Master of Arts in Art Education
With: Jane Jin Kaisen, Volker Pantenburg and Students Master Art Education
Hosted by Anselm Franke
SYMPOSIUM:
FILMS AND DISCUSSIONS
ENTRY FREE FOR ALL
How are modern histories of violence written forth, and what cinematic-documentary strategies unravel and confront colonial amnesia and the nationalistic appropriation of collective traumas? The symposium "Contested Memory (Erinnerungskämpfe)" takes six films as the starting point for a discussion of narrative techniques and image politics in documentary film, which deal with memory and the afterlife and perpetuation of structural relations of violence. The films will be discussed together with invited guests. The discussion parts will be prepared and co-moderated by the participating students. The event is open to the public and free of charge.
Der Lachende Mann (The Laughing Man) by Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann is a much-discussed contemporary GDR documentary from 1966, consisting of an interview with the mercenary Sigfried Müller, known as "Congo Müller". Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes is a 2021 HBO miniseries that connects the current renaissance of right-wing ideologies of white supremacy to the continuities of genocidal histories of violence. Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 The Act of Killing focuses on the 1965/66 anti-communist mass killings in Indonesia through interviews with perpetrators still alive. Angela Melitopoulos' Passing Drama from 1999 is a cinematic meditation on migrant memory and transgenerational trauma that addresses the displacements and forced relocations that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Jane Jin Kaisen's Community of Parting from 2019 addresses the afterlives of histories of violence and their transnational entanglements in a divided Korea through the lens of shamanic practices and myths. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's This is Not A Burial, it’s a Resurrection from 2019 is the only feature film in the program: a story of symbolic death and rebirth probing the depth of colonial modernity’s frontiers, told through an old woman's resistance to the forced relocation of her village.
Program:
Saturday, 15 April
10:30
Welcome: Anselm Franke
Introduction: Students
Der Lachende Mann- Walter Heynowski/ Gerhard Scheumann (1966) [66 minutes]
Discussion
12:00
Introduction: Students
Input: Volker Pantenburg, UZH
Discussion
14:00
Lunch break
15:00
Introduction: Students
The Act of Killing- Joshua Oppenheimer (2012) [115 minutes]
Discussion
17:30
Break
18:00
Introduction: Students
Passing Drama- Angela Melitopoulos (1999) [66 minutes]
Discussion
19:30
Final Input and Apéro
Sunday, 16 April
11:00
Welcome: Anselm Franke
Introduction: Students
One Episode Exterminate all the Brutes- Raoul Peck (2021) [60 minutes]
Discussion
13:00
Lunch break
14:00
Introduction: Students
Community of Parting- Jane Jin Kaisen (2019) [72 minutes]
Input: Jane Jin Kaisen, artist
Discussion
16:00
Break
16:30
Introduction: Students
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection- Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (2019) [120 minutes]
Discussion
19:00
Closure