EISENSTEIN. SCREEN LIFE: desktop-performance and essay films
In a special programme dedicated to 120th birthday of Sergey Eisenstein, video essayist Kevin B. Lee will perform as a desktop-mc and will present film essays on works of world cinema classic. Zoe Beloff's ingenuous reflections on Eisenstein's unrealized project entitled Glass House, as well as careful analysis of homoerotic allusions in his films, prepared by Mark Rappaport, will become a starting point for Kevin's audiovisual performance.
Kevin B. Lee is American filmmaker and researcher. He created more than 360 video essays which analyze movies and media. Developing this new form of audiovisual criticism, he switched to desktop film format. After presenting Zoe Beloff and Mark Rappaport works, Kevin will be exploring Internet in real time in attempt to discover, what can be learnt from Eisenstein heritage today - in the age of online video, digital filmmaking and the emergence of screen life, a genre of film narrative.
«Glass House»
Glass House by New York filmmaker and artist Zoe Beloff is based on Sergei Eisenstein's notes and drawings for a movie that he pitched to Paramount Studios in 1930. Its theme is the architecture of surveillance. He imagined a great skyscraper in which not only the walls but also the floors and ceilings were made of glass, a world of total visibility. He conceptualized this film as a satire on American capitalism featuring three characters, the Architect, the poet and the robot. He called it a comedy of and for the eye.
«SERGEI / SIR GAY»
In the film by American film critic Marc Rappaport SERGEI / SIR GAY Sergei Eisenstein, one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time, is also presented as a brilliant plastic artist. His thousands and thousands of drawings are superb—as are the hundreds of homoerotic drawings he made for his own amusement, never meant for publication. In this video, the homoerotic references in Eisenstein's films are examined and explored in ways that they never had been before.
Kevin B. Lee
Kevin B. Lee is a US-born, Germany-based filmmaker, artist and critic. Over the last ten years, he has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning "desktop documentary" Transformers: The Premake played in several festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival Critics Week. In 2017 he was the first-ever Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He is Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. His video work can be found at https://www.alsolikelife.com
Zoe Beloff
Zoe Beloff is an artist and filmmaker based in New York in museums, alternative art spaces and film festivals. Each project aims to connect the present to past so that it might illuminate the future in new ways. Her projects include The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926-1972, The Days of the Commune, A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood. She shows her work internationally; venues include the Museum of Modern Art New York, the MUKA Museum in Antwerp, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg.
Mark Rappaport
Mark Rappaport, after making more than a half a dozen shorts in the 60s and early 70s, made 5 features in the 70s—CASUAL RELATIONS (1973), MOZART IN LOVE (1975), LOCAL COLOR (1977). THE SCENIC ROUTE (1978) won The British Film Institute's Sutherland Award as «the most imaginative and innovative film of the year.» In the 90s, Rappaport began working in video with POSTCARDS (1990) a video narrative. ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES (1992), EXTERIOR NIGHT (1993) – another experimental video narrative, FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG (1995), THE SILVER SCREEN/COLOR ME LAVENDER (1997) and the short, JOHN GARFIELD (2002) followed.Rappaport has also been writing fiction and essays about films for over twenty years. Several of his pieces, written for the French film magazine, Trafic, were published in France in 2008 in the collection, The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much (Le Spectateur qui en savait trop).
PROGRAMME 2018