Sunday, 10th February 2019 – 8pm

CHAINED FOR LIFE

D: Aaron Schimberg, Cast: Jess Weixler, Adam Pearson, Stephen Plunkett, Charlie Korsmo, DP: Adam J. Minnick, USA 2018, 91 min., English OV – GP

An arrogant artist and a beautiful actress who blindly believe in their own appearance: in an affectionate nod to Todd Browning’s Freaks, Aaron Schimberg gathers an ensemble of extravagant bodies around the actress, offering sharp commentary on the political present of the USA. In his film, Americans speak as if they had once been Germans, sticking to a script that only really feels at home in ambiguity. The setting is a clinic in which a bizarre horror film is getting made about a mad doctor who wants to operate on faces. While cinema dissolves into its components, Schimberg demonstrates film history’s sensationalism and power politics, revealing himself as much a comedic expert of the obvious as of the subversive and uncanny.

ROI SOLEIL

D: Albert Serra, Cast: Lluís Serrat, DP: Artur Tort, ES/PT 2018, 61 min., w/o dialogue – GP

When death doesn’t irrupt into life but is expected, then dying itself becomes a form of life, a staging and an experience – not only for the dying person, but for onlookers as well. In his historical film The Death of Louis XIV, Albert Serra had already traced the last weeks of the French king and indulged in excessive physicality amidst the theatricality of courtly rituals. In Roi Soleil, he further radicalises these motifs and, by extension, his entire oeuvre. The period setting is evoked solely through a few objects and the protagonist’s costume, but the gaze directed at the act of dying, which here unfolds within a synthetic, red-lit room, is all the more sophisticated. Flirting with the conventions of video art, Serra achieves his purest treatment of narcissism to date.

After the screening

Debate: EMPATHY FOR VANITY

When a king’s death throes turn him into a laughing stock, and a master director holds sway over everyone during the shoot, then empathy and tunnel vision go hand in hand. A discussion about wilful arrogance and the joyful demise of the art film.

Guests: Horst Bredekamp (Art Historian) and Hanna Schygulla (Actress, “Die Ehe der Maria Braun”, “Lili Marleen”, “Faust”) // in the presence of the directors Aaron Schimberg and Albert Serra

Moderated by Frédéric Jaeger (Berlin Critics’ Week)

Re-Run: Friday, 15. February 2019 – 9.30 pm

Tickets