The best of KunstFilmBiennale 2007

23 march, 2009 - 5 april, 2009
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Hitomi Steyerl. Lovely Andrea, 2007
Hitomi Steyerl. Lovely Andrea, 2007

Since it began in 2002, the KunstFilmBiennale in Cologne has reflected this current trend in contemporary art towards forms of narrative film, and the growing permeability between exhibition spaces for works of art and cinema. In six programmes, this series presents a wide-ranging sample of the different genres, themes and aesthetics of the pieces that were shown at the 2007 Biennale. An homage to the cinema - an expression used as the title for one of the programmes - resonates throughout the selection of films in this series.

The programme Lonely includes pieces like those by Shoja Azari (Shiraz, 1958) and Alex McQuilkin (Boston, 1980), in which the fact of seeing or being seen has implications that affect the depths of subjective identity.

The program entitled Metropolitana takes a tour of world geography via a group of films whose common nexus, beyond differences in genre and theme, consists of making cities the main protagonists in the audiovisual story. Frenchman Jean-Gabriel Périot (Bellac, 1974) and the Egyptian Yasmine Chatila (Cairo, 1974) are among the directors included in this section.

Pulp Fiction evokes both the pulp subculture and the film by Quentin Tarantino to which it pays tribute, presenting two pieces in which the hybrid of genres suggests interesting reflections on the influence of film on the perception of reality.

Works by Jesper Just (Copenhagen, 1974) and Anthony Goicolea (Atlanta, 1971), among others, are used in the KunstFilmBiennale’s section Homage to the Cinema to explore the limits of classic Hollywood film with respect to both the narrative resources and the filming techniques and exhibition spaces.

Finally, the programme devoted to Young German Experimental Film includes pieces by Thorsten Fleisch (Koblenz, 1972) and Michal Kosakowski (Szczecin, 1975), among other young rising stars in German cinema.