16.08.2010
Piano + Metropolis
This thursday night at the Rotterdamse Open Air Cinema: the screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with live music
18.06.2010
Cinematic Rotterdam
Floris Paalman, programmeur van de Rotterdam Classics, promoveert dinsdag 22 juni op ‘Cinematic Rotterdam, the times and tides of a modern city’. Read more »
16.05.2010
Film + architectuur in Den Bosch
On May 17 onward there will be several interesting screenings in the Verkadefabriek in Den Bosch concerning architecture. This monday it’s Many words for modern of Jord den Hollander, a film screened at the 2007 edition of our AFFR festival.
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09.05.2010
Shopping malls on film
The Barbican in London organises screenings of architecture films on a regular basis. Read more »
28.04.2010
Rotterdam premiere
Living Architectures of Beka & Lemoine has its Dutch premiere on Thursday April 29, the filmmakers will be present at the screening. Make your reservation now at the NAi.
08.03.2010
The opportunity to build
Screening of ‘an opportunity to build’ (1985) by Rob Klaasman and Maarten Kloos.
06.02.2010
The Complete Metropolis
Only 200 meters missing, as the newspaper announced. In 2008 the only (almost) complete reel of Fritz Langs’ Metropolis was found. Friday Febrary 12 live on Arte TV. Read more »
02.02.2010
Oscar nomination for Logorama
Yes, we recognize the beauties, because the short animation film Logorama we screened at our festival is nominated for an Academy Award! We keep our fingers crossed for the people of H5, especially Nicolas Schmerkin.
Fascination of space
Interview with director Niklas Goldbach
by Ulrike Haele
The settings for his work range from the steel and glass facades of high-gloss office buildings to paradisiacal-seeming landscapes, from the ruins of an Expo pavilion just recently celebrated in the colour supplements to new uses on an inner-city wasteland. Goldbach draws out the tension of reality and fiction in his films and the result is an interweaving of personal narrative, public reception and socio-political constructs: unspectacular, irritating and beautiful at once.
Ulricke Haele: What is the starting point of your work?
Niklas Goldbach: Usually it is a wish to visualize a sociological or political observation. This can be based on personal experience, like the impression of the privatization of public space in post-reunification Berlin architecture, for example, but frequently it’s also the fascination of a place I’ve found that then inspires a series of images and thoughts.
What are your criteria for selecting a location?
The fact that a place might have an interesting history is far from being enough to make it a suitable location for filming – if it were I’d really have my work cut out! I don’t see myself as an encoder of historical and sociological issues either. In contrast to an academic perspective, a personal relationship with the location is key for me as an artist, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to bear the frequently long post-production phase.
There is frequently a big discrepancy between the architectural concept and the built reality. Does this discrepancy play a role in your work?
Almost every building is based on its planner’s view of society, and in extreme cases it is a utopian symbol or a symbol of a dictatorship – so architectural works interest me, socio-politically, as heterotopias. Although of course filming something in the ruins of the Nazi public swimming baths on the island of Rügen is completely different from shooting a film in the Parisian district of Beaugrenelle. What is interesting in both places is that architecture does not necessarily have to be functionally successful to have an expressive impact: Beaugrenelle has that aura of the nostalgia of failure in the consistent realization of its utopian modern social design, while the surreal volume of the baths on Rügen fills me with sheer horror.
Documentary and fictional modes of representation become relative in your work. What is the relationship between the spatial dimension of architecture and social needs?
I try to concentrate on the ambiguity of reality described by Foucault in Des Espaces Autres: it’s about a redefinition of spaces by fictionalizing the significance of their systems of organization. My work is often described as science fiction even though all of the elements filmed do actually exist, and have only been rearranged. I would say that the works are set parallel to our time and not at a particular point in the past or the future. They are a kind of dystopian daydream without any claim on reality. The spatial conditions and the social requirements are fictionalized accordingly, and their social significance is no longer static, but of course there’s also a critical component to them.
Your work Rise shows an uncompleted high-rise in Bangkok where construction was halted during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A harbinger of the end of global economic growth?
Like the wastelands in Haunt, the ‘Ghost Towers’, as the locals in Bangkok call them, are primarily architectural scars on the city’s matrix that are interesting as ‘mistakes’. The fictional relocation, that is, placing the building in a seemingly untouched tropical landscape, increases one’s sensitivity to the history of the location and so makes it allegorical of the far more abstract process of an economic crisis. The building itself is merely a contemporary ruin, and so reality. The fictionalization, though, suggests a far greater catastrophe – an entire civilization appears to lie in ruins here.
Niklas Goldbach is one of the special guests on the AFFR 2009. His short films Haunt, Dawn, Gan Eden, Rise and Civil twilight are screened at the AFFR2009.The full interview is published in A10 #29 Sep/Oct 2009.
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19.06.2010
Newsletter
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29.10.2009
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23.10.2009
Filmposters
Check out the filmposters here and tell us which one is the best! Read more »
