Directors Lounge

Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee, which was called Stalinallee until 1961, is known as “the first Socialist street” on German soil. The 2 kilometres between Strausberger Platz and Frankfurter Tor is considered to be the most monumental 20th Century street development in Germany. In the 1950s the road was widened to 90 metres and seven to nine storey buildings were built in accordance with party instructions in an anti-modernist Stalinist/neo-classical style. The two towers at Frankfurter Tor, designed by Hermann Henselmann, became the street’s symbolic landmarks.




In the faded austere grandeur of what must have once been a shop or expansive lobby on the ground level of the imposing Frankfurter Tor north tower, Directors Lounge screened an impressive 10 day programme of film and video. Impressive partly because, unlike Transmediale, the event receives no funding, none of the organisers or curators receive a Euro in payment and there is no admission charge. The only money to be made is from the bar where a 0.5l bottle of Berliner Pilsner will set you back €2, so I did my best to help contribute towards some income there. Of course it’s not as expansive as Transmediale, neither is it as ambitious. The motivation for Directors Lounge is simple. According to artistic director André Werner, at this time of year most people he knows from outside Berlin are likely to be in town for Berlinale, so it is a good time to put on an event where they can get away from the mad bustle of the festival and relax and watch some films the like of which are unlikely to be seen in Berlinale. There is a strong sense of this being the result of a collective effort by dedicated individuals. We only had two evenings there before having to return to London, but if what I saw samples the overall standard it would have been well worth staying for the entire ten days. There was a fascinating programme of experimental film from Bombay and mixed programmes of works from Germany, UK, US, China and elsewhere. Later in the week there would be screenings of Finnish video art from AV-arkki in Helsinki and Chinese works from Yunnan Arts University, and of course the wonderful Intimate Journeys programme curated by London-based Lynn Loo, featuring In Transit by Ooni Peh. André seemed genuinely and pleasantly surprised at the quality of the work and the willingness of people to contribute. It rekindled in me ideas about putting on screenings in London, thinking that with the right motivation and a good collective will it might be possible to stage something regular. A recurring experience for me in visiting ‘artists’ film and video’ festivals in Europe has been that the majority of work I see never gets screened in London or, as far as I’m aware, the rest of the UK.

My video Metalogue screened on Saturday (11th February) night as part of Klaus W. Eisenlohr’s Urban Research project. The thematic nature of his project gives Klaus the ability to programme works drawn from a range of generic types while all broadly speaking independent, experimental and personal. So in the Reading Surfaces programme Diane Bonder’s If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now uses documentary conventions to mis-contextualise images and stories from small town USA, while in On a Slow Boat to China by Sonja Lillebaek Christensen imagines the sad lives of the men she stalks with her camera in a park. Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know Of Our Neighbours is a documentary about the Mass Observation Movement (interesting to reflect on how the roots of market research are in what was essentially a surrealist project). The programme weaves through a range of approaches to surveillance linking the neo-voyeuristic, the fantastical, the mundane. Notions of urbanity are imagined and constructed, not simply in orthodox terms of cities and spatiality, but also in personal and cultural terms.

Metalogue was imaginatively programmed with the 90 minute I Was Born But by Roddy Bogawa in the Where is Memory? session. A long programme to start at midnight, but people stayed, they stayed and watched, intently. Bogawa is a native Hawaiian, whose rite of passage was the L.A. punk scene. This autobiographical personal voyage recovering the past is compelling. Shoot on super 8 the film reminded me vaguely of Jem Cohen’s work, both aesthetically and with its cultural location in around the music scene, but more directly personal and candid. It seemed to share little in common with Metalogue, but Klaus astutely unpicked the theme of memory and its location as reflected in the programme’s title. Bogawa recovers memory through retracing his adolescence and young adulthood through urban space and music, while Metalogue constructs a meta-memory, as Klaus suggested: “...what happens when memory becomes a database”.