The first London Essay Film Festival, to be held at Birkbeck College and the ICA, is delighted to feature Viennese artist and filmmaker Constanze Ruhm, who will be showing and discussing her recent work Invisible Producers, Chapter 1: Panoramis Paramount Paranormal (made in collaboration with Emilien Awada). The essay film takes “projection” as its central topic. While projection is a key part of cinematic technology there is also projection in the psychoanalytic sense: projecting onto something or onto someone, which/who always has a connection to those forms of desire that structure the relationship between an audience and events on the screen.
The film will be screened twice:
Wednesday 26 March, 6:30pm, Central St Martins College of Art
Friday 28 March, 12:30 - 16:30, Birkbeck College Cinema, Gordon Square
She will also appear in convesation with Laura Mulvey on 25 March at 6:30pm. Find out more here.
Constanze Ruhm is an artist and author, whose work, exhibited internationally, encompasses installations, film/videos, publications and curatorial activities. Her artistic practice explores the interactions between film/film theory, theatrical forms, and new media, primarily with regard to questions of identity, representation and (feminist) film theory. Since 2006, she has been professor for Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Since 2007, she has also been an adjunct professor at the Art Institute Boston/Lesley University. She lives in Vienna and Berlin.
Friday's event at Birkbeck, combining screenings and discussion, is structured in two parts.
Part one – Constanze Ruhm in conversation with Roland-Francois Lack (UCL, creator of The Cine-tourist web-site):
In La Difficulté d’une perspective: A Life of Renewal (2013), Constanze Ruhm, with Emilien Awada and using location research by Roland-Francois Lack, created this photographic series of eight locations from Une Femme est une femme shot from two different perspectives: first, as a precise replica of a shot from the original film, and then as a representation of the subjective perspective of the main female character (Angela/Anna Karina). The photos show what Anna Karina must have seen when she herself was seen by Godard and his camera.
Part two – screening and presentation:
Panoramis Paramount Paranormal (part of the Invisible Producers series), Constanze Ruhm with Emilien Awada, 2014
Out of their work on Une Femme est une femme, Ruhm and Awarda discovered the film studio St. Maurice founded in 1913 and destroyed by fire in 1971. The film focuses on the history of this specific location and its place within the history of cinema. Subsequently, the apartment complex Le Panoramis was built on the same site.
