Two Museums

Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

An experimental German film

The extraordinary work of the American artist Philip Guston is a milestone in modern painting. Guston is one of the most discussed painters of his time and today a star of the younger generation of contemporary artists. ARTE is showing the documentary on the occasion of the major Guston retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.

This film is in effect a slideshow of exquisite single photographic images in sparkling black and white, representing Mikesch’s own version of Mary Stuart. “The drama of a woman who attempted a kind of liberal emancipation in a time of upheaval, but got caught in the snares of men,” in her words. Confronted with layers and layers of conflicting information about “how it really was” Mikesch decided not to try to be a historian, but to radicalise the narrative and condense it into striking images of passion, power, love, pain and death.

A German Platoon is explored through the brutal fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad. After half of their number is wiped out and they're placed under the command of a sadistic captain, the platoon lieutenant leads his men to desert. The platoon members attempt escape from the city, now surrounded by the Soviet Army.

A German TV movie

In the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.

Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.

After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

Clonetown 1974 to 1979: a terrorist defector named Charon sits on the edge of oblivion and commentates on the imminent putrification of an abducted car dealer.

A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.

Agatha is an international lawyer, Jo a filmmaker. The two women are lovers. While Jo is on the road showing her films, Agatha discovers and reads her diaries. Problems ensue as Agatha's transgressions lead to jealousy and a spiraling cycle of sexual obsession.

In the 21st part of his Photography and beyond series, Heinz Emigholz projects as usual a series of structures into our brains and from there on to the screen: Airports, motorways and bus stops; department stores, market halls and warehouses.

Worn-down pavements, broken paving stones. Trees that jut out of the concrete, casting shadows on to crumbling façades. The centre of Tbilisi in the summer of 2013. Glimpses of side and main streets, over railings and under balconies, of an architectural cacophony. The voiceover spoken by Natja Brunckhorst reflects on the nature of streets and public spaces.

The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity. An architecture with a sell-by date: That many are now empty or have been repurposed at best is linked to the decline of the socialist ideals they embody.

The final part of Heinz Emigholz’s "Streetscapes" series is again a triptych. A prologue examines three buildings from the 1930s designed by Julio Vilamajó in Montevideo which could have inspired the work of Eladio Dieste, the subject of the main part of the film. The industrial and functional buildings presented span the period from 1955 to 1994; their organic brick construction is astonishing and inspiring.