Following his September 2019 visit as artist-in-residence at the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, German director and media artist Lutz Dammbeck will tour the USA with his film series
Art & Power: Lutz Dammbeck featuring 18 of his documentaries and animation films. All films from the tour will be made available for rental and educational streaming by the DEFA Library.
The Washington, DC leg of this tour will include three screenings of Dammbeck’s work, two of which will be followed by Q&As and discussions with the filmmaker himself. The film program, including Lutz Dammbeck’s appearances at the National Gallery of Art on September 15 and at the Goethe-Institut Washington on September 16, has been made possible with support from
Wunderbar Together: Germany and the U.S., the DEFA-Stiftung, and the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Experimental Short Films & Documentaries of Lutz Dammbeck
Followed by a Q&A and discussion with Lutz Dammbeck.
Starting in the 1970s, Dammbeck worked on his own Super-8, 35mm, and video projects, including
Metamorphoses I (Metamorphosen I) — one of the first experimental films to be shown publicly in the GDR—and
Homage to La Sarraz (Hommage à La Sarraz), both of which make use of non-camera animation. These two films were the beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the
Hercules Concept (Herakles-Konzept), which the artist sees as a total artwork (
Gesamtkunstwerk), including research materials, media collages, photographs, texts, painting, dance, film, and music. Dammbeck has continued to work on various sequences for and variations on his
Hercules project ever since.
In the GDR, Lutz Dammbeck co-organized two groundbreaking exhibitions, designed to offer an alternative to state-organized art shows. In 1977, he helped developed the concept for an intermedia exhibition called
Tangents I (Tangenten I), which was banned in 1978 and never took place.
Metamorphoses I is an experimental film collage that was to be part of the exhibition. With five other young Leipzig artists, he then opened the
First Leipzig Autumn Salon (1. Leipziger Herbstsalon) in fall 1984. The private exhibition met with the criticism and disapproval of officials. The short film fragment
First Leipzig Autumn Salon shows original footage of the exhibition filmed by cinematographer Thomas Plenert, who collaborated with Dammbeck on other productions.
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Metamorphoses I (Metamorphosen I)
GDR, 1978, 7 min., b&w/color, experimental, no dialogue
For the 1977 intermedia exhibition
Tangents I (Tangenten I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor, and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dresden districts of Radebeul and Pieschen. When
Tangents I was banned, Heinze turned to other projects, but Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself.
Metamorphoses I — the first experimental film to be shown publicly in the GDR — marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the
Hercules Concept (Herakles-Konzept).
Homage to La Sarraz (Hommage à La Sarraz)
GDR, 1981, 12 min., b&w, experimental, German with English subtitles
In this experimental short, Dammbeck relocates his Leipzig-based artists’ circle, known as the
Autumn Salon (Herbstsalon), to La Sarraz Palace in Switzerland. In 1929, La Sarraz was the site of a legendary congress held by leading European avant-garde filmmakers — including Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Ivor Montagu, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann — who wished to create an independent cinema as a forum for discussing issues such as elitist thinking, the tastes of the masses and the differences between art and life. Not only avant-garde film history is at stake in
Homage to La Sarraz, however. So too are images and sounds from after 1933: Voices and visions of the Nazi past intermingle with the voices and (tele)visions of the (1981) socialist present, suggesting certain analogies. Formally, the director experiments with over-painting and non-camera animation.
Homage to La Sarraz and Dammbeck’s earlier experimental film,
Metamorphoses I mark the filmic beginning of the artist’s long-term project the
Hercules Concept (Herakles-Konzept).
First Leipzig Autumn Salon (1. Leipziger Herbstsalon)
GDR-Germany, 1984-2008, 22 min., b&w, documentary, silent, with English inserts
In fall 1984, Lutz Dammbeck and five other young Leipzig artists secretly organized the sensational exhibition they called
First Leipzig Autumn Salon (1. Leipziger Herbstsalon) in protest of official art exhibitions and failed reforms in the East German art market. The private exhibition lasted almost a month and challenged the authority of cultural officials. This short film shows original footage, shot by cinematographer Thomas Plenert, of the artists preparing the exhibition the day before its opening.
Dürer’s Heirs (Dürers Erben)
Germany, 1996, 59 min., b&w/color, documentary, German with English subtitles
A 1961 painting by Harry Blume is at the center of this film: beside the painter himself, artists Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig, Heinrich Witz and Hans Mayer-Foreyt appear in the painting. All five members of the first postwar generation to study art at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design when it reopened in 1947. Some of them went on to become professors at the academy. Director Lutz Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the academy, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before the Wall was built in 1961. After the Wall came down in 1989, what happened to the major Leipzig School painters Werner Tübke and Bernhard Heisig, who had been called “Dürer’s red heirs” by West German journalists in the 1970s? In the film, Tübke, Heisig and former GDR officials who were involved with culture in Leipzig at the time talk about modernism, conformism, political pressure, party discipline, personal claims and fading memory. The documentary paints an insightful, often critical picture of early East German art history.
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