Klaus vom Bruch's DAS SCHLEYERBAND (Experimental Revival)

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