The morning and afternoon lecture program will be moderated by “Alternative Fictions”, a collective of visual anthropologists who use film and ethnography to explore issues surrounding representation. They also facilitate interactive spaces to engage in these conversations and continually seek to find new ways to explore the intersections between art, media and academia.
The late 1920s saw the first large scale wave of radical political film making in Germany. Deploring ‘how broadly and deeply the cinema influences and confuses proletarian audiences’, Béla Balázs cried out in 1922: ‘We must create our own film companies! This is absolutely necessary!’ (more…)
Price discusses her current research towards a new film that explores the overwritten histories and redrawn boundaries of Holloway Women’s Prison, the largest women’s prison in Western Europe and the only women’s prison in London until it was decommissioned in 2016. (more…)
During the Weimar Republic, communist organisations contributed tremendously to the establishment of a tradition of worker writers. Thus factory workers were encouraged to write about their experiences in labour and life. As a result of her research into original poems, songs and epigrams by workers writers about the housing question, Ina Wudtke decided to write some agitation texts herself, (more…)
What does radical film mean today? All cinematic forms, styles and intentions are capable of taking on a radical character. There are no concrete modes of distribution or exhibition that are exclusively radical – at least theoretically. What makes a film radical today, as Third Cinema proposed fifty years ago, is a particular way of approaching reality that, because of it, provokes a reaction on the part of the audiences. (more…)
The film “Navy Cut” deals with the figure of the sailor who is always present at the beginning of the 20th century when it comes to revolution. The sailors’ uprising in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel on 09.11.1918 triggered the November Revolution and the sailors of the battleship Potemkin are film legends. It’s about utopia and loss of utopia. (more…)
The massification of digital technologies of image recording, the participatory web and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube have deeply transformed the way in which filmmakers can portray and approach reality. (more…)
Consciousness raising groups are a form of activism popularised during 1970s feminism. These groups of women met up regularly to discuss their experiences, which became a powerful tool for collectively constructing theory and taking action. (more…)
Exploring the works of Migrant Media in relation to the political concerns during the periods of the time of practice, the notion of an uncompromising ‘documentary of force’ develops throughout the portfolio. (more…)
We understand the body as the place where thought and practice, art and life intersect to go across creation. How do we train the body to be aware of being contemporary? (more…)
In neoliberalism ‘the story’ has become a universal currency. Today, every commodity has a story to tell. The neo-liberal subject is obliged to tell their life story as a story of coming to oneself, of healing or self-discovery. Self-realization here means that we do not exist without a story. (more…)
Defined by Peter Snowdon, vernacular videos belong to the multiple series of gestures and actions through which individuals gather, both online and offline, to enact the people as the possible subject of another history. (more…)
The long-term documentation “We are still here” (working title) shows changes in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg since 2009. It gives an insight into the life and work of people who for years had to defend themselves against being deprived of their homes. (more…)
Passing the Rainbow was created in collaboration with Berlin film maker Elfe Brandenburger, filmmakers, actresses, activists and Sandra Schäfer, visual artist and film maker, in Kabul between 2002 and 2007. The film deals with strategies to undermine the rigid gender norms in Afghan society: on the level of filmic staging, in political work and in everyday life. (more…)
On the 21st of June 2018, A.S.S.-Collective and a group of artists and activists gathered in front of the Ernst-Thälmann monument to spend 24 hours together. Questions concerning the effects of dominant histography on todays cities and public sphere and the examination of alternative narratives formed the basis of their joint gathering. (more…)
Watch Before Deletion investigates the pivotal role of gossip in the construction of sexual desire by taking El-Kotchina, an alleged sex film starring an Arab music icon in the 1980’s, as its point of departure. A sound film par excellence, El-Kotchina was entirely constructed in the collective imagination of the Egyptian public through aural networks of gossip, rumour and hearsay. (more…)
Social media, streaming portals and video platforms…through the internet the possibilities of film distribution have increased significantly. But which ways are available to independent documentary filmmakers? Which new ideas and which networks make sense? (more…)
Cooperative productions, independent distribution and film events as venues social communication. A lecture with examples based on the documentaries „Das Gegenteil von Grau”, Mietrebellen und Dystopolie. (more…)
The lecture introduces queer guerrila film practices in the People‘s Republic of China. Using the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF), Shanghai Queer Film Festival (ShQFF) and China Queer Film Festival Tour (CQFFT) as examples, this lecture highlights socialist and democratic principles in film festival programming and organisation, as well as the tactics through which film festival organisers circumvent government censorship and commercialisation. (more…)
How can political videos from civil society effectively assert themselves on the Social Web against the dominance of advertising, entertainment and propaganda? This is the central question of a joint research project that will be presented in this lecture. (more…)
Cypriot thinker Ulus Baker defines video as an “instrument for recording” or a “document-device”, cinema and photograph are also primarily a means of recording. While cinema is an expensive industry, video enjoys the freedom to penetrate in the personal worlds of its users. (more…)
This lecture will focus on two films, which have subject matters that have been actively suppressed by the Turkish state because they go beyond the boundaries of the ethno-nationalistic model aggressively implemented since the establishment of the Republic, thus creating a threat to the integrity of Turkey. (more…)
In this lecture I wish to explore the question ‘What is radical film’ with a Deleuzean twist — thus rather asking “What can radical film be(come)” or “What can it do?”. Approaching this question from an ecological perspective, one can extrapolate a novel potential of film making/activism that I will coin ‘Parasitic Activism’ through probing the (originally Berlin-based) eco-porn platform Fuck for Forest. (more…)