Cinema Can Do Autobiography: Berlin [Underground]

Every artistic expression, whether in film, art or architecture, is irrevocably linked to the autobiographical, as is also the case for the drawings by Heinz Emigholz which were printed in the Arsenal program magazine from 2008 to 2021. His film BERLIN [UNDERGROUND] shows 171 notebooks and sketch books from 2004 to 2021, nine U-Bahn stations in Berlin in 2019, two ads for a fictitious perfume brand and 67 trees on the streets of Buenos Aires filmed in the summer of 2019 whose roots push up through the sidewalks. Filmmaker Madhusree Dutta once gave the following answer to a question about a film “underground” in India: “We aren’t aware of any underground, where we are there is no cellar”. BERLIN [UNDERGROUND] is of a similar clarity. If the animated drawings, collages and writings represent an artistic testimony, the U-Bahn stations forms the real counterpart to an obsolete conception of the artistic underground, while the studies of trees and their roots document an active, organic deconstruction of architecture through nature. (stss)