Flotsam:
Film Undone
October 3, 2024
Our program series Flotsam is devoted to examples of ephemeral film: archive finds, film documents, unpublished and fragmented film material that have become a subject of research and curatorial attention in the Film Museum. This time we have invited the Berlin-based project Film Undone to present two film projects whose finalization and public presentation was prevented for political reasons.
Film Undone brings together artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present unmade and unfinished film projects, ideas for films produced with non-filmic media, and films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. An initial event in Berlin in 2023 and a book published in 2024 gathered tentative and careful inquiries of singular projects, highlighting the importance of primary materials before and beyond a film. Uniting these components as Elements of a Latent Cinema opens a space to consider examples from a variety of political geographies and historical moments in relation to each other. The concept of latency is intended to prompt us to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema within deficit-centered categories like failure, loss, and incompletion. It marks the sustained potential for things to change their conditions, affect us, and set us in motion.
At the Austrian Film Museum, Film Undone will focus on two films which were confiscated during post-production and only became publicly available on VHS decades after they were meant to be seen in their respective socio-political contexts. Although the films are ostensibly finished, the material transformation and the "postponed spectatorship" of Kianoush Ayari's The Newborns (Iran, 1979) and Chetna Vora's Frauen in Berlin (Women in Berlin, GDR, 1982) betray their incomplete aspects, requiring viewers to co-create the films' speculative para-texts. The films will be introduced by Tara Najd Ahmadi (The Newborns) and Nida Ghouse (Frauen in Berlin), who will discuss them with Philip Widmann. (Philip Widmann)
The publication Film Undone. Elements of a Latent Cinema, edited by Philip Widmann, with numerous contributions (by Tara Najd Ahmadi, Tobias Hering and Mathilde Rouxel, among others) will be presented on this evening.
Our program series Flotsam is devoted to examples of ephemeral film: archive finds, film documents, unpublished and fragmented film material that have become a subject of research and curatorial attention in the Film Museum. This time we have invited the Berlin-based project Film Undone to present two film projects whose finalization and public presentation was prevented for political reasons.
Film Undone brings together artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present unmade and unfinished film projects, ideas for films produced with non-filmic media, and films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. An initial event in Berlin in 2023 and a book published in 2024 gathered tentative and careful inquiries of singular projects, highlighting the importance of primary materials before and beyond a film. Uniting these components as Elements of a Latent Cinema opens a space to consider examples from a variety of political geographies and historical moments in relation to each other. The concept of latency is intended to prompt us to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema within deficit-centered categories like failure, loss, and incompletion. It marks the sustained potential for things to change their conditions, affect us, and set us in motion.
At the Austrian Film Museum, Film Undone will focus on two films which were confiscated during post-production and only became publicly available on VHS decades after they were meant to be seen in their respective socio-political contexts. Although the films are ostensibly finished, the material transformation and the "postponed spectatorship" of Kianoush Ayari's The Newborns (Iran, 1979) and Chetna Vora's Frauen in Berlin (Women in Berlin, GDR, 1982) betray their incomplete aspects, requiring viewers to co-create the films' speculative para-texts. The films will be introduced by Tara Najd Ahmadi (The Newborns) and Nida Ghouse (Frauen in Berlin), who will discuss them with Philip Widmann. (Philip Widmann)
The publication Film Undone. Elements of a Latent Cinema, edited by Philip Widmann, with numerous contributions (by Tara Najd Ahmadi, Tobias Hering and Mathilde Rouxel, among others) will be presented on this evening.
