Retrospectives

Ute Aurand, Renate Sami, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz

The films of Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami stress the inseparability between filmmaking and living. Theirs is a cinema in the present tense; films woven of threads of life, in all its joy and darkness, of travel, of friendship. A cinema of and for the senses, which has been widely recognized at prestigious international festivals such as Berlinale, Oberhausen, NYFF and Rotterdam. 

This retrospective is made possible thanks to the collaboration of Goethe-Institut.

An Oceanic Feeling

In 1930’s Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses Romain Rolland’s notion of “oceanic feeling,” defining it as the sensation of an unbreakable bond between oneself and the outside world. Rather than any assertion of autonomy or mastery, oceanic feeling is a quasi-sublime state in which the integrity of the self is lost, or at least compromised, in a sense of limitlessness, unboundedness, and interconnectedness. For Rolland, this feeling formed the basis of religious sentiment; Freud does not question its existence, but disagrees that it is the source of religion, understanding it rather as something akin to an acknowledgement he finds in a line from Christian Grabbe’s 1835 play Hannibal: “Out of this world, I cannot fall.”

Anne Charlotte Robertson

ANNE CHARLOTTE ROBERTSON’S FIRST PERSON CINEMA

Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949-2012) was an independent filmmaker who gave new and melancholy meaning to that term. For to call Robertson's cinema "independent" is to recognize not only the minimum financial and institutional support given to her work, but also the ways her films speak with poignant directness to her own extreme independence as an artist and woman who lived and worked largely alone. Indeed, Robertson's struggles with loneliness and clinically diagnosed manic depression were integrally woven into the complex fabric of her films, most especially her magnum opus, her Five Year Diary, a thirty-six hour chronicle of her life begun in 1981 and completed seventeen years later.