De cierta manera (Sara Gomez, CU 1974) und Kurzfilme von Skip Norman. De cierta manera (In gewisser Hinsicht) ist Sara Gómez’ erster und einziger Langfilm, sie starb 1974, ohne ihn fertigstellen zu können. Die vier Kurzfilme, die der afroamerikanische Filmemacher Wilbert Reuben ‘Skip’ Norman als Student an der “Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin” gedreht hat, fragen nach den Möglichkeiten schwarzer Befreiung in der europäischen Diaspora. Filme rund ums Lehren und Lernen. Filme als Vorschläge, über neue und andere Gesellschaftsformen nachzudenken.

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A workshop on methodologies for working with non-filmic sources in researching non-extant, unfinished, and unmade film with Philip Widmann (Berlin/Zürich). Starting from an ongoing research project which attempts to reconstruct the contexts of a specific film’s production, circulation, and loss, we will look at how documents from various public and private sources can help to claim and reclaim film as an idea. In the absence of film as a material art object, its persistence as an idea – in multiple versions and other types of media – documents the role of film as a cultural object which is mutable and related to various contexts, exceeding ’the cinema’.

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Over the past few months, the Old Facts Are Yet to Amaze workshop has been working on the Cairo Cinema Club archives from its founding in 1967 until 1974. The workshop consisted of eight sessions that delved into various access points to the cinema club’s archive. Now, we invite you to join us for a tour of the archive we explored, complemented by research presentations on other non-filmic cinema archives. These archives encompass diverse materials, including paper material; whether books, magazines, newsletters, publications, in addition to production and distribution documents. Whereas oral histories narrate experiences of going to the cinema and watching films in various contexts.

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Rocío and its director Fernando Ruiz Vergara repeatedly challenged the idea of a national centrality of the Spanish state. Developed in the midst of the transition to democracy, this documentary essay, the only film in the filmmaker’s filmography, was seized and judicially censored in the 1980s for pointing out one of the perpetrators of fascist crimes in 1936, after the military coup that led to the civil war and four decades of dictatorship. Rocío dismantled the connections between economic, religious and political powers hidden behind the most massive Marian pilgrimage in the Iberian peninsula. The links between the religious brotherhoods and the Francoist state, the tensions between genuine popular expression, the creation of myths and the construction of a Catholic and national identity, and those underlying the ownership of land and labour revealed the heavy burden of a regime that refused to fade away. Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado will introduce a reconstruction of the uncensored version of the film.

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Examining two sets of contemporary documentary and experimental films from the former Yugoslav region, this paper outlines two mirror-like relations between the onscreen presence or absence, and the voice or the voicelessness. In the first (works by Ognjen Glavonić, Tea Lukač, Kumjana Novakova, doplgenger), the voice-over is projected onto landscapes and buildings, without the speakers ever being shown on the screen, whereas in the second (films by Ivan Marković, Bruno Pavić, Ivan Ramljak), the protagonists are deprived of their voice.

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During the seminar we will read and discuss three texts and watch a short film in conversation with Geology of Separation. The aim is to explore ways in which the perceptions and sensibilities prompted by Geology of Separation might contribute to an analytical vocabulary for cultural critique: one that does not see migration or the condition of living in the interstices of the nation-state order as an exceptional limbo and a condition to be corrected, but as a mundane aesthetic and everyday experience of living in ruins from which imaginaries of coexistence can be reassembled. What do you do when compelled to wait for something that might never materialize? How do we imagine the loss of things that never were?

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Abderrahmane has been living in the Alps in northern Italy for six months in a former family-run hotel converted into a temporary reception center for asylum seekers. In the room opposite his, lives Laly. Abderrahmane is waiting to appear before a commission that will rule on his asylum application. He has been warned: in view of this trial, he will have to tell his detailed story. Laly has appeared before the commission twice, soon he will have the response from Italy, from Europe. “In the name of the Italian people,” he will have to leave. Laly does not know yet, but soon there will be the Italian-French border and its giant mountains from which one sometimes hears a shrill cry: an elegy, which crosses the dislocated territories of migration, those that separate the south from the north, the sky from the earth. And in this story of the eye that is so human, appears in the background, the tragedy of the original soil, that of the Pangea or separation.

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This seminar will depart from three main questions that are articulated throughout Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s film Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro, while drawing parallels to other films. The question of land back, central to the film, will constitute the main part of our discussion. It will unfold in relation to how cinematic temporality captures the struggle for land, the act of reclaiming land and working it, as well as the question of “trespassing” private property. All of these issues will be looked at from a filmic perspective, in the way they are translated into filmic tools and how the filmic in its turn sits in land struggles. A selection of film excerpts will be discussed in this framework.

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Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro documents the first years of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and its struggle to reclaim ancestral territories, reflecting on the centuries-long oppression of farmers and indigenous peoples in Colombia. Fusing straightforward documentation and fantastical visualization, the film mingles myth, poetry, and popular memory while capturing a defining moment in the modern indigenous rights movement.

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The first talking film made in Lebanon, Dans les ruines de Baalbeck, was produced during the 1930s by a German woman who had established a production company in Beirut which operated its own laboratory and sound stage. A rare case of independence from European film facilities, years before the end of French Mandate rule. The film is today considered to be lost. The film archive that could potentially have preserved it does not exist in Lebanon. In Germany, the film and its producer have remained unknown, its archives hold almost no records related to them.

The absence of what was advertised as “a first national film” within and without the archive has prompted a research approach which looks for the ‘encounter’ with contextual fragments rather than the ‘discovery’ of a singular object to be preserved and historicised. Between locations and languages, the film can be situated as a ‘cultural object’ across contexts that are not cinematic but condition the cinema and are to some extent conditioned by it. Materials relating to the competition and cooperation between parallel national(ist) projects at the time could constitute another type of ‘archive’ in which the absent film attains presence.

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Black filmmaking has long been relegated to the margins of film history. In recent years, with the increasing interest in ideas of decolonisation in art and culture as well as in academia, it has finally become more visible. The first part of the lecture will focus on Wiliam Reuben (“Skip”) Norman, who was part of the first cohort of students when “Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie” (DFFB) was founded in 1966. In reconstructing Skip Norman’s trajectory, the specificities of the film school context, and the special situation of Norman’s expatriate position will be highlighted. In the second part of this lecture, we will consider Norman in the larger context of Black Internationalism in film and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Norman belonged to an ideological and mutually supportive cohort that circulated around each other in Europe, if not always directly interacting or collaborating. We might think of a filmmaker like Melvin van Peebles, or a polemicist and activist like Angela Davis, or even a man of letters like James Baldwin. Skip Norman’s position in this historical continuum has yet to be properly accounted for.

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