Besides all the hanging out in the cinema, you recluses will also get the Chance to catch some fresh air at this year’s GEGENkino. Artist and curator Julia Lazarus will offer a workshop during the festival, where you’ll get the chance to endeavour in different approaches to creatively appropriate the woods of Leipzig with your camera.
Walden or living in the woods
Film workshop with Julia Lazarus
Saturday, Apr 7th, 10am til 7pm (workshop) & Friday, Apr 13th (screening)
This workshop enters the woods around Leipzig in search for the traces of the great-grandfather of political revolt, pioneer of environmentalism and drop-out Henry David Thoreau. In his 1854 book „Walden“ Thoreau describes his life in a self-built log cabin in the woods of Massachusetts, where he lived two and a half years. Text excerpts from this book and other texts by him will be the jumping-off pointfor short filmic studies.
The forest is primarily a mass of trees, vast and always in motion, influenced by wind and clouds and the interplay of light and shadows. In cinema, the forest often stands for the eerie, the impenetrable and becomes a projection surface for the fears of the protagonists. „The woods“, though, can also be staged as home, as a secret place of refuge for dissidents or simply as a protection against the prying eyes of the others. Presently, the forest is also site and object for political debate with regards to global cimate change. At the beginning of the workshop we will take a closer look at filmic representations of the woods, which can also function as impulses for own recordings. Concluding th workshop there will be a screening of the material, results and ideas. A quick apprentice piece for the creative possibilities of the camera in open air environments.
Requirements: Video capturing device (Phone, DSLR camera or camcorder), sturdy shoes.
Registration fee: 30 euros
Registration: workshop[at]gegenkino.de
Julia Lazarus is a filmmaker, artist and curator and lives and works in Berlin. she studied at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin und am California Institute of the Arts Los Angeles. Since 2001 she does videos and films, which are shown in exhibitions and on international festivals. Her films are distributed by Sixpackfilm Wien and e-flux Berlin/New York. For her most recent film project she followed the Turkish activist group „Kuzey Ormanlari Savunmasi“ into the woods North of Istanbul.
Here’s the next item of this year’s programme: Combining industrial, jazz, psychedelia and minimalism, Tomaga (UK) from the Hands in the Dark will add two new scores to LUCIFER RISING by Kenneth Anger and EARLY ABSTRACTIONS by Harry Smith. Plus, you’ll get the chance to see another early subversive work of film: Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON—on glorious 16mm!
LUCIFER RISING
USA/UK 1970-80 D: Kenneth Anger, A: Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithful, Bobby Beausoleil, 28’, 16mm / USA 1939-56 D: Harry Smith, 23’, 16mm
Being subversive high priests of New Age Cinema and ardent worshippers of occultist and self-appointed Antichrist Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith take into account esotericism, archaic symbols and hardly decodable mythologies each with their own aesthetics. Topically, Anger refers to the charismatic figure of Lucifer, the most incandescent angel in heaven, who is banned after engineering a revolt against God and henceforth develops into a rebel against established orders. In images of creation and destruction, of deities and forces of nature, Anger interweaves Christian myth and historical, pop-cultural and personal threads. In Smith’s partly hand-painted animations, colours and forms are mushrooming seemingly erratic: grainy, coarse textures and micro-organisms on the one hand, design elements seeming modernist and bits of short narratives on the other. With bass, synthesizers (Tom Relleen) and percussion (Valentina Magaletti), Tomaga will add live scores to these classics of experimental cinema. The London duo canalises multi-instrumentalisms in lose patterns traversing industrial music, psychedelia, jazz and minimalsim. Committed to musical exploration, they dismantle known tropes in favour of new configuration, create tension between improvistaion and form, The result is sometimes modest noise music, seomtimes manically danceable.
supporting film: MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
USA 1943 D: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, A: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 14’, 16mm
Proceeding from actual things, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON moves towards an implausible universe step by step. First, the hand of the protagonist places a flower, then the film disappears together with her to a distorted dream world, in which lookalikes meet, hooded figures glance out od mirrors and order falls apart. Time moves forward and backwards, leaves blanks, accelerates. In the end, a knife flashes, a mirror brakes and waves wash away the shards into the Atlantic.
Tickets: 10,00€ + fee • available at Culton Ticket (Peterssteinweg 9) and online via TixforGigs.
GEGENkino #5 is proudly announcing our cooperation with music plattform RASTER and visual artist Pedro Maia! Robert Lippok is exclusively adding a live score to the 16mm film WASTELAND, Grischa Lichtenberger and Mieko Suzuki will follow up with their audio peformances and all night long you can watch Raster video works on screens installed in the venue.
[Thanks a ton to PAUL NILLING for the poster (design, typeface, visual noise and all) for the event by the way!]
ROBERT LIPPOK adds live score to WASTELAND (2015, Pedro Maia, 30’, no dialogue, 3x16mm)
Subsequently: ROBERT LIPPOK (live set), GRISCHA LICHTENBERGER (live a/v set), MIEKO SUZUKI (dj set)
Plus: INSTALLATION of Raster video works
Pedro Maia: http://www.pedromaia.net/
Robert Lippok: https://soundcloud.com/robert-lippok
Grischa Lichtenberger: https://soundcloud.com/grischenka
Mieko Suzuki: https://soundcloud.com/mieko
Raster: https://www.youtube.com/user/rasternoton
For more than 20 years, Raster (formerly known as: Raster Noton) has established a label that not only stands for a specifically distinct techno and experimental sound, but also for a collective platform that frequently serves as basis for collaborations with artists from various disciplines. The evening will be opened by an encounter of digital and analogue: as a premiere and exclusively for GEGENkino, Robert Lippok adds a live score to WASTELAND, a 16mm-film performance of Portuguese artist Pedro Maia.
The title literally refers to the origin of the filmstrips shown: they are seemingly useless waste, faulty exposures, they are discarded material from an analogue film lab. The colours of WASTELAND are less reminiscent of barren or bleak landscapes but rather remind of Stan Brakhage’s chemical experiments. That means that after being exposed to toxic processes, the images turn into pure colour fields. Maia’s three projectors animate them, let fissures and stains flicker, let veinlets, scratches and debris whirl. After an additional live set by Robert Lippok, Grischa Lichtenberger will present his audiovisual live performance. Raster resident Mieko Suzuki will then end the showcase. Besides, various Raster video works are installed and displayed all night long. They are representative for the close involvement with computers and their audiovisual capabilities – a constant topic that steadily forms the objectives of the label.
Doors: 9 pm
Screening WASTELAND: 9.30 pm
Tickets: 12,00€ + fee • available at Culton Ticket (Peterssteinweg 9) and online via TixforGigs.
Out of the void! GEGENkino’s returning this year with its 5th edition!
This year (April 05 – 15, 2018), our central focus are the topics of protest and resistance. How can film behave and positiion itself considering the reality happening all around it? What logics and formats succeed in reaching for the empathetic sensors of the audience—how does a movement on screen get into the brains of the people?
Find a few answers maybe or some more questions emanating from these questions at GEGENkino 2018.
The logo design was done – as you may’ve recognized already – by beloved Raging Eyeball Ricaletto, as always responsible for GEGENgraphics. Check this out: http://ricaletto.blogsport.de
Hello dear GEGENkino friends,
if you’re clueless what movies to watch right now, here’s a couple of hints for you.
You may remember the hommage to Finnish filmmaker MIKA TAANILA with which we concluded this year’s GEGENkino festival. In case you’ve missed his latest feature length documentary RETURN OF THE ATOM (Atomin Paluu) he did in cooperation with JUSI EEROLA, you’ve got the chance to see it again now in cinemas, for example in CINEDING LEIPZIG.
Check www.cineding-leipzig.de for more information about the film and the screening dates.
Our hommage to Taanila somewhat became an hommage to his long-time collaborator MIKA VAINIO, because of his sudden death in April. Vainio worked together with Taanila on the soundtrack of RETURN OF THE ATOM among other projects. See the very beautiful documentary SÄHKO THE MOVIE about Mika Vainio, shot by Finnish musician JIMI TENOR, over at boilerrom.tv, and see below for some more information on Vainio and the film.
“Mika Vainio’s death in April 2017 sent shock waves rippling through the electronic music community. The late Finnish musician left an indelible mark on noise thanks to his roles in the ‘90s group Pan Sonic and record label Sähkö Recordings. Over the years, Vainio collaborated with Björk, Suicide’s Alan Vega, drone icon Stephen O’Malley and more.
Now, just months following his passing, Boiler Room has unearthed a mythic film about the Sähkö label. Artfully shot on 16mm by Jimi Tenor in 1995, SÄHKO THE MOVIE – a title fans have given the film in the absence of any official one – is a suitably abstract portrayal of the singular label in its prime. Finnish artists featured include Sähkö co-founder Tommi Grönlund, Mono Junk, Hertsi, IFÖ, and, of course, Mika Vainio himself.
The film tracks the Finnish unit at work in the studio making tracks on their trademark custom-built analogue equipment, hand-pressing limited edition vinyl releases and their eardrum rupturing yet delicate live performances.Outside of a few select festival screenings and those who own a rare VHS edition released by Blast First Petite, hardly anyone has seen the 44-minute film but this hasn’t stopped it attaining legendary status.“
