Festivalmotiv

DORE O.Friday 22 March 2019, 7.00 pm

Guest: Dore O.; Curation: Masha Matzke, filmologist, curator and archivist at the Deutsche Kinemathek; Organization: Sabine Kues

* from the archive of / in collaboration with the Deutsche Kinemathe

The films of Dore O. (born in 1946, Mühlheim on the Ruhr, Germany) seem to claim a certain uniqueness and independence from the dominant, yet diverse and irreducible currents of German experimental cinema. As the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt declared already in 1988: »Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing ... It's time to proclaim loudly that Dore O.’s work is unique in German avant-garde film, since 'Jüm-Jüm' [...] she retains her independence also within independent film.«
The timeless originality and power of her work is all the more perceivable today, when many dogmas such as those of the political, feminist or structural film and the contemporary accusations of trivial aestheticism have lost their hegemony. Dore O.'s concern lies in the creation of an associative, almost pre-conscious flow of images and sounds and the deliberation of their sensuality, which cannot be easily interpreted or be approached verbally and intellectually. Unlike the overly formalistic structuralism of many of her contemporaries, her painterly and poetic films nevertheless testify to a constantly renewed examination of the geometric two-dimensional conditions of the cinematic image through a filmic reality which is experienced and captured foremost as images unfolding themselves in multilayered tableaus and multiple frames through the rhythmic counterplay of depth and surface, of transparency and opacity, exteriority and interiority, stillness and motion oscillating between immersion and conscious perception, hypnosis and clarity. Going beyond the purely personal her work thwarts the logics of distinct classification in its intimate and enigmatic poetics. »Dore O takes the original material for her films from her private domain [...] She works in the tradition of Brakhage in that she presents reality through the interpretation of her own emotions.« (Birgit Hein) As in no other work in the context of German experimental film her oeuvre speaks of a cross-fertilization of various aesthetic preoccupations avantgarde film discourse has identified throughout its history: from JÜM-JÜM onwards (her first film in collaboration with her former husband Werner Nekes) a historical trajectory is re-traced and brought into play in which painterly, graphic or poetic conceptions of the medium were increasingly shaped and made over into distinctly cinematic terms and in which those eventually served as a mean for representing new modes of subjectivity and states of consciousness. This personal poetic is inextricably linked to the formal exploration of the cinematic image, the visionary and representation itself. As the first female filmmaker Dore O. won the First prize at the 5th International Experimental-Film Competition in Knokke (Belgium) for her film KASKARA. The highly musical nature of these pictorial stratifications and orchestrations of image layers is carried over into her late works of the 1990s (XOANON). For more than four decades, Dore O. studied in the layers of celluloid the nature and sensations of her phantomlike self and of those figures of absence in front of her camera "to create new architectures of old forms-such as windows, a door, a man." (Dore O.)

Programme:
ALASKA
16mm / 18min / color / 1968 / sound: Dore O.
«An emigration film: a dream of myself, the consequences of the act with society.» (Dore O.)

LAWALE
16mm / 30min / color / 1969 / camera: Jochen Gottlieb / sound: Dore O.
«Memory is a cruel hope without awakening.» (Dore O.)

KASKARA
16mm / 21min / color / 1974 / sound: Anthony Moore / with: Werner and Rona Nekes «A balance of being enclosed in divided space.» (Dore O.)

XOANON
16mm / 11min / color / 1994 / camera: Serge Roman, Dore O. / sound: Peter Eisold / with: Afrane Adje Twumm, Ricardo Mosquera
«Placeless and bodiless these images describe in their sequence the secret order and structure of th espace by means of appearing and disappearing, rising and falling. Like sand in which the painter draws his lines over and over again.» (Karin Stempel)

----------------------------stills----------------------------

Filmstill:Kaskara, Dore O., 16mm, 21 min., 1974, image: Deutsche Kinemathek

Filmstill: Alaska