Constanze Ruhm – Retrospective at the Filmmuseum

Meticulous and unsparing, the director deals with modern cinema and the industry in their alleged foundations, from production conditions to roles and locations to technology – ultimately, cinema's entire (problematic) tradition. Doing the directing here is an author who like nobody else mops the floor with auteurist cinema, in which, as is well known, the stories and perspectives have turned out far too masculine – well-versed in theory, immensely literary, and formally strategic: The palette ranges from reenactments, reconstructions, simulations, the public activation of omissions on the path to the archive, the repair of history/ies, and their questionable translation all the way to (meta)fictionalization, computerization, fabulation, and affective and stylistic transgressions. Ruhm employs her strategies across different media and in opposition to narratives of completeness with a formidable cast from the history of film and culture: stars, nymphs, goddesses, activists and many more. These are elements of a work that, like the individual films, is an open constellation in which traces of the past appear in the present – constructivist, taking on multiple perspectives, and sonorously experimental. If the patriarchy is buried without further ado in a swampland, it was very likely murder. Because here, humor is not only a question of stylistic means (slapstick meets concrete tragedy), but also of the will to militancy. (Katharina Müller / Translation: Ted Fendt)
 
With Constanze Ruhm in attendance from November 9 to 12, and on November 17, 2023