Festivalmotiv

ANDERS, MOLUSSIEN by Nicolas Rey (L’Abominable Paris)Saturday, 23 January 2016, 7:00 pm

Nicolas Rey (*1968) is a veteran of the Paris laboratory L'Abominable and with his feature-length film essays one of the film collective's force centres. His works captivate because of their unconventional mixture of analysis, stunning visuals and playful wit. Also in 'Anders, Molussien'. This time, the legendary novel 'The Molussian Catacomb' by novelist and philosopher Günther Anders served as reference for the film. Written in the early 1930s, shortly before Anders escaped from Germany, the story of an imaginary totalitarian empire remained unpublished for a long time. Nicolas Rey adapted the novel, that has only been published in German so far, in his usual unconventional manner and complemented the puzzling migration story with a film which forms ever new shapes with every single screening.
A film in nine reels/chapters, screened in cross-processed 16mm, shown in random order, based on fragments from'The Molussian Catacomb' (1932–36), a novel by Günther Anders. Prisoners in cells of an imaginary fascist state, Molussia, transmit stories to one another about the outside world, in the form of series of philosophical fables. There are 362,880 ways of arranging the nine reels, and so one can reasonably regard every screening as a world premiere.

Comments:
'Nine reels of fabulous 16mm material, eight of which present the allegories from Günther Anders' 1992 posthumously published novel 'The Molussian Catacomb' which expose the fascist elements of capitalism – and vice versa. The order of the film sequences, which means, the stories and the method by which certain motifs, aesthetic strategies and cinematic arrangements are introduced and elaborated, are interchangeable. What the material has in common is the colours and the texture. Only few works combine cinematic sensibility and marxist dialectic this perfectly.' - Olaf Müller, Film Comment
'I wanted to make a film based on a novel which I could not read, because it was only published in a language I don't understand. No translation existed. It's all a question of trust and intuition. I only knew the framework of the plot: Prisoners, incarcerated in the dungeons of the fictional fascist state Molussia, tell tales about the outside world and philosophical fables. Today I can say that I was right: The novel contains a profound timeliness.' - Nicolas Rey

„Anders, Molussien“ a Film by Nicolas Rey FR 2012, 81min, 16 mm

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1980 Jamaica Animationsstudio bei JBC 2