At the beginning of the symposium (24.3), Nina Menkes will give a three-hour public masterclass about women in cinema from a feminist perspective entitled Cinematic Images of Women. Afterwards the film producer and dffb head Ben Gibson will talk with the Greek director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari about the new politics of image in her works and about how to organize aesthetic resistance to precarious production conditions. Cinema of the fantastic in the German-speaking realm will be the focus of the discussion in Gegen die Wirklichkeit?(25.3., in the Arsenal's event room on 4th floor). Nicolette Krebitz, Till Kleinert, Veronika Franz will speak with Christoph Hochhäusler and Marcus Seibert about how fantasy, desire, dreams and nightmares, essential components of our world, come into their own right in the cinema and about the role existing myths, conventions and genres of our film culture play in this context. In QUEEN OF DIAMONDS (1991) by Nina Menkes (25.3.), the protagonist Firdaus (Arabic for paradise) is a female croupier in Las Vegas who also cares for an elderly man. In the ensuing discussion Myth/Document (25.3.), Nina Menkes will talk to Nicolas Wackerbarth about her work between experiment and hypnosis. The silent protagonists of PROVENANCE (2013) by Amie Siegel (25.3.) are pieces of furniture designed by Le Corbusier, which are now rarities that trade for record sums on the global market. In Possible Images (25.3.), Amie Siegel will talk to Christoph Hochhäusler about "capitalist realism" and strategies of visualization in the era of immaterialism. In Wahrheit im Dokumentarischen(26.3., in the Arsenal's event room on 4th floor), Thomas Heise will shed light on reality as material and the reality of material. Realismus ist immer … (26.3., in the Arsenal's event room on 4th floor): A discussion between the film theorist Gertrud Koch and the film critic Ekkehard Knörer about realisms of the cinema in an era of total mediatization. In a talk entitled Nomadisches Kino? (26.3.), Sergei Loznitsa, Razvan Radulescu, Asli Özge talk with Nicolas Wackerbarth and Christoph Hochhäusler about the realistic notion of a new cinema of exile, in which an adopted home not infrequently plays an offscreen role, raising the question of how German cinema can open up to the talent of international artists without smoothing over their idiosyncrasies or appropriating them. (ch) This program is supported by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany with Funds through the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry for Economics and Energy (BMWi) and the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin.
Symposium: The Shock of the Real – Filmmakers in Dialogue
To celebrate its 50th birthday, the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) is not only looking back but to the future. Its "Shock of the Real" symposium focuses on questions that have always been key to the film academy. Each film asks “What is real?” but to attain the eponymous "Shock of the Real" the distance between perception and experience has to be forced open, tackled in a cinematic way. Searching for this wound is one of the challenges of all new "realistic" aesthetics. At the symposium, international filmmakers and artists will take apart new concepts of reality in lectures, panel discussions and podium talks. It will take place in cooperation with the film magazine "Revolver".
