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STAFF DEVELOPMENT
BERLIN IN (AND OUT OF) THE BOX: A FIELD REPORT
Nestled amongst the greenery along the western edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten lies the Akademie der Kunste, the host site for the 2012 International Experimental Cinema Congress. This five-day convergence of filmmakers, curators, and moving image scholars has occurred twice before; both times in Toronto (1989, 2010). Unlike the 2010 congress, which was known as the Experimental Media Congress, this iteration, titled Think:Film, was intent on returning cinema to the center of discourse. As a curator for International House and charged with keeping this institution at the front of moving image culture, there is no better way to uncover trends, thoughts, and a whole host of other things to keep us all inspired and rooted firmly as a leader in film for the Philadelphia area than travelling, sharing experiences, and engaging in discourse with professionals from all over the world. Following an opening night panel and screening of Jean Isidore Isou’s On Venom and Eternity there was a sense that the doors to the academy had been kicked open and no idea or gesture was to be seen as too radical. Panel discussions with titles like “New Footage Found,” “Theoretical Physics and Film,” and “The Edge of Narration” promised to expand on Isou’s bold manifesto for a new moving image art, and we were all in the presence of greatness with avant-garde icons among us including Michael Snow, Thom Andersen, and Klaus Wyborny. A panel on “experimentation” in contemporary television dramas such as Breaking Bad and Oz practically threatened to upend the whole congress, with attendees decrying the impossibility of experimentation in such a commercialized medium. As with any congressional gathering, dissent was in the air—disrupting any possibility for easy definitions or categorizations about the state of things. My Berlin experience was not to be confined to this congress, however. Stepping outside of the spacious theater at the Akademie der Kunste I encountered Douglas Gordon’s Pretty much every film and video work from 1992 until now (1992- ) in a small gallery on the second floor. Arranged in a cluster of monitors stacked on crates and boxes, Gordon’s work functions as a kind of portable archive, scaling each piece into a bite-sized morsel that can be viewed collectively as a kind of visual stew. Gordon’s earliest perform [??H ????[??[?[X]X?\ ?? ?X][???Y? ?? H ?Y]?\??&\?] [?[?[? ?]\?Z]\?H?[?X??[X?H?[??\? H\??[X?Y?H? H\?\?8?&\??]]??H
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