Various cinematic genres and movements over the years have laid claim to truth in cinema — the
actualités of the Lumière brothers, Kino-Pravda espoused by Dziga Vertov, the “ethnofiction” anthropological films of Jean Rouch, and the “ecstatic truth” of Werner Herzog’s documentaries are but a few examples. Although the documentary is still a viable cinematic genre, many filmmakers have now expanded the range of their practice to create works that cross between art and anthropology, documentary and fiction, education and entertainment, and galleries and movie theaters.
Serious Games: Documentary Art between Fact and Fiction explores a cross section of documentary practice by German filmmakers and artists focusing on the subject of war and conflict. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, these works also demonstrate the fluidity of exhibition practice between the black box of the cinema and the white cube of the gallery. Presented in association with the National Gallery of Art, with special thanks to Zach Feldman for organizing the program.
November
Germany, 2004, 30 min., Director: Hito Steyerl
Invoking Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary
October (1928), artist Hito Steyerl avows, “
November is the time after
October, a time when revolution seems to be over, and peripheral struggles have become particular, localist, and almost impossible to communicate.” Exhibited at Documenta 12 (2007), the film loosely follows Steyerl’s childhood friend, sociologist Andrea Wolf, and the appropriation of her likeness as an icon of martyrdom. Steyerl plays up the dissemination of images in the digital age and the stories inscribed to them, while delivering a scathing critique of Germany’s armed involvement in foreign affairs.
In Free Fall
Germany, 2010, 30 min., Director: Hito Steyerl
Following the financial crisis of 2008, Hito Steyerl sets her film
In Free Fall in a graveyard for scrapped airplanes in the Mojave Desert. Featuring Hollywood aviation disaster montages, interviews with the junkyard proprietor, an actor portraying an aeronautics expert, and an out-of-work cinematographer, the title evokes a double entendre connecting aviation and economic crashes. Like many of Steyerl’s works,
In Free Fall confounds the distinction between documentary and fiction to articulate themes such as workers’ labor, the culture industry, and the ills of capitalism.
Hito Steyerl was born in 1966 in Munich and now lives and works in Berlin. A filmmaker, philosopher, and cultural critic, Steyerl roots her investigative practice in the proliferation of digital images and the large-scale implications of such circumstances. Steyerl’s work takes the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography.
Considering such topics as the ways in which money enters and influences the art world, post-structural philosophy, free ports, and military propaganda, Steyerl’s practice is both acutely political and timely. In addition to teaching, she cofounded the Research Center for Proxy Politics; operating from 2014 through 2017, the organization hosted lectures and discussions on various topics, including the potential for resistance within a networked society and the role of art in emergency situations.
More information on seating is available on the website of the National Gallery of Art Film Programs (see link at right).
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