Dore O.

The German artist Joseph Beuys is reflecting on his theory of art, being filmed as a kinetic sculpture. In 1981, the film has won the German film critic's award for “Best short film in Germany”.

Hurrycan has nothing to do with whirlwinds, although in this Nekes film the pictures journey across the screen, excitedly, spasmodically and flickering. The title weds the element of haste with the notion of a film can, which in this case turns out to be something of a Pandora's Box and contains expectations for a new way of seeing. A computerized shutter system that Nekes had built.

Attracted to Nordic landscapes, [Dore O.] filmed KALDALON (1970/71) in Iceland where images of water, rocks, steam and smoke were technically enhanced to appear blue-tinged.

The reality of the film is the fantast of the viewer. My north pole in the Ruhr valley. Dedicated to Georges Méliès.

Enzyklop is a rediscovery and reconstruction of the cyclopean gaze that Odysseus erased to free himself. The search for the lost view leads to intermediate distances, into the realm of association, the multiplicity of dimensions. An anthology, a variety of image/image ideas is created.

A montage experiment in which Dore O., her body painted in different colours, swings back and forth in front of a movie screen, on which is painted a phallus (slightly abstract and fairly large). The perspective is such that the girl appears to be swinging into and out of the phallus. It is one who is content to see through the specific event. The work exhausts itself in a trivial aspect, the literary. This is most comfortable for the critic: the literary content of a work is easiest to reproduce in a literary form of criticism.

A strange succession of tableaux of four women and a man which gives the sense of a sort of dream family locked in an antiseptic world of endless afternoon teas, dinners and waiting. Often her images seem to be stills either before or after something has been said.

A series of still photographs, is various states of photographic exposure.

Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.

In 1920 Frans Masereel published in Paris his woodcut series "The idea". Dore O. has draw inspiration from this work on her first feature film, a poetic fable about the human longing for a free and just society. Following Masereel "idea" Dore O's "CANDIDA" accesses old, anchored in the ancient Christian tradition and ideas, according to which such ideas and aspirations in the image of the naked woman find their embodiment.

An experimental film where a particular space is constantly "present" : there is a complex usage of superim- position, and of split-screen effects. The place shown is a part of a house in the country. Doors and windows are continually shown, emphasizing the film's concern with framing. Other images are present: city-scapes of a particularly sinister nature, implying a sense of ruin, and shots of a chorus on a stage. These shots begin and end the film which is accompanied by a vocal chant on the soundtrack.

A female figure wanders inside a warehouse interior and through various motifs, including a fan and a birdcage, set to a medieval chant.

For "Thermoment" Dore O. filmed the clarinetist Eckard Koltermann with a heat recording camera and thus translated the heat regions of the body's interior into images while making music.

Traces a series of forever-winding staircases like liminal excerpts from an endless memory-spool, asking the viewer which spaces their eyes may have taken for granted along the ambling path.

A painter surrounded by images - his own and those of the reality that surrounds him - is the protagonist of the latest film by Dore O., moves exactly in the border area between the two, only apparently separate worlds.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

A fixed shot showing six persons, looking into the camera inertly. Gradually tiny, minimal movements can be registered.

Director Werner Nekes has created this experimental film in the mode of James Joyce's Ulysses to the extent that human interactions are represented by poetic, symbolic images and language, with a certain amount of nudity added in.

The film is divided into five parts differing in pictorial and musical structure. The plot, two women and their love for one another, is of secondary importance. An ingenious combination of stereoscopic images and montage of individual pictures make new qualities of perception accessible to the viewer. In the final part of the love scenes pictorial sequences and music build up to a delirious rhythm.

A painterly, poetic experimental film with narrative elements. A woman is looking after an obviously blind man. She undresses, bandages and dresses him again. Since the action takes place on two temporal planes running in opposite directions, the couple's relationship appears to be in a state of stagnation. In-between, we are shown the images in the protagonists' minds: nightmares, an optical machine, but also erotic dreams from perhaps better days. Tango motifs and an aria (composed by Anthony Moore) reinforce the impression of a romantic chamber piece. The man's blindness refers to the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, who destroyed his sight through keeping his naked eye fixed too long on the sun while researching into the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina. The pictorial technique, with layer after layer dissolving into one another, is reminiscent of the overpainting technique deployed by the director in her work for the canvas.

Dore O. and later Nekes speak to each other and into the camera, slowly and deliberately like a speech exercise, quickly like a tongue twister or in competition with each other, accentuated rhythmically or rubato, until the silent noise becomes piercing and rings in the ears. As in a mirror joke, Zerroptik also involves the viewer in the erotic duet, which persistently elicits all the comedy and latent horrors of a sudden discovery from the field of associations of the strange sentence.