Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
FRIEDERIKE PEZOLD (PEZOLDO)
March 10 – March 16
March 10-16, 2024
A photographer, performer, and video and installation artist who made one fascinating excursion into feature filmmaking with CANALE GRANDE (1983), Friederike Pezold (Pezoldo) is an exhilaratingly multi-media artist, and one who deserves far more recognition in the U.S. than she’s thus far received. Pezold’s work is defined above all by a preoccupation with the intersection of technology, media, and the body, a theme she has explored in many different forms. Born in Vienna in 1945, and educated in Munich, Pezold is perhaps best known for her photo series and multi-channel video works which center on – and tend to deconstruct – her own body. Her feature-length video TOILETTE (1979) is emblematic: over the course of 78 minutes, it focuses on and isolates various parts of her body, bestowing on them a certain monumentality as well as a mysterious (and comic) abstraction. TOILETTE reflects an overriding goal of Pezold’s work: to be both subject and object at once.
A couple years earlier, Pezold had inaugurated an ongoing project entitled “Radio Free Utopia”, in which she designed a special apparatus that allowed her to move through the city shooting video which was simultaneously displayed, via a closed-circuit feed, on a monitor attached to her body. “Radio Free Utopia” was a radical and deadpan funny extension of the utopian ideas of other video artists of the time, who were determined to circumvent the restricted production and distribution channels of commercial media networks. It also became the pretext for CANALE GRANDE, whose protagonist – played by Pezold herself – wanders through Vienna and Berlin equipped with the “Radio Free Utopia” rig. Incongruously, however, CANALE GRANDE was filmed – beautifully – on 35mm, in part by the accomplished filmmaker and cinematographer Elfi Mikesch. An unusual and provocative marriage of film and early video, it combines the visual beauty and texture of film with early video’s preoccupation with new ways to produce and circulate imagery, while also reflecting the new medium’s liberation from the conventions of narrative drama.
Having held CANALE GRANDE in the highest esteem ever since hosting a screening in 2018, we are thrilled to showcase it for a full week in February, alongside TOILETTE, and to present the U.S. premiere of Pezold’s most recent moving-image work, REVOLUTION OF THE EYES (2022), a typically singular, funny, and uncategorizable piece that finds Pezold meditating on the changes to perception and behavior wrought by the new technologies of our own time.
This series is co-presented by Sixpack (www.sixpackfilm.com), and with generous support from the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Special thanks to Friederike Pezold (Pezoldo); Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger & Melina Tsiamos (ACFNY); Dietmar Schwärzler & Gerald Weber (Sixpack); and Sebastian Höglinger & Peter Schernhuber (Diagonale).
CANALE GRANDE
1983, 88 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In German with English subtitles. Cinematography by Elfi Mikesch, Wolfgang Pilgrim, and Fritz Ölberg.
“Like Pezold’s sculptural work, CANALE GRANDE plays with the dynamics of subject and object, composition and consumption. Its protagonist rebels against consumer television by producing her own ‘narrowcast’ (as opposed to broadcast) network, shooting in public with a video camera and monitor apparatus strapped to her body. The film relates to Pezold’s larger ‘Radio Free Utopia’ project, inaugurated in 1977, which posited an individually empowered form of television whose production and distribution were free from state monopoly.” –SCULPTURECENTER
“‘I take my wishes for reality because I believe in the reality of my wishes’: the cry of Paris, May ’68 is also the key note of CANALE GRANDE. Herein, Pezold says goodbye to the world of pre-packaged, merchandized media and opens up her own ‘grand canal,’ or Radio Free Utopia. Wandering around Berlin [and Vienna] with a closed-circuit TV on her back, she plays the inquiring reporter with deadpan humor. The result is a one-to-one TV network that makes its programming as it goes along; more than art-in-action, it is media inspired by, and geared to, the individual reality of wishes. Shot by Elfi Mikesch, one of the most formally innovative of German women filmmakers, CANALE GRANDE is also a stage for a tongue-in-cheek display of underground haute couture.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
“A young woman refuses to watch television and decides to create her own program. The changeable and unpredictable structured underground film sees itself as a protest against a standardization of the world of images, as a call for radical subjectivity.” –Friederike Pezold
Fri-Sun, Mar 10-12 at 6:30 nightly, and Mon-Thurs, Mar 13-16 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly.
PLUS:
TOILETTE
1979, 78 min, 16mm-to-digital. No dialogue.
“With a video camera, the filmmaker observes piece by piece her body, its forms, movements and sounds. In shots with the forcefulness of graphics, the viewer willing to do so can experience seeing and hearing anew and discover adventure in the everyday.” –Friederike Pezold
“The discovery of slowness. A woman – Friederike Pezold herself – in front of the camera and monitor. Always a body part – naked or decently covered – shifts into extreme close-up in the video image. Details first become visible, recognizable, when one has become accustomed to the slowing down. Ultimately, the body does not bare its secret, or in other words, preserves its aura of mystery. TOILETTE, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum in 1979, strips the viewers’ gaze of any prudence. A body film. Radical. Unparalleled.” –DIAGONALE 2022
Fri, Mar 10 at 8:45, Sat, Mar 11 at 4:30, and Sun, Mar 12 at 4:30.
REVOLUTION OF THE EYES / REVOLUTION DER AUGEN
2022, 75 min, digital, silent. In English.
“Revolutionary as never before in the world, the eyes fight for a new worldview against the prevailing abuses! They change the world through a new way of seeing the world: the body in it. Against the ruling way of seeing it, they fight to give the gaze more time, more space, more silence: because these values are threatened with extinction. And they fight to save the mysterious in the image of face and body in the new surveillance society with selfie mania, because it is so much more exciting for the eyes. Eye pauses.” –Friederike Pezold
Sat & Sun, Mar 11 & 12 at 8:45 each night.
