2013-04-03
Teri Wehn Damisch in conversation with Prof.Weibel
With a retrospective selection of French filmmaker Teri Wehn Damisch’s short- and documentary films, the ZKM dedicated for the first time a unique, two-day film festival to her work in January 2013.
The pinnacle of this was the film screening and world premiere of the new film by the director, who has received several international prizes. »Les Enfants Otages de Bergen-Belsen« is a film which thematizes the transportation of children to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.
In dialogue with Peter Weibel, the literary scholar discusses how she has contributed to the success of the genre – above all in the area of the art- and artist documentary – and explains, for which reasons even historical content should be processed creatively if a lasting documentary is to be produced.
»In the last ten years the documentary film, as an independent film genre, has soared to unimaginable heights. [...] One of the most extraordinary protagonists in this new wave of documentary film, who at the same time is one of its founding pioneers, is Teri Wehn Damisch.«
Damisch offers her insight into her working method, which she details in order to describe how her films are created. With the documentation »Les Enfants Otages de Bergen-Belsen« she does not merely create one of many works dealing with the Holocaust; rather, her film stands out from other films of its kind: using two cameras and a dual projection, she builds a dispositive in order to capture the evocative power of the moving and unmoving images.
This method awakens memories among survivors that would not have come to light in a conventional interview. In this context, Peter Weibel and Teri Wehn Damisch also discuss the meaning of allowing the »mise en scène,« the director’s staging of the film, to speak for the work, and explore whether and how her oeuvre might differ from the works of other »Cinema direct« artists.
