Urban Research on Film
“spectra of space”
Directors Lounge – contemporary art and media – Berlin
October 27, 2016
http://urban-research.eu/DL2016/framesUR-Spectra.html
directors lounge monthly screenings
The idea of scale in architectural contemplations reflects on the meaning of the space, also scale connects with urban topology and contemporary ideas of social geography. Social, political, or personal impacts may be seen differently if seen from different point of views: looking from a global, national, municipal, personal, community-based or journalistic point of view.
These new films create spatial contemplations or film essays from Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Canada, from a historical literature connection (Kerouac) or even the virtual space of a Si-Fi film series.
The screening presents a diversity of films connected with architecture, urban space and landscape from documentary to experimental, and will create an interesting visual dialogue about urban space in film.
Urban Research is a film and video program curated since 2006 by Klaus W. Eisenlohr during the Berlin International Directors Lounge festival. Urban Research encompasses explorations of public space, reports of the conditions of urban life and interventions in the urban sphere realized by international film and video artists using experimental, documentary, abstract or fictive forms.
The films of this Urban Research selection revolve around visions of the future city, recent and current movements and developments that take their expression in public spaces, urban studies and metaphoric images dealing with urban life. The mix of experimental and more documentary styles complement each other and create a diversity of connected ideas about urban life.
PROGRAM:
Sylva Fern
Scales in the Spectrum of Space 7:21 US 2015
Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive and in collaboration with jazz musician Phil Cohran, Scales in the Spectrum of Space explores the documented histories of urban life and architecture in Chicago. Silva samples 35 films and creates a glimpse into the collective memory of the city.
David de Rozas
They want to give it a name 8:45 US 2014
They Want to Give it a Name observes a public open call process to name a plaza in the city of San Francisco. The film explores how the urban space is negotiated by the relationships that a naming process has with history and the collective physique. They Want to Give it a Name inquires a process of governing the subjectivities that inhabits the city.
Lynne Sachs
Drift and Bough 6:35 US 2014
New York Central Park in the midst of winter. A private view onto the contained nature of the most famous park of New Your City.
Hans Georg Esch
Airport Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt 4:49 DE 2014
A commissioned architectural view onto the new Berlin airport still in progress.
Rhayne Vermette
Les Châssis de Lourdes 18:22 CA 2016
“while many architects through their time have sought a ‘true house’ or a ‘true architecture’, their truth was something of the past and not so true in the present [Š] here architecture is a child of the sea, arose from its substanceŠ” ? Gio Ponti
At the age of 32, I finally ran away from home. Dramatically, I left with only my cat and copies of all the still and motion images taken by my father.
LJ Frezza
The Neutral Zone 4:54 US 2015
A screenshot series highlighting the utopias of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
Benna
short movie #2 6:52 IT
The shadows of people on the street seem to reveal an uncanny secret about them.
Wolfgang Thies
From Daraa to Berlin 17:47, DE 2016
Cold rain. Sleeping bags on the pavement in front of the entrance. Behind mud to wade through. Meter- wide puddles. Crowd barriers. Hundreds of men in bathing- slippers, heads and shoulders under plastic tarpaulins. One container for x- rays, another with spilling toilets. Berlin, October 2015. The Central Registry for Refugees, the Regional Office for Health and Social Affairs Berlin, in short Lageso. A young man from Syria reports, why he fled to Germany and how he experiences the situation here in the capital.
Luis Valdovino and Dan Boord
Not Enough Night 7:50 US 2008
The Longmont Colorado gas station that Jack Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road” was moved twice to protect it from certain destruction. Our present day bulldozes the past to make room for quaint condominiums and homes that pretend to be part of an American yesteryear of cottages and town squares.
“Not Enough Night” is a swan song for bygone hipsters, who longed for more “life” amid the coming storm of the post-World War II suburbs, shopping malls and the lonely existence of the solitary consumer.
This work commemorates the passing of the fiftieth year since the publication of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and “The Americans” by Robert Frank.’