„Fuck the midtones“ – How to make a book with Steidl

This Thursday for the first time on tv: the german documentary “How to make a book with Steidl”, Thursday night, 04.10.11 at 3sat.

“How to make a book with Steidl” is a documentary on Gerhard Steidl and his work as a printer and publisher in the art and photography world. The film was awarded the “Golden Dove” and received positive reviews so far, so I’ll definitely see that one!

Watch the trailer on http://www.howtomakeabookwithsteidl.de/file/Trailer.html, buy the dvd here.

Best moment of the trailer: Steidl discussing proofs with a (famous) photographer, who seems to be worried about the midtones of the pictures. Steidl’s reaction: „Fuck the midtones“

Read more here.

Feldstaerke in Los Angeles with Thom Andersen

Greetings from Los Angeles!

As some of you know I’ll spend some time in the states and i’m right now for one week participating in a great international workshop (FELDSTAERKE) with students from Germany, Paris and from CalArts University Los Angeles.

As an introduction to the extremely big Los Angeles area, we saw an essay film by Thom Andersen that is called “Los Angeles plays itself“. Andersen takes literally almost all the movies that were shot in LA and uses their scenes to show the city. The film took about 3 hrs, but these youtube clips give you a nice idea of it. Cool piece, but in my opinion just too long. Maybe one has to see it in 2 or 3 parts.

A film about Wolfgang Tillmanns

Fortunately,  I was able to see a film about photographer Wolfgang Tillmanns yesterday at the Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund. Berlin based director Heiko Kalmbach accompanied Tillmanns for several years and made this interesting documentary, showing a lot of private moments but also the artistic process which is very special with Tillmanns work (e.g. the way he hangs his photographs on the wall when he has a show – this can easily take several days…).

As far as I know, this film isn’t available on DVD, but maybe there are more screenings soon, I’ll keep you updated if I learn more about that.

If One Thing Matters
- a film about Wolfgang Tillmans

by Heiko Kalmbach, D/USA 2008, 72 min.

See also the PDF here.

In the documentary there is also a sequence that shows how the british band Pet Shop Boys ask Wolfgang Tillmanns to do a music video for them, “Home and dry”. In the beginning, the concept for the clip was very different from what it turned out to be later, and Tillmanns ended up to show mice in the London tube…Like that one.

Tokyo Olympiad Film by Kon Ichikawa

Last semester I took a photography course that was about sports, olympia, body culture etc. , and I had to give a presentation on the olympic films. As you might know, each olympiad has one official film, though the most famous ones are those of Leni Riefenstahl 1936 and Kon Ichikawa 1964.

Kon Ichikawa’s “Tokyo Olympiad” shows the 1964 olympic games in a sometimes very poetic way, with some really beautiful camera. Someone put the whole film on youtube (divided into 20 parts or so, see it here), and for those of you who are interested in movies it’s worth watching them.

Here are 2 examples, but check out the other ones too, there are sooo many good scenes.