Copresented with Engauge Experimental Film Festival and Interbay Cinema Society
The monthly film series
GERMAN CINEMA NOW! is curated by Goethe Pop Up Seattle. This year, the series explores themes of disruption and continuity to inspire public dialogue about the ways in which the past shapes our moment and can inform a radically different future.
The screenings are presented in partnership with
Northwest Film Forum Seattle, and all ticket purchases support Northwest Film Forum. This hybrid special event, programmed with guest curator
Conrad Veit, is copresented with the
Engauge Film Festival.
The screening of
Braunschweiger Schule, which includes the US premiere of Berlinale favorite
Blastogenese X, will take place in person as well as online. Please register in advance and pay what you can.
The film stream is available to viewers in North America from 7:00pm PDT October 27 to 7:00pm PDT October 28. The in-person screening takes place at NWFF at 7pm on October 27.
The film program will be accompanied by a live (remote) Q&A after the screening with the directors of
Blastogenese X,
Charlotte Maria Kätzl and
Conrad Veit.
Film Program
NY ‘NY ‘N WHY NOT (4:13), dir. Michael Brynntrup
S.O.S. Extraterrestria (10:25), dir. Mara Mattuschka
Auto Center Drive (28:08), dir. BjørnMelhus
Faszinierendes Puppenhaus (9:00), dir. Uli Versum
Sweet as Candy (2:33), dir. Conrad Veit & Charlotte Maria Kätzl
Blastogenese X (26:39), dir. Conrad Veit & Charlotte Maria Kätzl
Curatorial Statement
Today’s visual arts are hardly imaginable without the presence of the moving image, even if, as cross-border commuters between the art market and the film industry, filmmakers still find it difficult to assert their presence. However, in the Germany of the early 1970s, when the moving image still faced serious opposition within the established art world, it was a pioneering, practically visionary achievement when the University of the Arts in Braunschweig (HBK Braunschweig) had the bold idea to establish a seminar in film and video that understood itself wholly as visual art. In 1972, directed by Gerhard Büttenbender (later co-directed with Birgit Hein and since 2006 by Michael Brynntrup) the film department at HBK Braunschweig came into being. With it, something we can call the “Braunschweiger Schule” (Braunschweig School) has developed, encompassing to this day experimental films, video art, and multimedia installations that, far from conceptions of scenic-narrative feature film, testify both to a powerful visual richness and to an anarchic lightness, and demonstrate how diverse and colorful film can be if only it is afforded full artistic freedom.
Accordingly, when Goethe Pop Up Seattle approached me after the premiere of our film
Blastogenese X at the Berlinale regarding a screening of the film and a possible accompanying program, it seemed only fitting to “bring along” a selection of films and representatives of this Braunschweig School, who arose from the same context in which I too was, in part, socialized into art. In the context of
Blastogenese X, the program focuses on highly idiosyncratic, at times heightened staging of figurative performance. Common to all these works, whether by Mattuschka, Melhus, Brynntrup, Versum, or Charlotte Maria Kätzl and myself, is that, made with simple and quite limited means, they draw freely from the most various bits and pieces of film history and pop culture, consciously employing trash as an ironic stylistic device in order to give rise to strange, other, nearly iconic figures and filmic spaces. –
Conrad Veit, Guest Curator
© Conrad Veit / Charlotte Maria Kätzl
Conrad Veit (* 1987) and
Charlotte Maria Kätzl (* 1993) are an artist duo who have developed various film and video works, video installations, and photographic works, as well as spatial installations since they began studying Fine Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art in 2014. In film, photography, and installation, Veit and Kätzl's works form their own cosmos in which play with the figurative and the different is in the foreground. A game that creates diversity and confusion and questions the boundaries of the heteronormative and the socially constructed. The duo’s works are multimedia-based, combining sculptural elements with elements of costume that often function as drag and performative stagings that lead to film or photographic works or are further developed in space-related installations. Their film Blastogenese X celebrated its premiere at the 2021 Berlinale.
More Info and Tickets
COVID safety protocols apply for the live event. Please visit NWFF’s
event page for more information.
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