With films including the 'rubble woman' portrait Martha, the three-part experimental film cycle Potter's Stier, Venus nach Giorgione and Frau am Klavichord, the portrait of the artist Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, and also the documentaries Rangierer and Die Küche, noted for their outstanding sound and visuals, Jürgen Böttcher distances himself yet further from the didactic tone and abstract heroic representation of socialist films.
Part of Böttcher’s experimental trilogy of overpaintings, this short shows the filmmaker, who paints under the name Strawalde, taking a reproduction of an old image on a postcard and painting over it before the camera. Stroke by stroke the picture is transformed, its soundtrack improvised from the friction of the brush. Film, painting and animation touch, and making becomes metamorphosis, carried out small and in private under a state that had no room for his abstraction.
Jürgen Böttcher (b. 1931) is widely regarded as the foremost avant-garde filmmaker of East German cinema, and has painted throughout his life under the name Strawalde. His abstract painting was suppressed as “formalist” in the GDR and several of his DEFA documentaries were banned; his films join a tender attention to labour with an experimental fascination for the image. A. R. Penck was among his students.
Film Partner: Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
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Devanshu Singh is a National Award winning filmmaker and educator known for feature films ‘Chintu Ka Birthday’ and ‘14 Phere’, and several viral AIB sketches.
