Mit Parallelität von Widersprüchen wird Komplexes missverständlicher

Montage enters history with film. It is the cut that connects. Images. The montage is not extending the single image into collage but it provides continuity to difference and movement. From here to there.
—Here an image of Bertolt Brecht exploring montage as a means for epic theatre [walking up and down on the seashore collecting what the tide has washed ashore – Fascism at his time, its imagery, he notes, a source]. But not everything becomes an image as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes in her book’s chapter on archival imperialism* = THE UNTAKEN IMAGE, “which ‘can take many forms: a verbal description, a testimony, a drawing or a photograph of a reenactment of the unphotographed event’”.

—People talking about events remembered from the German revolution.
Cut
Genesis P-Orridge who had a weakness for the newfangled Magic Marker would say “Cut-ups confound and short-circuit Control. Cut-ups loosen rational order, break preconceptions and expected response. They retrain our perception and acceptance of what we are told is the nature of reality.”
Cut
—Here an image of Georges Didi-Huberman’s book explaining montage in Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal as a main principle of grasping (or let’s wish) mastering reality when images take (dys-) position. Contradictory in complexity. Eine Realität, die von Widersprüchen zerrissen ist.
—Here an image of Ronald M. Schernikau that presents itself like a quarry: What the text says it can only say through contradictions, thwarting the principle of description and counter-description.
Magick, let’s remind us, goes further than description.
Cut
—An image of an imagined friendship necklace dedicated by Jung to Freud and based on Jung’s observation of the shattering of a bread knife as parapsychological experience in his first studies term. (One of two experiences).
Cut
An image of Elisabeth Hauptmann describing Brecht as too skinny, a slightly unnerving guy in Munich in the twenties of the last century.
—Here an image of two laughing women at the Libreria delle Donne in Milano in the 1970ies. The paper crumples = neglected history = a phonetic visual joke (maybe the only one).

—Two videos by Noor Abuarafeh based on the same photograph of artists in the “First Spring exhibition”, Jerusalem, 1985 – Two different perspectives on storytelling: “We did not know whether to believe the memory of the photograph or the memory of the people”
Cut

—Here an image that presents itself as a painting. [painted by a machine, painted from video recordings = assisted painting]
—A painting that resigns to a sign. It reads S and S.
—Here an image of a spectator. The spectator carries a German and a Greek newspaper. “Whatever the public (das Volk) wants from the back and the front”. Vlassis Caniaris writes. He lived in Berlin in the 1970ies. He died in 2011.

Cut

—Here an image of a person kneeling in front of a Lexus car, his back towards us. This is a photograph taken by Larry W. Cook in the visiting area of a prison.
Cut
—Another car made out of cardboard challenges the task of translation when a movement transitions into another one [with residue].

Someone might sing karaoke to ariella tai’s “That‘s the Way Lorde Goes” and to the tune “That‘s the Way Love Goes”. Someone screams. [They are Manhattan-based record store employees’ “favorite screams”].
A letter has been written.

The Black Box; film itself: “People will become whatever they wish to be in plenitude”. Clear 19th-century socialism. In 1995 they will get deep-frozen dumplings (cynically: the same, Linda Bilda says).
Cut

—Close up on Berlin (a hommage), three views. fading out
—the memory image.

How to unsettle ruling orders of appearances? How to unsettle the self-certitude of what is shown?
How to self-comment while being exposed?

*Ariella Aïsha Azoulay; Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, 2020

Including documents and works by: Noor Abuarafeh, Ariella Azoulay, Linda Bilda, Bertolt Brecht, KP Brehmer, Vlassis Caniaris, Larry W. Cook, Josefin Fischer, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Matthias Groebel, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Tiphanie Kim Mall, Ariane Müller & Verena Kathrein, Marlies Pahlenberg, Genesis P-Orridge, Ronald M. Schernikau, LeRoy Stevens, ariella tai, Sophie Reinhold, Agnès Varda