White Light Cinema at The Nightingale - Sunday, 7pm
Often, the use of found footage to comment on events of the recent
past involves heavy manipulation of mass produced media. There is an
overt effort to deconstruct scraps of industrial communication, and
to decode hidden truths about the modern world through the use of jarring
visual effects. The resistance to this impulse is what makes vom Bruch's
lengthy video both refreshing and hermetic. Utilizing a mixture of television
news footage, commercials, and propaganda tapes from the Red Army Faction
(the Anglicized name of the Baader-Meinhof group), vom Bruch's work
poses more questions about West German society thirty years after the
end of WWII than it answers. Images related to the kidnapping of a former
SS officer who became one of the country's leading industrialists, Hanns
Martin Schleyer, as well as those of a Lufthansa plane that was hijacked
by Palestinian terrorists, are presented in an almost episodic fashion.
Often lasting for a few minutes without cutting, vom Bruch forces the
audience to rewatch newscasts of the violent "German Autumn," without
the emotional distance of analysis. This approach to the subject matter
serves to critique the violent nature of events without positing a reason
why. The addition of images of product consumption alongside the self-produced
materials of left-wing domestic terrorists seems to imply that the common
thread of the West German national identity has frayed, and the lack
of distinction between the two poles is an eloquent reflection of the
artist's inability to make sense of what has happened. In many ways,
the violent fall of 1977 was the most important national event for Germans
between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not one that vom Bruch
wants to glorify. Introduced by DePaul and Columbia College film
instructor Therese Grisham. (1977-78, 112 min, video) JH - Cine-File.info
