, he arrived in New York, and on the art scene, only after he left the group of expatriates gathering in N.YC. Later on in post-soviet era, after 1989, it seems that at least part of the art scene in Lithuania has embraced the two artists and somehow repatriated them, together with Fluxus.
R. Venckus makes direct reference to Fluxus and the experimental films of the 60's. In contrast to those artists, however, R. Venckus’ films play with forms and references in a much lighter way than those artists’ from the 60's, whose humor was acidly addressed at the opposed notion of ‘high art’. Mekas, as director of the Anthology Film Archive, for example, tried hard to create a canon of avant-garde in order to establish the film as a serious art form. Those struggles seem to be far in the past, when looking at R. Venckus’ early films.
However, the landscapes appearing in the artist's films mostly seem to be dark and grey, not happy. The struggles may be different, less about art concepts and the seriousness of a style, but a struggle with society and with a new kind of conservatism in art and in public discourse, nonetheless. His more recent films address those struggles differently, and in a more direct way. ‘My success story’ (2013), an autobiographical film essay, has never been shown in Lithuania yet. The film talks about the difficulties of fighting against prejudices and homophobia in the surroundings of conservative academia. His newest film ‘The Letter’ (2018), on the other hand, turns a love letter into a poetic sound and image piece of dance by a male dancer intermitted with urban landscapes, and during the winter time. The voice, reading, or better, reciting the words of the letter turn the movements of the dance into a song of praise and lament. The addressee stays unknown to the viewer, or the viewer may find himself being addressed as a possible sender or recipient of the letter.
Remigijus Venckus will be present for Q&A at the screening. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.
‘Return to Fluxus’ is a video art program of Remigijus Venckus created in a period of 2002 - 2018. The program will be presented at the ‘Directors Lounge Screening’ at Z-Bar 29 March 2018, 9pm.
Artist Link:
Ph.D. Remigijus Venckus
http://www.venckus.eu/
http://en.venckus.eu/video/
The Berlin artist Verena Kyselka presents her video works connected with art projects in different countries. Born in Erfurt, Thuringia and having studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, her video work is related with her earlier emphasis on performance. She further works with installations, collages and photography. Her interest in questions of identity let her investigate people's connection with culture, tradition and ethnic differences. Her many projects in Asian, Arabic and Latin American countries started with invitations to Taiwan, where she has collaborated and exhibited many times with local and international artists. Her quest for identity, especially of women, gives her a distinct interest in how people live, how artists live, and how they connect contemporary life with tradition. It also brought her attention to ethnic minorities, people of indigenous background or to people whose families or peoples had to migrate in the past.
Artists who research on ethnographic themes often do not dwell much on cultural differences within the countries they are interested in. Traditions of other countries are often seen as singular, unicultural and seen as unchanging during generations. Cultural changes related to migration or ethnic domination however are rarely perceived.
In her projects, Verena Kyselka often collaborates with local artists. Performance artists, musicians or people unrelated to contemporary art appear in Verena's films and express their issues through their art. In this way, the video artist transforms the documentary idea into a multi-layered cultural expression with many voices, instead of attempting to “objectively” record ethnographical sources.
The screening will present a large selection of her video work from different countries. The artist will be present for Q&A.
