A society affirms itself in rituals and symbols, with any attack on these usually unleashing a storm of indignation. By making use of research, artistic distancing techniques, and interventions in public space, the films of the short film program "Beyond Evidence" (3.10., guest: Lutz Henke) explore the relationship between mass media, populism, and the production of fear, as well as structural xenophobia and extreme right radicalism in Germany. TREMBLING TIME(Yael Bartana, The Netherlands 2001) transforms the minute of silence for the fallen soldiers of Israel on the national holiday into an eerie image of collective behavior. In DER FALL JOSEPH (Sweden 2003), Petra Bauer reconstructs the events that lead to the death of Joseph Abdulla at an open-air swimming pool in Sebnitz in June 1997. Cana Bilir-Meier's film SEMRA ERTAN(Germany/Austria 2013) is dedicated to Semra Ertan, who moved to West Germany from Turkey in 1972 with her parents and publicly immolated herself ten years later as a protest against racism in her new home. By looking at the example of the heated media debate about the two white US flags that suddenly appeared on the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York in 2014, SYMBOLIC THREATS(Mischa Leinkauf, Lutz Henke, Matthias Wermke, Germany 2015) questions art's scope for taking action in society.InENLIGT LAG (Sweden 1957), Hans Nordenström and Peter Weiss document the youth prison of Uppsala as a place of human debasement: an everyday occurrence for what wasn't seen as "normal" in 1950s Sweden. Showing life on the margins of society represents a recurring theme of political cinema. LA ESTANCIA(Federico Adorno, Paraguay 2014) recalls the massacre of Curuguaty in June 2012, whereby small farmers occupied state-owned land claimed by a company, with their protest being violently put down. In LA IMPRESIÓN DE UNA GUERRA(Colombia/France 2015), Camilo Restrepo is concerned with the violence ubiquitous in Colombia for decades now. Steffi Wurster's new film POSTEN NR. 6(Germany 2016) is about a trilateral peace outpost on the edge of the security zone between Moldova and the separatist region of Trasnistria. By looking at the traces of repression and war, the films of the short film program "Traces of Violence" (4.10., guest Steffi Wurster) present different strategies for making things visible. MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO(Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba 1968, 11.10.) tells the story of an affluent amateur writer, played by Sergio Corrieri, during the revolution in Havana in 1961. It observes the changes, attempts to remember the previous era, and understand the new one. Gutiérrez Alea edited documentary and newsreel footage into the fictional plot and thus created one of the most profound reflections on the Cuban revolution.San Francisco, Santiago, Athens – the city streets have always been places and signifiers of the battle for social, economic, and political change. Which images are created in the process here, who is represented and who is not, and who represents themselves in what way? The documentary depiction of reality in film always represents a form of taking sides, emphasizes Peter Watkins in THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME(Deimantas Narkevičius, Lithuania 2003). The short film program "Images of Change" (11.10., guest Daphne Hérétakis) begins with SECRETS FROM THE STREET: NO DISCLOSURE (Martha Rosler, USA 1980), a critical observation of the relationship between culture and power in San Francisco's Mission District. SOMOS + (Pedro Chaskel, Pablo Salas, Chile 1985) documents a protest by the Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life) against the Pinochet regime. InICI RIEN (France/Greece 2011), Daphne Hérétakis creates a portrait of the district of Exarhia in Athens that is framed by turmoil and poetry in equal measure, revealing the deep crisis in Greece. In THE ANATOMY OF VIOLENCE (Peter Davis, United Kingdom/Canada 1967, 17.10.) and AFSAN'S LONG DAY (THE YOUNG MAN WAS, PART 2)by Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh 2014, 17.10.), the question of violence and resistance in the history of the radical Left is explored in different ways: Peter Davis documents the Dialectics of Liberation congress which took part in London in 1967 and included such participants as Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, and Carolee Schneemann, while Mohaiemen contrasts the political turmoil in the 1970s Bangladesh with the German Autumn, inspired by the diaries of historian Afsan Chowdhury.Eric Baudelaire's feature THE UGLY ONE(France 2013,17.10.) is based on a script by Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, who lived for over two decades in the Beirut underground. With the story of Lili (Juliette Navis) and Michel (Rabih Mroué), Baudelaire continually departs from Adachi's text: the painful recollection of a terrorist act and the loss of a child. Not least in relation to the insolvable political situation in the Middle East, THE UGLY ONErevolves around the impossibility of reconciling the biographical, documentary, and fictional elements of film. In FACTORY COMPLEX(South Korea 2014, 18.10., guest Sun-ju Choi), Im Heung-soon shows the exploitation of unskilled female works in South Korea since the 1970s. Both then and now, the women fight for basic rights and appropriate pay for their work in textile and electronics factories, which is often damaging to their health – places where products of the global consumerist culture are produced. Alternating between documentary and art, FACTORY COMPLEX won the Silver Lion at the 56th Art Biennale in Venice in 2015 (fw)Curated by Florian Wüst. A project by HAU Hebbel am Ufer in cooperation Arsenal. Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation as part of "The Aesthetics of Resistance– Peter Weiss 100", a festival by HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
The Aesthetics of Resistance – Peter Weiss 100
Although Peter Weiss is primarily known as a writer and playwright, he began his artistic career as a painter. After he immigrated to Sweden, it was his feeling of being foreign, his insecurity, and existential distress in exile that governed his exhausting search for new forms of expression. In the 50s, Weiss finally turned his attention to the moving image. He shot a total of 18 experimental, documentary, and fiction films, of which four fragments remain, before he made his long hoped-for literary breakthrough with the short novel The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman. Weiss’s film work marked the transition from an interior view marked by surrealism to an engagement with social reality in the divided world of the Cold War. In his documentaries, a detailed view on people and places emerges, while the meticulous treatment of facts and life stories that would later play such a major role in The Aesthetics of Resistance is also alluded to. Weiss doesn’t create a closed image of history, but rather the actions of his figures are pervaded by individual standpoints and contradictions. Peter Weiss's thoughts on oppositions, "eaten away by the disease of doubt, the difficulty of deciding for one thing, back and forth, fluctuations with work, in the past painting-writing, theatre-film, Swedish language-German language", as he puts it in his notebooks, carry an important productive power in his art. Before this backdrop, this film series, which already began in September, is dedicated to the relationship between aesthetic and political subjectivity in relationship to resistance and social change. The compilation of historical and contemporary films from across the world and short film programs brings several of Weiss's recurring themes up to date – from the eternal exploitation of human work and the power of capital via the battle against repression and inequality, racism and fascism, all the way to the horror of war and the question of violence as a means of revolutionary politics.
