Arsenal Film Archive

A portrait of the filmmakers Bärbel Freund and Karl Heil like a song in its changing verses, the locations were chosen according to mood and season: in spring, in snow, in Venice, in the flat, alone and together.

A film structured around Detel Aurand and Jon Sigurgeiersson.

Scenes in the park of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich with its collection of Asian, African and Indian art.

Throughout her work, Aurand frequently makes her camera and her images felt as an active, moving body—spinning, rushing, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, hanging upside down. In A Walk, her film goes walking. The camera occupies a snowy Swiss setting, as Aurand creates a material, tonal landscape that is both nebulous, serene, and wonderfully energetic.

A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Aurand’s 16mm films are portraits of people and place, often prompted by the discovery and experience of travel. As George Clark has written, the journey is a cornerstone of Aurand’s filmmaking: "“Her work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, Aurand’s work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading and dissecting space."

Experimental film about a train ride. The carriage window becomes a screen, the landscape a mood, the mood a landscape.

“In the day after seeing Terzen, there was a surprising sense of the film that developed for me. The rhythms were still present and helped to unify a multitude of impressions. This lead me to reconsider the general tone of the film because, as I reached beyond its quick pace and rhythmic lightness and beyond the everyday content, I realized that its Heiterkeit grows out of a serenity or courage in facing mortality. This is the surprising sense of the film, its inner music. (…) Early in the film I recall a chair held in the strong afternoon sunlight. Even though you show it from many angles, it has a potent stillness. This strikes me as a good example of how you embody an active sense of seeing in your filming, and you reflect back to us the paradox that it is in movement that we create stillness. The eye, constantly moving yet creating stillness." — Robert Beavers

Two memories from a longer visit to New England in Autumn 2012: a group of elderly ladies playing bridge followed by the stormy ocean at Cape Cod in Winter while listening to Etienne Grenier's music practice.

An imaginary journey on a ship. We turned the building of the Film Academy into a ship. Claire and Solange from a Jean Genet piece, a polish woman with her Madonna, screaming sailors are a few of the passengers on this artifical journey.

“Fadenspiele 2“ (Toying with String 2) is an animation made with the painter, my sister, Detel Aurand. We filmed inside the studio and outdoors in the forest and fields. From various elements like paper, wood, plastic and fabric come images that continuously change their form. We see one image evolving out of the other, becoming something new.

A walk, a moment at the beach... And the Japanese filmmaker Utako Koguchi behind the heard piano.

Jón in Akureyri is the second part of Detel + Jón. I filmed Jón Sigrurgeiersson walking through the streets of his childhood, meeting his filmmaker brother and telling childhood stories.

A collection of fleeting observations that document the passage of time through intimate encounters with friends and family captured between 1999 to 2018.

Portrait of Canadian artist Susan Turcot in 1993 and 2011.

Stories from the lesbian subculture in West Berlin, about being in love, clichés, desire, and conflict – "shot as a narrative, with real lesbians at real locations about real feelings."