"Stay in the costume and stay in the frame": Maximilian’s Darkroom turns the viewer into the protagonist of himself: the individual among the masses at the Berlinale. A spectator’s head covers the open back wall of a “darkroom”, his face is as large as the screen, and nothing but his gaze fills the room. A magic lantern of a special kind, one that comprehends the early period of cinema as avant-garde: a space open to extreme aesthetic experience. The transitions from silent film to performance and queer cinema are fluid. For it is the bodies – those of the spectators and of performers Antonija Livingstone and Antonia Baehr as Fritz and Iacob – which enact themselves, the stage and the cinema.
Maximilian's Darkroom
Anne Quirynen
Germany 2004
6 min.
