Halmaspiel

A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.

Picture postcards, travel brochures and holiday photos are all this merrily caustic collage needs to portray moods and desires between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. In spring 1990, the first Interflug plane carrying GDR citizens touched down on Majorca. About the mediterranean colours of the island, the first-person narrator remarks in the voiceover: “We knew them from the postcards sent by our West German relatives. This was the West, this was West-West.” Ostensibly naïve, her recollections nonetheless develop an ironic undertone. However blue the sea shines in the photos, however loud the castanets play, the travel group with their East German money are never more than onlookers in this half-board paradise. Everything seems like an empty promise: the bursting oranges on the trees, the sumptuous breakfast buffet and the giant hotel pools.

ALL UND ALLTAG goes on a journey through the history of the history of DEFA (from 1946 to 1992 the state film film production in East Germany).

Snow, film dust, and particles. The worn and torn broken film from an old lanterna magica projector. Retrieved animated footage from around the 1900s is combined with computer animation.

We see the machinery of image projection fail all the time. What happens when art steps in and takes over the process?