Film program curated and presented by Kerstin Schroedinger

Based on her latest film ‘Luddites’ (2020), the program shows films about the history of industrialization and its decline, of cinematic acts of sabotage of dominant narratives, and of the haptic connectivity of textiles.
“Luddites” shows and undertakes an interweaving of the memory of a marginal, but not erased history of resistance against the inhuman and destructive reorganizations of society since the 19th century. In a far-reaching circular path, the ongoing consequences of this history are projected into the post-colonial, -industrial and -documentary space of the present. The bitter songs about the uprisings of the weavers from the 19th century, which accompanied the workers’ movements ever since, tangent the circulation of the image track as a chorus of suffragettes who cannot comply. These songs appear as interruptions, almost disruptions or irritations.
The selected films are accomplices and collaborators of “Luddites”, which accompanied, commented, and localized its coming to being.

for info and booking contact: maschinenstuermer @ posteo(.)  net 

Program:

Handtinting
Joyce Wiemand, Can 1968, 16 mm no sound (distributed by arsenal distribution)
“HANDTINTING is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic.” – Robert Cowan

Clotheslines
Roberta Cantow (US 1982, distributed by Cinenova) HD
Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores.

The Revolution of Machines ثورة المكن
Madkour Thabit, Eg 1968
The film is one of the first Egyptian experimental documentaries, weighing highly on Verton and the Soviet cinema that glorifies the industrial revolution as a socialist project for a better future for the people.

Die Maschinenstürmer / Luddites

K. Schroedinger, Ger 2020, DCP/HD
Luddites documents certain modes of production in the fields of agriculture, weaving, processing, knitting and story telling, which on the one hand can be understood as narrative structures that can tell us of complex social transformations in daily life experiences. And, as a counter-narrative, the voices – an exchange of letters – seek for subverted forms of sabotage, practices of weaving the stories and telling the textiles that are “making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances” (D. Haraway). Luddites is a contemporary critique of technology, giving the Luddite movement a new reading, while reflecting upon the biopolitics of the worker today and how technologies enhance and inform working bodies. Slowing down, stopping, not proceeding. Deviating the progressive form. (https://vimeo.com/377937594 password: luddites)

Intermissions: Songs of the Song of the Shirt, 4 x 1 min, 16 mm optical
4 very short 16mm films. Each song is accompanied by an image track that consists of black film treated with a sewing machine. The songs are without a title or credits, they intervene in the course of the film program (that is, teach film is played in-between the films of the program), as a chorus that is not visible and as a film whose surface is pierced.
(https://vimeo.com/466664504 password wrkwrkwrk)

total running time: ca 100 min
in collaboration with Cinenova and Arsenal Film and Video Distribution