The View from Our House

Stephen Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, a hypnotic poem in the Dwoskin meaning of the term which is long observations of very tiny details. A gesture, a pause, a look, a moment. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for Age is..., all the faces being close friends, or close friends relatives and sometimes even Stephen himself.

Based on documents found in Berlin archives, Four Parts of a Folding Screen explores exclusion, statelessness and the legalised theft and sale of everyday family possessions by the National Socialist regime. A voice, enigmatic and sometimes uncertain, foretells of, relates and recalls the routine processes of injustice and their legacy: the creation of a diaspora of household objects, scattered amongst buildings that no longer exist. As the camera probes the secrets of ordinary spaces, streets and buildings around the city of Berlin, semblances of a person and a history begin to emerge and coalesce.

A pioneer in sound recording, Ludwig Koch was suspected by the Nazis of complicity in the Reichstag fire. After taking refuge in England, he specialized in recording birdsong. Blending contemporary imagery with his sound archives, the film retraces his journey.