1/8 [Brigitta Kuster *]
At home, with oneself – that would be the site, this geographical space: a city, a village, a region, a nation state, sealed, fortified. This has actually never been the case. In fact, in the modern age, fixation and sedentarism became a compulsion, an ideology and a myth, which was supposed to bring mobilisation under control. The historical emergence of film and cinema, in particular, has brought to the fore the paradigm of the journey, the route, the passage to be travelled or the distance to be bridged, which is not only induced by the motion of machines. Moving images. And this conjuncture has certainly not hindered the development of cinema as a business. What has been a challenge to film theory, however, is the fact that with film, we are always already heading somewhere else. Easily carried away and therefore difficult to grasp, we are completely with or even within ourselves and yet somewhere else, at the same time ici et ailleurs.

5/8 [Philip Widmann]
It is easy to criticise a “Festival of German-Language Documentary Film” for this linguistic limitation, since it only refers to one (of the) official language(s) of nationally defined territories, but not to the many other languages spoken there and in the films produced there. It is just as easy to criticise a “Festival of Documentaries from Germany, Austria and Switzerland” on the grounds that the countries of production and the locations of some of the films are not identical. In front of the screen as a membrane on which the imagined and the real can transform into their respective other, communities are formed, an imaginary “we” of the viewers, which sometimes identifies with the “they” of those being looked at and which sometimes distances itself from it. By the time it began to speak, cinema had already crossed borders and made them credible by depicting differences across the globe. With the advent of the sound film, the “we” was institutionalised in nationally organised markets, production and reception cultures, linked internationally through cooperation and competition, and selectively permeating each other. Its division into homogeneous linguistic areas is an anachronism of cinema, in which its missed opportunities latently continue to exist: other forms of perception, understanding, community.

2/8 [BK]
The prefix “para” can refer to locality, and thus to being close but slightly off-centre, somewhat removed. As a temporal marker it corresponds to the simultaneity of a difference, while in a figurative sense it indicates an opposition or a comparison. Paranational: to do something that is contrary to the great things that Ernest Renan thought a nation would look back on or aspire to in the future. In film, it is above all the producing countries, the financiers, who inscribe a nationality on a film. And the entire national infrastructure of the film industry, from film funding to censorship and archiving, can be understood as a protectionist policy against international competition and the transnational flooding of markets, especially from the USA since the 1930s. An example from France: the Centre national de la cinématographie, the central institution for the subsidisation and governance of national cinema, emerged from an institution founded during the Vichy government. However, the COIC (Comité d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique), founded in 1940, was not concerned with Hollywood, but with counterbalancing Goebbels’s Continental Film. The model was also exported to the colonies, where it was replicated by the CCM, founded in Morocco in 1944. In film history, many prefer to focus on films and authors, and less often on the history of the cinema industry.

6/8 [PW]
The realistic image of the intersection between production and reception culture consists not only of what is produced and seen, but also of what is not produced and thus remains unseen. A good forty years after its publication in West Germany, Claudia Lenssen’s Liste des Unverfilmten (List of the Unfilmed) is still a highly topical text, despite all the changes that have taken place since then. The entries in the list insist on difference and its momentum to destabilise homogenised media and material spheres of life, rather than the option for a consumability of diversity that maintains the status quo. A large number of brief descriptions of situations and constellations, “ordinary and bottomless,” which can hardly be reproduced in a short quotation. A critical mass of material for a “prospect of films in which history enters in a different way than it has to date.” It is not a lament about losses due to structural conditions, but rather a view of the future that implies changing structures and thus becomes a matter of shared responsibility between producers and recipients. Learning to perceive the unrepresented and the non-representable in order to show and see differently requires the ability to understand oneself as another. This responsibility cannot be transferred to institutions, nor can it be organised by public authorities.


3/8 [BK]
Personally, I came to film history from the margins, for example with questions about the representation of migrants in cinema, and together with queer-feminist protagonists of film practices that, from the 1960s onwards, saw themselves as part of a force that wanted to transform the grand narratives of what was considered to be (socially) changeable. – CinémAction: the name of the film magazine founded at the end of the 1970s was programmatic: close to social movements and struggles, cinéma militant, emancipatory, anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist cinema, direct, collective, lighter equipment, small teams, flexible, agile, sur le vif. Since the beginning of the 2000s, I have been working as a cultural producer, mostly in networks and groups and as part of a milieu on entanglements and translations – on a DissemiNation. Our aim was to promote a post-migrant society in Central and Western Europe as a cultural and social consequence of migration processes. We also wanted to connect to a post-colonial perspective as a contact zone of our own history that we felt needs to be questioned anew, with all its asymmetries that need to be criticised and with forms of porosity, that do not come without power differential, but include exchange, hybridisation, renewal, and violence. In this context, it was always important to look over one’s shoulder, not least with regard to processes of exploitation and accumulation as well as the opening up and uncertainty of articulated categories such as gender, which often go hand in hand with all of this. We’ve learned transnationally, and it seems we have not done such a bad job of partially instituting these post- and transnational perspectives on difference. But both the reflexive (post-) and the trans-formative moment have meanwhile proven to be blocked in terms of their constituent power and co-opted in many ways; they have been exhausted in the redistribution of resources and the reallocation of positions. Exactly at these points they are currently being attacked by conservative, even restorative, identitarian-authoritarian programmes. Defending what has been achieved is an inadequate tactic, not least in view of the urgency of fostering a process of radically reshaping our sensibilities as earthly beings and extending the more-than-social to a planetary aesthetic.

7/8 [PW]
Learning to ignore existing images in order to recognise those which they obscure; adopting the knowledge associated with them in order to rebuild fragmented solidarities. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s text What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment deals with the effort to unlearn the epistemic ignorance conveyed by established images and thus to interrupt the structural violence of a mode of perception sanctioned by the nation state. Her text refers to the inability, perpetuated by German state authorities and public discourse, to recognise the NSU murders and their trial, years of misguided inquiries and a persistently inadequate investigation as the continuity of a racist structure. Strategic cluelessness as an anaesthetised perception from which migrant, situated knowledges and experiences of difference simply roll off. One could imagine the Federal Republic of Germany as a fog field, increasingly sealed off inwards and outwards. Under the title “Reason of State,” the fog would become a projection screen for the supposed unambiguities that are driving the rapid erosion of solidarity and self-centredness in the majority society. In the light of these projections, suffering is judged by unequal standards, knowledge is discredited, repression and violations of the law are normalised. Phenomena in the fog remain without scale: distances cannot be defined, connections are obscured, sounds are muffled and difficult to locate, even one’s own extremities become “phantom limbs” (Michel Serres).

4/8 [BK]
Besides, on the margins of and against the organic national enclosure, the action of a movement image does not lead from a given to an altered situation, but to a paranational body corporate without organs. It perforates the panoramic view, wears it down with its symptoms and its disconcerting gestures. Not before and after, but something else besides – it skews the tenacity of the seemingly irrevocable forms of the territorial nation-state system, together with its seconds, the supranational organs, which do not accidentally coincide with the triumph of cinema before and before. It has always been there, or it suddenly materialises, shot out of an immense off-screen, through the centre to the front and in your face. Too early, too late, its persistence is tremendous and its appearance like a flashing cameo. Achille Mbembe argues for reparative thinking based on the figure of the passer-by: a non-enduring and arbitrary presence, mortal and perishing in passing, the paradigmatic figure of anonymity in urban modernity, passing on the way to somewhere else, just like film.

8/8 [PW]
To reawaken sensibility would require a sense of one’s own implicit involvement in forms of obfuscation instead of trying to locate their origins elsewhere. Tolerance of ambiguity – the competence to deal constructively with the unclear and the contradictory, rather than seeking to straighten it out for the sake of supposed certainty – is also claimed where it is not practised. When used as a tool to accuse others of incompetence, it is deployed to defend a Eurocentric concept of universalism, wrapped in a poisoned willingness to engage in dialogue. In this way, the supposedly cosmopolitan spectrum of “international” (at film festivals and elsewhere) easily turns into a protective claim for a national mindset drifting into the isolation of authoritarianism. The use of the prefix “inter” may mean that in Germany one no longer dares to venture into interstitial spaces, but rather emphasises the national as a moral essence. The prefix “para” stands in the way, as a thinking-besides of films like nations under the condition of their potential non-existence. Not settling for laurels means repeatedly returning to such zero points in order to interrupt continuities and suspend the certainties formulated by national (state) structures. Paranational cinema, in German and other languages, is a sporadic phenomenon without an established location. Where does it become visible?