Odeon Lloyd Cinema, Budapest
20. October, 2005, 7 pm
Gustav Deutsch:
WORLD_MIRROR_CINEMA
Footage films from the first decades of cinema
Episode 1: Kinematograf Theater Erdberg, Vienna 1912
Episode 2: Apollo Theater, Surabaya 1929
Episode 3: São Mamede Infesta, Porto 1930
35 mm, bw, 93 min, 2005
The film will be introduced by the author, Gustav Deutsch.
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“Before it became the dominant teller of stories in the modern era, cinema served as the mirror of the world, placing distant lands in their great and extensive variety within the reach of a new worldwide audience. For cinema’s first decade actuality films, films showing both the spectacular and the everyday from all areas of the world, made up the largest proportion of film production. [...]
Although the vast majority of these actuality films, like most of our perishable film heritage, have turned to dust, thousands of them still exist, for the most part languishing on the shelves of film archives. Although the practice of actuality filmmaking became more marginal as fiction film became dominant, its imagery remained vital, if neglected by most scholars.
[...]
Welt Spiegel Kino does more than marvel at these forgotten images of a now distant actuality. Its structure stitches images together in a texture of impossible fantasy, a vision of an infinite cinema, as new images seem to bleed through the surface of other images, creating a contradictory sense of surface and depth, like two mirrors placed at acute angles to each other.
[...]
Welt Spiegel Kino reflects on the illusory interplay of surface and depth, of succession and narrative, in cinema. Images give way to other images; images are filled and emptied of meaning. The structuring of these moving and transforming images is based on our recognition of similarities and our expectations of narrative. This film knits these relations together constantly, in a way that emphasizes both our thirst for meaning and the arbitrary nature of the desire. The film makes sense to us, but slowly this sense itself seems to dissolve into seemingly endless play of similarity and reflection, recognition and enigma.”
(In.
Tom Gunning: Living Mirrors: Deutsch's Cinematic Monadology)
Full text
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Odeon Lloyd Cinema, Budapest
20. October, 2005, 7 pm
free entry
The screening is part of the international project entitled
Light_Image_Illusion in cooperation with the
Art and Research conference at the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Art.
Organiser: C3 Foundation
With the support of the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union, the National Cultural Fund, Hungary and the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage, Hungary.
Odeon Lloyd Cinema
Budapest, Hollán Ernõ u. 7.
H-1136
Tel.: (+36-1)329-2064
