A World of Dogs
March 27 and 28, 2009
In every epoch of art history, in (amateur) photography and in film, dogs occupy a unique place and play a (sometimes hidden) lead role, whether as companion, participant, witness, actor, guard, playmate, or as a protagonist who just happens to be there. "All knowledge," wrote Franz Kafka, "the entirety of all questions and all answers are contained in dogs."
Taking the cue from Hanna Schimek's new book Earwitnesses or The Canine Comedy, the Film Museum and Synema present two programmes with rare films from 1894 to 2009 as well as an international symposium which investigates the representation of dogs across various media and art forms.
The films cover the entire spectrum of cinema: from early Edison films to new avant-garde films, from cinematic war propaganda to works of great auteurs like Ermanno Olmi and Gillo Pontecorvo. The canine subjects of films by the Lumières’ come face to face with those from Andy Warhol's Factory Diaries, Nazi messenger dogs are followed by William Wegman's Dog Baseball, and Gustav Deutsch's "coincidental dogs", excerpted from the cinema of the belle époque, encounter their descendants 100 years later in Vivian Ostrovsky's Public Domain.
Related materials
Download Program (PDF)
