Homage | Rainer Komers | PLACES, WORDS, RHYTHMS

Homage | RAINER KOMERS

Homage to the documentarist Rainer Komers

Rainer Komers (*1944) is a German documentary filmmaker, cameraman, graphic artist and writer whose precisely crafted and carefully narrated short and feature-length documentary films are waiting to be widely discovered beyond a specialised audience. Komers mostly shoots “travelogues”, in which he takes a look – attentive, from a certain distance, often critical – at the mentalities, living and everyday spaces of people whose culture is not his own. His cinema is one of picked up modes of speaking and rhythms. It is a quiet, unagitated cinema that could also be described as a “counter-cinema” due to its rejection of classic reportage modes, such as contextualising classifications of what is seen – without appearing militant. 

The films deliberately allow for non-understanding – they do not suggest that as an outsider in a foreign place, you could get a complete picture of its uniqueness. Komers makes film mosaics. Once they move into familiar territory, you don’t get the impression that it’s about the filmmaker himself: the people portrayed are an active part in the whole. A feeling for the “country and its people” is built up in them piece by piece; Komers is interested in the small, the detailed views, as well as the whole that appears in them – the total view.

Komers was born in 1944 in Guben, Brandenburg. After working as a printmaker, he studied film at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and has been making numerous documentary films since the late 1970s. As early as 1980, his medium-length film ZIGEUNER IN DUISBURG, which takes a critical look at the contemporary living conditions of Sinti and Roma people, won the German Film Critics’ Award. This was followed by the Ruhr Prize for Art and Science in 2006 and the ARTE Documentary Film Prize at the Duisburg Film Week in 2019 for his feature-length landscape, city and artist portrait BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA. In addition to more than 30 of his own directorial works, in which he is always his own cameraman, Komers is closely associated with the work of the significant German documentary filmmaker Peter Nestler (*1937) as a cinematographer to this day. 

The homage aims to pay tribute to the diversity of Komers’ oeuvre in three programmes. Different forms of his aforementioned “travelogues” will be presented as well as a concentrated look at the Ruhr region so familiar to him, an area of upheavals, myths and grievances. We are delighted that Rainer Komers will be present at all of the programmes and that he makes the films of our selection, most of which were produced on analogue material, available to us on historical film prints. Moreover, we offer you an insight into his artistic work beyond film: on the third date of the homage, Komers will be reading a selection of his poems, while screen-printed posters designed by him in the 1960s and 70s, which have since found their way into the museum, will be hanging at Luru Kino.

11.09.24 Luru Kino
7 pm	B 224 DE 1999, D: Rainer Komers, 23‘, Doc, no dialogue, 35mm ZIGEUNER IN DUISBURG DE 1980, D: Rainer Komers, 37‘, Doc, OV with English subtitles, DCP EIN SCHLOSS FÜR ALLE DE 1997, D: Rainer Komers, 44‘, Doc, German version, File In the presence of Rainer Komers
12.09.24 Luru Kino
7 pm	BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA DE/US 2018, D: Rainer Komers, 76’, Doc, OV wit German subtitles, DCP NOME ROAD SYSTEM DE/US 2004, D: Rainer Komers, 26’, Doc, no dialogue, 35mm In the presence of Rainer Komers
9 pm	Rainer Komers reads a selection of his poetry KOBE DE/JP 2006, D: Rainer Komers, 45‘, Doc, no dialogue, 35mm  MA’RIB DE/YE 2007, D: Rainer Komers, 30‘, Doc, no dialogue, 35mm In the presence of Rainer Komers