May 25, 7:30 pm
As part of Hidden’s series of film lectures, film critic Aleksey Artamonov will present the film Behindert (dir. Stephen Dwoskin, Germany, 1974). Boy meets girl, boy shoots girl: he’s a director, she’s an actress. It’s a classic situation for cinematographers after the French New Wave. Here, however, there’s one catch: Stephen Dwoskin suffered lasting disabilities from polio and had to use the camera to compensate for other less mobile parts of his body. One of the key artists of the Post-War Avant-Garde, Dwoskin still remains largely in the shadow of his more eminent colleagues. This made-for-television film (which, in addition to other things, erases the borders between the documentary and scripted, calling into question the status of both) tracks the entire history of the relationship, from the first meeting to the final farewell, from the nascent hope to its inevitable end. Obstacles, fear, illness and disability are all recurring themes for Dwoskin, but Behindert is no socially-aware documentary. Rather, it is one of the most vivid and also somehow universal cinematographic expressions of the nature of desire, vision and its lack, which the camera is able to detect inside each of us.
Aleksey Artamonov is a film critic and curator of film programs (including Talking Films, as part of the MMKF Mediaforum), as well as an ex-editor at Séance Magazine. He has written texts on music and film for Afisha, Interview Russia, W-O-S, Look At Me, Colta.ru, Cine Fantom, and Kinote, among others. The former editor of the Film Section of the site Teorii I Praktiki, Artamonov has worked as press secretary at the State Central Museum of Cinema and the Message to Man International Film Festival, where he curated the program Found Footage: The Mirror in Motion, for the 24th edition of the festival.
The film is screened in its original language with subtitles.
Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
