Experimental Film

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Experimental Film

Experimental Film at the KHM includes all free, non-narrative artistic forms of the moving image. This must attempt to absorb into it a variety of hybrid works under the loaded and blurred collective term ‘experimental film’ without becoming generic. Experimental films have freed themselves from the rigid definitions of the theory and the long shadows cast by self-referentiality and formal orthodoxies of structural film. There is a history of the artist at the center – with individual interests and energies, and a focus that may “reduce the radius but deepens the perception” (Karsten Witte). So new forms are generated, in which analog entangle with digital processes, low with high tech, original with appropriated material. For some time it has also been a conscious taking up of traditions, the development and continuation of the genealogies of cinema’s sub-history, for example, ideas of Expanded Cinema in large-scale film installations.

Having long ago widely been excommunicated from the visual arts that generated experimental film, its homelessness was often a complaint; today experimental filmmakers are attracted to nomadism of creative production. They move as naturally between cinema and gallery as between film and other media. The seminar for Experimental Film also offers guidance to the complexity of the situation described, to impart knowledge to the different mechanisms of art and film world and in the face of growing commercialisation of film to defend the medium as a means of radical artistic expression: film as a subversive art. In Experimental Film Forum student productions are discussed, while in thematic seminars ( "Places", "Collecting“, "First Person Cinema", "You Are Going To Die", "Freaks" etc.) topics of experimental film are illuminated in lectures, screenings and film analysis. Here, among other things, screenings and talks by visiting artists including Birgit Hein, Helga Fanderl, Mike Hoolboom, Guy Ben-Ner, John Smith, Miranda Pennell, Laura Waddington, Gustav Deutsch, Ulu Braun, Mara Mattuschka and Jürgen Reble are given.

Experimental Film at the KHM is represented in teaching by Prof. Matthias Müller and artistic and scientific staff Daniel Burkhardt. This area is in close proximity with the video art, represented by Prof. Phil Collins and artistic and scientific staff Tobias Yves Zintel.

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