Screening and discussion with Clemens von Wedemeyer

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Join us at e-flux Screening Room for a screening of Clemens von Wedemeyer’s Rushes (Muster) (2012, 79 minutes) and The Cast (Procession) (2013, 15 minutes), followed by a discussion with the artist. 

The screening is part of the series “Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art” taking place at e-flux Screening Room in monthly chapters between December 2022 and March 2023. It is produced and organized by e-flux, with the support of the German Film Office.

Clemens von Wedemeyer, Rushes (Muster) (2012, 79 min.)
Clemens von Wedemeyer has imagined a trip back in time to Breitenau. Starting with events that happened there between 1933 and 1945, the German artist has composed three stories that reach the years of the women’s reformatory in the 1970s, with a different protagonist for each era. Rushes (Muster) is a work that attempts to bring out the pathology of the site, and at the same time its unforgettable status as a black hole in the history of Germany that sucked up innocent lives for almost a century. (Bert Rebhandl)

Clemens von Wedemeyer, The Cast (Procession) (2013, 15 min.)
The Cast (Procession) recalls the protests that broke out among extras in 1958 during filming of the Hollywood production Ben Hur in the Cinecittà film studio near Rome, which was originally founded by Mussolini. Thousands of unemployed workers had hoped to be hired for the scenes featuring human masses. When they were turned away, they stormed the film studio. In the film, the voices of the protesters of yesterday are played by cultural activists of the present: members of the Teatro Valle Occupato, who came together in 2011 in order to save the Teatro Valle, the oldest theatre in Rome, by assuming collective management of the theatre. The film opens a parallel view of the same place by making its main characters time-travel through three generations of German history.