Ciné concert

Produced in 1927, Berlin: Symphony of a Big City is considered one of the most iconic urban symphonies of late-1920s European avant-garde cinema. Reflecting the thinking of Futurism, Walter Ruttmann painted the portrait of the German city during one day, from dawn to dusk. The era of industrialisation was at its peak; urban modernism had become a fashion. The "city symphony" became a fully-fledged film genre, whose characters were the railway, the dance of the trams, the magic of electricity and the roar of automobiles. From this rapidly-developing city arose a resounding combination of new sounds, now given a new dimension by musicians Simon Fisher Turner, Klara Lewis and Rainier Lericolais through a contemporary sound and musical creation.

“Having reached an age at which you think about getting your bags ready for the next world, I’m about to burn my life, to throw away all I’ve collected and accumulated for over half a century. Books, clothes, films, everything must, will disappear, in ashes and smoke. Funeral (on the art of dying) presents itself as the ‘last’ episode of my auto-cine-biographic work Babel, which covers over thirty years of my life. Funeral will bring this narration of life to its end. It can be considered as my last movie, as a will.” (Boris Lehman)

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

Focused on art, design, and photography, with the use of color as a unifying element, this program includes a striking selection of abstract and representational works. Joseph Cornell’s celebrated found-footage film Rose Hobart (1936) serves as a center around which circulates David Rimmer’s eye-popping Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970), T. Marie’s gorgeous minimalist video series Panchromes I, II, III (2014), Janie Geiser’s photo-collaged Flowers of the Sky (2016), William E. Jones’ appropriated images of labor and workers on foreign currency in Model Workers (2014), and Amit Dutta’s riff on the work of 18th century Indian miniature painter Nainsukh. Onscreen pre-show is Barry Doupé’s Lite-Brite-like video loop Dots (2016).