A summertime question for Stephan Geene.

How refreshing it is to see a new film made in Berlin, a film that is even somewhat about Berlin, that has next to nothing to do with the Berliner Schule other than that the lead's played by Sabine Timoteo (probably best known for her roles in Christian Petzold's Gespenster [Ghosts] and Matthias Glasner's Der Freie Wille [The Free Will]). Not that the Berliner Schule, a school with pretty porous walls in the first place, isn't still a source of fresh and invigorating work, but Stephan Geene's After Effect reminds us that there's more than one way to tell an unconventional tale in this city.

I'd run through a plot outline, but fortunately, German Films has already seen to that. I'll just add that, at the bottom of that page, you'll find Stephan's bio, one line of which reads, "In the 1980s, he was active in the theater group 'Minimal Club' in Munich." I was, too, from 1985 through 1991. But there's a gaping chasm of difference between our levels of activity. Stephan wrote many of the texts we performed and directed each production. It was a collective to varying degrees, but the overriding aesthetic, as the work evolved away from theater and towards installation, was his; it was as if notes taken during a furious yet rigorously disciplined bout with theory (and it would always be chunkier theory that I could ever grapple with head-on, but Stephan's never been one to be intimidated by such things) were rendered in three dimensions and then placed and replaced in a meticulously mapped spatial and temporal order.

While not as breezy as Minimal Club's soap-like serial of 2002 to 2004, Le Ping Pong d'Amour, After Effect is nevertheless light-footed and walks a slightly straighter line in comparison with the work of the Munich period. Even so, it's no less stimulating.

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Stephan, even though you shot After Effect two years ago, I think it's a happy coincidence - and maybe you do, too - that it's seen its premiere in what the papers are calling "Art Summer 2007," a season of a highly unusual alignment of major art events: Venice and Basel, Kassel and Münster. Each of these shows has its own brand identity which takes over its respective city and overwhelms it for the duration. Among the many other things going on in After Effect, Carl Celler Culture, an agency of sorts, commissions creative types to do more or less the opposite: to absorb a city's identity into a campaign - though the nature of that campaign is an impossible-to-define fusion of marketing and art. To what extent is Berlin, if maybe not perfect, at least very, very good in its role?

I wasn't really trying to keep the film focused specifically on Berlin, although, arriving in 1991, I did find the Berlin mix of this deluge of freelancers from all over, a temporarily undefined public space, a real estate vacuum, empty buildings everywhere as an echo of the expulsion of the city's Jews - it all struck me as quite unique, and this may have been the spark of the film, a deep-set feeling and a concrete experience that work is not the be all and end all and that everyone involved is a producer and consumer (of his/herself). You wouldn't have had this experience in Munich - and not in Paris, either. Other than that, with After Effect, I wanted to create something, an artificial space that would accentuate this odd liveliness of the characters. Their unlimited matter-of-factness when it comes to the projects they're working on. And the extent to which this idea of animals is an indication of a certain discomfort that undercuts their confidence without their actually being aware of it.

But sure, for me, this culture-saturated summer makes for a pretty good background, especially since I'm in Kassel right now: b_books and Pro qm are running the Documenta Bookshop. This allows for an amusing angle on all the brouhaha. It may be the first time in my life I'm doing something that might be called "business." But at the same time, it's also very much a "collective."

Posted by dwhudson at July 23, 2007 12:34 AM