The Film

Directors: Wiebke Thomsen & Johannes Thomsen
Format: Live Super 8mm Color Film
Duration: 80 Min.
Sound: Stereo-Tape & Live-Samples
Language: German with English translation
Land: Germany 2022

Indifferent landscapes, refracting light, some lonely bird and the window to the sebum-laden living room made of patterned wallpaper and trivialities. Cut. Tenacious sequences inflate moments to cliff-hangers and shatter their tremulous spectatorship. Thundering leitmotifs – in constant intoxication by German desinterest – with no backrest or lederhosen. Black-red-gold at full mast, the cinema is dead.

Long live the cinema.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN GERMANY – a home-movie cabinet of German remembrance culture from the 1960s to 1980s. A visually associative cut-up film was created from over 50 kilometers of Super 8mm found footage, which the two directors set to music with self-composed tape soundscapes and sampled text fragments from German Dada, Beat and underground literature. An analogue cinema experience that breaks with cinema while voicing a declaration of love for cinema.