Independent films from Frankfurt Chicago Filmmakers

Critic's Choice - Chicago Reader

"Of the ten filmmakers on this program, eight have studied with Peter Kubelka, who teaches in Frankfurt and whose own short films create an architecturally perfect cinema out of precise "articulations" (his word) between images and sounds. One wonders what Kubelka thought of Anja Czioska's Bolero, a film of a man in drag doing an erotic and eventually nude dance in a gravel pit. Mostly edited in camera, the fey dance is in surprisingly good sync with the music, making it an amusing send-up of Ravel's macho rhythms.


10/12/96 - 10/12/96

8:00pm


"Of the ten filmmakers on this program, eight have studied with Peter Kubelka, who teaches in Frankfurt and whose own short films create an architecturally perfect cinema out of precise "articulations" (his word) between images and sounds. Fred Camper, Chicago Reader October 11, 1996

One wonders what Kubelka thought of Anja Czioska's Bolero, a film of a man in drag doing an erotic and eventually nude dance in a gravel pit. Mostly edited in camera, the fey dance is in surprisingly good sync with the music, making it an amusing send-up of Ravel's macho rhythms. Most of the other films, though closer to Kubelka's style, have an open, often poetic feel. In O.T., Monika Schwitte inked over found footage frame by frame so that in one image a figure is surrounded by black while in another a person may be a black shadow moving amid the landscape. The film as a whole is thus a series of masks that blot out parts of the image unpredictably; enigmatic and a bit haunting at first, these barriers finally become metaphors--for a keyhole, for encroaching blindness. Also strong is Wilhelm Orlopp's half hour ?What's Your Name!, in which a water mill provides the sound track with a perpetual groan, or whine, as Orlopp pieces together fragments from a trip in Egypt. This film is built up of small sections; in each he joins a few shots together tentatively, not so much to create meaning as to express his own bewilderment. Here Orlopp answers the past tradition of the all-knowing documentary with an acknowledgment of his own inability to fully understand another culture. Also films by Axel Schmidt, Theo Thiesmeyer, Thomas Heurich, Karl Kels, Thomas G.A. Mank, Tamara Grcic, and Jorg Simon"

Director
Anja Czioska,Axel Schmidt, Theo Thiesmeyer, Thomas Heurich, Karl Kels, Thomas G.A. Mank, Tamara Grcic, and Jorg Simon

Production
Chicago Filmmakers

Tags: Film, Old Europe, 1996