Jüm-Jüm, Dore O. & Werner Nekes, 1967, 10 min, 16mm
Alaska, Dore O., 1968, 18 min, 16mm
Lawale, Dore O., 1969, 30 min, 16mm
Kaskara, Dore O., 1974, 21 min
Xoanon, Dore O., 1994, 11 min, 16mm

We're thrilled to present a rare programme of experimental films by the German artist Dore O. which occupy a state in-between opaqueness and translucency, hypnosis and clarity. The programme has been selected by Berlin-based archivist and scholar Masha Matzke, who will also introduce the screening.

"Dore O.’s body of work appears to claim a certain autonomy within the dominating, yet diverse and irreducible currents of German experimental cinema. This rare programme of experimental films by the German artist Dore O. aims to show her consistent concern for a creation of an associative, almost pre-conscious flow of images and sounds and the deliberation of their sensuality, which cannot be easily interpreted or approached verbally nor intellectually. Going beyond both the purely personal and merely formalistic, her work thwarts the logics of her contemporaries in its intimate and highly enigmatic poetics which are inextricably linked to a meta-filmic exploration of the moving image, the properties of celluloid film and of modes of perception. In her films, one can observe the constantly evolving examination of the geometric conditions of the projection surface through a filmic reality that is experienced and captured foremost as image(s) unfolding in multilayered tableaus that occupy a state in-between opaqueness and translucency, hypnosis and clarity. Rhythmic counter-plays between depth and surface, stillness and motion, planes and phantoms, multiple frames and picture-in-pictures all function "to create new architectures of old forms” (Dore O.). As in no other work within German experimental cinema, her striking films retrace an historical trajectory in which painterly, graphic and poetic conceptions of the medium are made-over into distinctly cinematic terms that eventually serve as a means for exploring new modes of subjectivity and states of consciousness. The highly musical and hypnotic nature of these pictorial stratifications, in combination with radical soundscapes, are carried over into her later works of the 1990s." – Masha Matzke

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A programme selected and introduced by Masha Matzke, a Berlin based film archivist and scholar at the film archive and restoration department of Deutsche Kinemathek where she is currently involved in the restoration of Dore O.'s work. She is working on a monograph on Dore O. which is supposed to be published in English in 2020.

Supported by the Goethe-Institut London.