Ute Aurand: 03

1 April, 2017 - 22:15
Paddenhoek

Ute Aurand has been a central figure of Berlin’s experimental film scene since the 1980s and is one the most significant filmmakers active in the diary and portrait tradition today. In making her 16mm portraits, she often films her subjects over many years, thereby stressing the inseparability between living and filming for the avant-garde filmmaker. Aurand’s work celebrates the here and now, the people she meets, the places she visits, the very fact of being alive. Hers is an honest, energetic and vibrant cinema, one in which joy can even be found in sadness. “The diaristic form develops out of an inner dialogue with my surroundings, a silent visual conversation. The source of inspiration is daily life, the fountain which never stops and offers itself to everyone. It is a great joy and challenge to transform my inner dialogue into film.” Her films propose a courageous filmmaking which is as radical as it is poetic.

Rather than providing a comprehensive retrospective of Aurand’s work, these 3 Artist in Focus programs offer insight into key motifs of her practice, with an emphasis on films made during the past 10 years. 

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In the presence of Ute Aurand.

Notebook

Marie Menken
,
US
,
1940
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
10'

Notebook (1940-1962) is arguably Marie Menken’s best known film, and its great beauty lies in its simplicity and variety — it is as if we were seeing her whole body of filmic work condensed in this scrapbook, which consists of nine films or film- fragments, which she shot between the late forties and the early sixties. This open, new filmic form encouraged many filmmakers to show fragments and hardly edited films and incorporate them in autobiographical and dairy films. Marie Menken herself said about Notebook: ‘They are too tiny or too explicit for a remark, but one or two are my dearest children’.” (Ute Aurand)

Kleine Blumen, kleine Blätter (Little Flowers, Little Leaves)

Jón Sigurgeiersson, Angelika Levi, Franz von Lucke, Renate Sami, Detel Aurand, Ulrike Pfeiffer, Bärbel Freund, Karl Heil, Yael Bedarshi, Susan Turcot & Ute Aurand
,
DE
,
1995
,
16mm
,
colour
,
48'

“I asked 10 friends, filmmakers and non-filmmakers, to make a film about the Seasons — a child, an 80 year old, a painter, two artists and filmmaker friends, I also made one.” (Ute Aurand)

Envío No. 26

Jeannette Muñoz
,
CL
,
2013
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
6'

Envíos (letters) are moments in photography and film that I dedicate and send to particular persons. Thoughts, sensations, images transmitted by the Envíos are fragments of life made possible through encountering those persons. In the Envíos these fragments return, or move towards another place of reference. Each Envío is a consignment in a small cardboard box, consisting of a film reel or photography and accompanying text. Envío No. 26 is for Fernando Orrega and Reinhardt Schulz and was filmed in El Volcan, Chile.” (Jeannette Muñoz)

Venedig Dezember 2011 (Venice December 2011)

Renate Sami
,
DE
,
2013
,
video
,
colour
,
4'

Now in her 80s, Renate Sami has been making films since 1975, each work emerging from a strong desire to make that particular film. Whether long or short films, shot on 16mm, MiniDV or HD, with or without sound, dialogue or music — what they all have in common is the special inner freedom with which Renate Sami gives every film its form. As its explicit title implies, Venedig Dezember 2011 is a subjective record of a visit to Venice in winter.