Cornell Cinema: DDR/DDR

Cornell Cinema presents
Ithaca Premiere!
DDR/DDR
Wednesday, October 13 at 7pm
Willard Straight Theatre
with filmmaker Amie Siegel
Admission: $7 general/$5.50 seniors/$4 students
more here and at cinema.cornell.edu

Cosponsored with the Institute for German Cultural Studies and the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series

Directed by Amie Siegel
A multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful film essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the film collects unsettlingly mundane Stasi surveillance footage, interviews with psychoanalysts, East German "Indian hobbyists," and lolling shots of derelict state radio stations into an extended and self-conscious assemblage that weaves together meditations on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art. Subtitled. Digital Projection.
More at amiesiegel.net
2008 > Germany/USA > 2 hrs 15 min

AMIE SIEGEL BIO
Born in 1974 in Chicago, Siegel studied at Bard College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has lived and worked in New York and Berlin. Siegel works variously in 16 and 35 mm Þlm, video, sound, and writing. Screenings and exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial; KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; Austrian Film Museum; Berlin International Film Festival; PaciÞc Film Archive; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Frankfurt Film Museum; and Film Forum in New York. Her Þrst book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books), was published in 1999, followed by numerous essays on art and poetics. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address, and interview, investigating how these repetitions form cultural memory. Her multichannel video and Þlm installations reformulate cinematic enterprises - the establishing shot, the remake and the tracking shot - as uncanny reþections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia. Longer single-channel videos and films (The Sleepers, Empathy, DDR/DDR) move between scripted and spontaneous spaces, truth and Þction, shifting performance from identiÞcation to parody and estrangement. Siegel is also an Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.