kunstfilmtag
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Sa 10. November 2012
LANGUAGE IS THE HOUSE WE LIVE IN
The 2012 edition of the Kunstfilmtag Art Film Day lines up a programme of film and video art
through which we will be face-to-face with language for a day.
We have invited language to tell, via films, what manner of beast it is, what it could be, what it
does and what it does not do, where it might be tarrying when we are lost for words, and
where we might find it when we are in search of it to tell us how it speaks; and whether it
suffers when it is ravaged and ransacked for motives and tactics, put in the service of war or
otherwise conscripted into all too human intent.
So we propose to spend a little time exploring this house in which we dwell.
Is language a remembering, an act of recognition? Is it on hand as a quantity of concepts or
terms, is it a game of signifiers, is it a trail we pursue?
In the wake of the wholesale abolition of truth, we fumble for statements
somewhere at the crossroads of the Difference in Perception and the Scream of Experience.
We seek our own bearings that might yet have something to say amidst the routine placing-
at-option of the impossibly omnipossible.
And then we also see the language of objects, of images, of film the latter with its multiplicity
of materials such as music, speech, image, angle, montage, motion and time all interacting
reciprocally to mirror the complex matter of the world we perceive. We can tell by virtue of the
film how signs we see, and the expressions we hear, convey complex meanings.
In the act of their use, expressions, like film, are not the sole purveyors of content. In history,
in its evaluation, its narratives, in culture and remembrance, in the location where language is
spoken, in the voice, the speaker, in accent, intonation and text, we take soundings in the
semantics of utterance. Every communication we might receive through, for example, visual
media, television news included, derives from film. We enquire as to a deciphering of manners
of speech which have substantiated their declarations even into becoming imperceptible
convention.
But we also hear, and see, languages of communication.
And a language of literature, which expresses the inexpressible and is quite
capable of rousing in us a resonant dumbfoundedness. Language that bids us in and
receives us in its grand embrace.
If language is the house we live in, the coming Kunstfilmtag is an
opportunity to venture approaches to that house from many directions and to meet in it for a
long, exciting and fruitful day.
susanne fasbender
translation: Stephen Reader