Directors Lounge

You Say Festival-We Say Party II

Thursday, 12. April, Naherholung Sternchen

After the huge success of the first party of all Berlin Filmfestivals during The 8th Berlin International Directors Lounge it was only a question of time to set up a new edition.

Thursday, 12th of April, will be the your second chance to party with all the movers and shakers of the Berlin Film Universe. We start with a wild mix of shorts selected by the hosting festivals around 8pm, followed by

Doro & Tobi Filmmusic

Youngbois Italo Disco

Ångstrøm Electro

The incredible Yip Yips Electro

Enough Festivals To Kill A Rhino.

admission 5 Euro

(more at Festiwelt-Berlin | Partys 2012)

From Remembering to Rising/Internal Dialogues

Sunday, 15. April, at the [DL] homebase (RSVP)

KOK Siew Wai, video artist and director of Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival (KLEX), the experimental festival of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will present a selection of Asian films and of her own work in our homebase, Petersburger Platz. Come and meet Siew Wai, get to know more about the festival and about experimental video arts in Malaysia.

A. KLEX Screening: From Remembering to Rising (45 min)

This is a special selected KLEX program that consists of video works from Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan, literally or indirectly exploring the themes of nostalgia, recollection, memory and internal dialogues.

The human brain is the most fundamental agent of archiving. Like it or not, it records everything every single moment. After the recording, some materials are remained while others are discarded, and then some are twisted, created (out of the absence of a desired memory) and re-created (perhaps because it’s too painful?). Memories are stored in different forms: image, sound, smell… that eventually provokes emotions. What is “real”? What we “see”, or “experience”, or what we “remember”? Sometimes, the brain records a journey with rapidly changing images and sensations. In those split seconds, which image and sensation will remain in our consciousness and enforce new actions?  (KOK Siew Wai)

Program:

When the Time Without My Memories (2010, Malaysia, 4:55 min/sound)

Alison KHOR

For my parents: A time that never occurs in my memory but were their most precious moments in life.

Omokage

SATAKE Maki (2010, Japan, 6:20 min/sound)

My parents and grandfather took a lot of photographs and videos in my childhood. I am searching for the world in the interstice of the record and the memories.

PERHAPS (2006, Malaysia, 8:50 min/sound)

KOK Kai-Foong

Women in Love.

PASSING II (2009, Malaysia, 6:30 min/sound)

AU Sow-Yee

Moving in city, as if chasing the speed of light but was eventually pulled back onto the earth.

Sky Don’t Fall (2011, Japan, 3:11 min/sound)

NAKAMURA Akiko

I’m watching the sky

I wanna make sure the sky don’t fall

The Endless Steps (2007, Indonesia, 6:30 min/sound)

Maulana M. PASHA

The artist is going to find his friend and he asks for the directions. By the end of the conversation, he still doesn’t have a clear idea how to get there!

The First Rain (Meditation 1) (2012, Japan/Thailand, 11:00 min/sound)

TAMBATA Koji

This work is coming after my video project ‘Music Works’ and ‘Pre-Music Consciousness’ and is much more personal in a certain sense. One of intentions is juxtaposing images to get organic movements and reach the final result with process of it. Fragments taken from everyday life is going to reach some kind of reality eventually. In this time living in Thailand is one of influential aspects and the title, The First Rain is named by being witness of crucial moment of something. And here will be coming beautiful raining season after beautiful long dry season… (Koji Tambata)

B: Solo Video Screening: Internal Dialogues (58 min)

Short Artist’s Statement:

This special selected programme features works from 2002 until 2011. In general, my inspiration for artmaking comes from “the little things in everyday life”. I’m interested in observing “what is happening at the moment” - watching, hearing and feeling it, trying to understand and to interact with it, in different ways and forms that are interrelated. Much insights and wisdoms are discovered from the most honest, humble and banal daily happenings. The question is: Can we see it? I often use humble daily life experiences as “case studies” to explore the uniqueness of “living”. To me, understanding the very basics of “living” is a very practical yet significant inquisition.

Face (s)(2002, 7:00 min/silent)

Duet (2003, 8:35 min/sound)

The Breath of Time(2005, 13:00 min/sound)

Morning (2010, Malaysia, 3:50 min/sound)

Ching Ming Festival (2011, 13:00 min/sound)

pictured: Face (s) (2002, by KOK Siew Wai, 7:00 min/silent)

free admission, space is limited: RSVP

photo: kt/DL

THE GREAT SWIM ACROSS THE CHANNEL

“Swimming” in Berlin, Privatclub, 27.03.12

John Sampson is a good guy. More than that, he’s a good singer, a very good one, and the young Englishmen surrounding him on stage are good too, at least from the sound of things. Surprisingly good, to be more precise. Swimming by name, they are playing to nodding heads and swaying bodies in Berlin’s Privatclub, not their first trip to this city. The music is a shifting mix of fibrous tonal guitar waves punctuated by John’s quavering vocal trail, itself a hybrid of conversational melodic statement and benevolent falsetto. Not bombast and not understatement, the music is also much more than simply a comfortable compromise in between. The band is loud, and guitar strings are occasionally attacked to within an inch of their existence. This goes over very well. Despite the low ceiling in the venue and its determination to throw the sound back at the audience in a distorted din, the band plays like there was a great blue sky over their heads. Drummer Peter Sampson is concentrated and of athletic aim, while guitarist Joff Spittlehouse, bassist Blake Pearson and keyboardist Sam Potter veer between solid stance and more fluid moves.

Among the throng is multi-award-winning filmmaker Simon Ellis, who has come down from Hamburg, where he is working on a trailer for the Hamburg Short Film Festival, to see his friends play, although they’ll be in the Hanseatic City the next day for the last stop of this tour. Theirs is a fruitful trade-off, with Ellis making most of the band’s videos, and Swimming providing inspiration for Ellis, as with the film “Binaural Swimming (Beach)”, which had its World Premiere during Ellis’s retrospective at [DL8] (the 8^th Berlin International Directors Lounge) in February this year. He brought John along for the occasion.

The show increases in intensity before ending, with the guys on stage moving their well-meaning assault on their instruments up to a tornado-grade rush of layered melodic energy before bidding good night and disappearing into the relative sanctuary of backstage. The feeling on the ground is good, like seeing after-images of fireworks, but in your ears. Swimming has surely just added to their followers. Norwegian indie-stars Megaphonic Thrift, also playing here tonight, are luckily not in competition.

Outside after, I chat a bit with the singer. John gets my vote if anyone’s looking to cast St. Francis of Assisi. Already in Berlin in February, moving around the goings-on at [DL8], he displayed some of that hypnotizing inner peace that is a rarity in people who can belt their lungs out. Now, on the subject of the current state of things, he talks of “shedding old skin”and quickly correlates this to the name of the new single, “All Things Made New,” from the optimistically titled Ecstatics International. Sam, the keyboardist, is a new man on board, replacing Andy Wright. What else is changing? Before I can follow this line, a demure voice asks something. Two Russian girls have made their way to the show and speak in quite good English, but with enough accent to make them exotic. They seem shy. They talk to John but appear anxious to meet his brother, Peter. They first encountered him when he played in the far-flung Russian industrial city Perm, a million inhabitants sidled up near to the European side of the Urals. Peter, it should be noted, has a musical alter-ego: as THePETEBOX (the preferred configuration of capitals and lower-case), he has a fanbase all his own, and it is a widespread one. Blake joins us and he and John sign CDs for the girls. The latter win points with me by understanding my Russian.

Peter emerges from inside. He is somewhat harder-edged in appearance than his brother John, looking a bit like he’s seen some underbellies John might have been spared. They may yet come. It’s a good bet that Swimming won’t be submerging all too soon. When the girls address him, he seems polite enough but somewhat tired and not sure who they might be. They talk some more; he sifts through his memory and then places them. Peter is a busy man, with THePETEBOX doing his thing on various continents, and Swimming (and another project, We Show Up On Radar) filling in what time is left. THePETEBOX gets around to places Swimming has yet to hit.

Sometimes, it seems, it can go the other way around, with the audience coming to you. John tells me a girl once travelled from Marseille to London to see a Swimming gig, and ended up living with the (then) keyboardist. How far do you have to go to keep a fanbase? Or, the other way: does being a musician really have that many perks?

Another girl approaches. She is German, but first saw the band when living in Britain. She talks to Blake, who seems unassuming, not the one you’d pick to be the art-man of the outfit, but the covers and other paraphernalia are, I’m told, made up of images from his hand and mind. As far as I can make out, in hiding behind another moniker. Another alter-ego. When Joff (a.k.a. Jonathan) joins them, John and I get back to talking about what’s afoot these days. This brings us to Simon Ellis. They met back in Nottingham when Ellis came to a gig of theirs and said “a lot of nice things” about them afterward. Ellis has since dedicated a great deal of time to the boys from his home town, and it seems to be paying off. As well, they have begun to pay back in individual style – at least John. Presently, he is doing the music to Ellis’s trailer for the Hamburg Short Film Festival. Anything like Swimming?, I want to know. “Dance beats,” he answers. Not really what Swimming sounds like, even of their last album is pop-friendlier than the debut The Fireflow Trade. Talking of his efforts, he refreshingly uses pictures to describe sounds, rather than references to instruments and studio tricks. The music he is working to achieve here will feel like “flying at low level, low enough to see the whites of your eyes from the ground.” It is left to me to figure just how you put this into music, but I appreciate this visual-to-musical leap. He thinks the way I do.

It all sounds like a well-oiled machine. No catastrophes to speak of tonight either, save Blake’s hand catching fire backstage from a flaming Sambuca. All quiet on the continental front, eardrum-threatening volume aside. Did you make any mistakes tonight, I ask. “Nothing but mistakes, a united intent of mistakes,” he quips, his eyes gleaming. No, these guys haven’t made any major mistakes yet, from the looks of things.

And from here…? “I don’t know, world domination?” John laughs. Joff is now listening in, his demeanour loose and relaxed, although John says he is the one whose fingers can move in blur speed on the guitar. “The next album will be imbedded directly in your mind, like in that movie with the dreams….” He fights to come up with the name; Joff helps him recall it. “Yeah, like in Inception.” No question about their wanting to come in through the front door, maybe without knocking.

The world may belong to them yet. Right now, on a planet peopled by the bad and the good, Swimming still number among the good guys. And fairly high on the scale, too.

(Kenton Turk)

Swimming in the private club

One not to miss if in Berlin. You have seen swimming on the silver screen, documented by Simon Ellis and shown in world premiere at The 8th Berlin International Directors Lounge. Now the boys are coming to town, playing Tuesday 27. March at the private club supporting the Megaphonic Thrift, a Norwegian indie-supergroup of sorts.

pictured: Binaural Swimming (beach) by Simon Ellis

Amusement Park of Glowing Dreams

Filmmaker and Directors Lounge fixture Klaus W. Eisenlohr took the gathering on hand at Z-Bar’s screening space (22.03.12) on a rollercoaster ride to and through the Atomic Age’s forbidden zones with his curated program “Pripyat – The Uncanny of Modernity”. Not only Pripyat, Chernobyl’s ghost-ridden neighbouring city, but also other nuclear oddities were shown in light of a global fascination whose half-life is not yet known. This aesthetic preoccupation and its uneasy place in the nuclear discussion were at the heart of the selection, rather than any purely documentary vehicles or didactic essays. Several films in the 90-minute set were little more (but nothing less) than hazy imagery, as in the opener, Anders Weberg’s Peaceful Atom (SE), a multi-planed soup of impressionistic smears revealing forms and sounds. Nicky Larkin’s Pripyat (IE) followed, with static shots accompanied by howling winds and the incessant buzzing of flies. The deserted city emerges as a modern-day Angkor Wat, with radiation as the unseen jungle. Black figures painted on walls hark back to Pompeii’s ashen corpses, victims of a similarly sudden fate. Finally, Lenin’s face emerges, as lifeless and frozen in time as the scene he presides over. Immaterial Meshup (Sarah Breen Lovett, AU) opens on a television and takes us swiftly to futuristic cityscapes of Metropolis and Blade Runner, uniformly black and white and swathed in aphorisms. Other standouts included Gair Dunlop’s Atom Town: Life After Technology (UK), running newsreel propaganda footage on the Dounreay facility in split screen next to mostly colour updates of the same scenes, silent sentries to a then unknown future (its sentimentally greeted disengagement), wordlessly speaking louder than the narrator’s voice from the screen’s other half. Vanessa Renwick’s Portrait #2: Trojan (US) puts an atomic silo before intensified sunset views resembling Group of Seven stylization, then lets us witness the controlled demolition of the ominous tower. Eisenlohr’s own Phantasma Pripyat (DE) wove cascading found footage between flutter-by landscapes and computer games into a look at Elena Filatova’s counterfeit motorcycle tour in the forbidden zone around Chernobyl. Ribbon text website comments chase snippets of facts and each other so that the viewer is swimming in a sea of truths, half-truths and outright lies or flights of fancy that well represent the muddle of (mis)information that characterized the event. A discussion followed the films, with varying views on the attraction to voyeurism and its legitimacy. Eisenlohr’s Urban Research presentations run with monthly regularity, offering windows to the grand scheme of things cosmopolitan. In addition, they provide thematic pillars in the annual Berlin International Directors Lounge, back for its ninth incarnation in February 2013. Kenton Turk

pictured: Phantasma Pripyat by Klaus W.Eisenlohr

The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited

read more at placeboKatz: The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited

pictured: Ann Magnuson when she was the manager of Club 57

photo by Robert Carrithers

Pripyat — the Uncanny of Modernity

Thursday, 22 March 2012, 9pm, Z-Bar

One year after the Fukushima disaster and 26 years after the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor, the discussion on civil nuclear energy has again reached the “normality” of planning for new power plants. Over the same time, Pripyat the destroyed young Sowjet city, now situated in Ukraine, has gained an eerie attraction. Firstly presented in Freiburg DE, the collected films allow a discussion of the human imagination triggered by nuclear energy and nuclear disasters beyond excited press news.

Presented by Klaus W. Eisenlohr. The film program comprises films representing visions of the abandoned city of Pripyat by artists and documentary filmmakers, and imaginations of futures under the influence of “peaceful nuclear energy”.

Artists list:
Hanne Adam + Thierry Buysse,
Klaus W. Eisenlohr,
Gair Dunlop,
Andrea Slavik,
Vanessa Renwick,
Anders Weberg,
Sarah Breen Lovett,
Nicky Larkin,
Julio Soto

More infos at: richfilm

Z-Bar
Bergstr. 2
D-10115 Berlin-Mitte

U-Rosenthaler Platz

Pripyat — the Uncanny of Modernity

Thursday, 22 March 2012
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstr. 2
D-10115 Berlin-Mitte

U-Rosenthaler Platz

One year after the Fukushima disaster and 26 years after the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor, the discussion on civil nuclear energy has again reached the “normality” of planning for new power plants. Over the same time, Pripyat the destroyed young Sowjet city, now situated in Ukraine, has gained an eerie attraction. Firstly presented in Freiburg DE, the collected films allow a discussion of the human imagination triggered by nuclear energy and nuclear disasters beyond excited press news.

Presented by Klaus W. Eisenlohr. The film program comprises films representing visions of the abandoned city of Pripyat by artists and documentary filmmakers, and imaginations of futures under the influence of “peaceful nuclear energy”.

Artists list:
Hanne Adam + Thierry Buysse,
Klaus W. Eisenlohr,
Gair Dunlop,
Andrea Slavik,
Vanessa Renwick,
Anders Weberg,
Sarah Breen Lovett,
Nicky Larkin,
Julio Soto

More infos at:
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesPripyat2012.html

A Kiss for Mihai Grecu

Mihai Grecu´s “We´ll Become Oil”, screened during The 8th Berlin International Directors Lounge just received a “KISS” as the Best Animation at the prestigous Tampere Film Festival 2012.

Congrats. Well deserved.

The F-Stops Here

Directors Lounge/c.a.r. at the Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA) with Andreas Müller-Pohle, Rosetta Messori, Alejandro Bernal, Wenhua Shi.

March 10 to April 13, 2012
Opening reception: Saturday, March 10, 2012, 6 to 9pm


Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA) and Contemporary Art Ruhr (C.A.R.) are proud to present The F-Stops Here — a special cross-cultural photography exhibit featuring LAAA photo-based artists alongside international photographers.

Jurors: Silvia Sonnenschmidt & Thomas Volkmann

Special guest: Directors Lounge/C.A.R. with Andreas Müller-Pohle, Rosetta Messori, Alejandro Bernal, Wenhua Shi.

Los Angeles, Gallery 825, Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA), 825 North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

read more here (german)

pictured: Araki at Work, SV  12 min  1996/2011 by Andreas Mueller-Pohle