On a Wednesday Night in Tokyo
Tokyo, 11 p.m. People are entering a train. Shot in one take the video communicates the inevitable up to the edge of the unbearable. Various associations with the cover image of the 30th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival are possible…
Deutschland / Japan 2004 / 5:35 Min. / keine Dialoge
Regie: Jan Verbeek
Short film competition on the occasion of the anniversary:
“Not without my mobile! Is my behavior wrong? Or: The correct use of my mobile in the cinema.”
Presentation and awarding of the three prizes (2,500 €, 1,000 € and 500 €) for the nine short films which were produced in this context by the jury members Martina Bramkamp and Jan Peters.
Film with live music:
John Grierson’s classic of documentary film “Drifters” (1929) is re-intonated by Rochus and Markus Aust and the 1. German Stromorchester.
During the thirty-year-old history of the Filmladen silent movie classics, especially when they were accompanied by live music, always were highlights of the cinema programs. Over the course of the 29 Documentary Film and Video Festivals documentary experimental films from the 20s and 30s like Walter Ruttmann’s “Berlin – Symphony of a Metropolis”, Dziga Vertovs “Man with a Movie Camera” or short films by Joris Ivens, Luis Buñuel and René Clair took the audience by surprise by modern effective montage technics, by the use of an unbound camera and by symphonic visual effects and visual lyrics.
At the same time the critical look on reality – like it is common for the contemporary documentary film – was on focus of the film avantgarde. Both functional-literal and heartbreaking, f.ex. Joris Ivens and Henri Storck describe with “Borinage” from 1933 the desperate situation of Belgian miners.
To look in the future with the avantgarde of those days could be a slogan for the opening ceremony. John Grierson’s DRIFTERS from 1929 about the Scottish herring fishers is a classic of the early British documentary film school. Grierson admired Eisenstein’s montage technique, but he did not use it as much as confrontation and harsh shifts, but as an art of transition and as an organization of the filmic material for the purpose of a musical logic.
Rochus Aust and Markus Aust are composing a piece for the film which starts in history, leading gradually into the present. An experiment! We take pot luck. Finally we are joining the exponent of the Vienna Moderne, Alfred Polgar, who at the end of the 20s after a screening of this film said: “The see is most beautiful in the cinema.”
Drifters
Großbritannien 1929 / 49 Min.
Regie, Buch, Schnitt: John Grierson
Kamera: Basil Emmott
DRIFTERS is an intitial work of the British avantgarde of documentary film and still impresses by its expressiveness and visual musical composition. It is a film about the see and the hard work of the Scottish herring fishers.
Based on the carefully pictorial design and the montage which follows musical principles, the film generates a thrilling rythm and a strong suggestive power, like it is with Shakespeare.
Drifters film music:
Rochus Aust and Markus Aust and the 1. German Stromorchester (Premiere)
The new composition for DRIFTERS begins in the past with a reduced sound and pretended standards of the silent film to slowly evolve into the todays world of film music and even beyond. This is obtained by the use of the instruments (from the piano to the turntable), by the compositional progress (from the sonata to sound design) and by the musical attitude (from sound device to equipment sound). Herewith the music fulfills the technical development which DRIFTERS has anticipated.
The presentation of DRIFTERS with live music and the competition “Not without my mobile!” were made possible by the support of the Kulturstiftung Kasseler Sparkasse and the Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hesse-Thuringia as well as the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts.
Special thanks for the realization of the opening ceremony to: Ambion GmbH, “fliegende Köche by Christoph Brand, Manuel Gehrke, Pianohaus Doppelstein and Weinhandlung Schluckspecht.
