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After a screening of their most recent film Rainbow’s Gravity, artists Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger discuss the film and their research with Professor Sarah Street.

Rainbow’s Gravity is a cinematic study on the Agfacolor-Neu colour film stock made in Nazi Germany. Along its three layers of emulsion, the film digs deep into the escapist colourised landscape of this time and asks for the material requirements, retentions and ideological continuities of the Agfacolor palette.

The film sequences, projected in the former production line, dismantle not only themselves, but also our view accustomed to historicise. Those scenes aim to visualise what the colour does not show. The film tries to realise, not only how it had been – in the darkrooms of the Agfa film factory – but also how it can be possible at all to face this reality today within film, in images and movements without a final or even conciliatory view of the past.

Ger/UK 2014, 33 min, English/German with English Subtitles

Mareike Bernien (Berlin) and Kerstin Schroedinger (London / Zurich) have been working in collaboration since 2006 on joint film, exhibition and text projects. In their work they seek to critically interrogate image productions and to produce and reproduce images as a material of thought. Their historiographical practice works with film, radio play, music and text, questioning the means of production, historical continuities and the ideological certainties of representation. They are interested in an experimental and critical approach to media formats, with an implicit entanglement of content and form.

Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol. Her current research project is on colour films in the 1920s. Several of her recent publications have been in the area of colour film as author of ‘Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900-55 (2012) and as co-editor with Simon Brown and Liz Watkins of ‘Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive’ (2013). ‘Colour and the Moving Image’ resulted from an international conference held at Arnolfini in 2009.

 

Presented in collaboration with Electra Productions.

Supported by IFA.