English title: Image Of My Self - Act
Director: Wolfgang Lehmann
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Biography: Wolfgang Lehmann was born in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany in 1967.
Active in the film club there, Wolfgang Lehmann wrote film critiques and began working for the municipal cinema Freiburg, a post he held till until 2005. As member of the municipal cinema Freiburg, he developed and organised several retrospectives and programmes. He focused on presenting works of the film- and video avant-garde from its beginnings until today.
His main contributions have been to unearth little known or forgotten films, as well as explore areas such as “expanded cinema” and multi media works.Wolfgang Lehmann has also displayed interest in the notion of live film performance in terms of a type of staged activity.
Concluding his work in Freiburg was the organisation of the Festival Film Forum Freiburg: Expanded Cinema & avant-garde in 2004. His first cinematic efforts were made in 1989. Since 1994 Wolfgang Lehmann has realised and produced his own films, many of which were invited for showings at festivals and museums in Europe, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, USA and South America.
Since the beginning of his artistic activity, he has not only been fascinated by film, but music as well. The ECLAT Festival commission, Meer (Sea) (2004), conceived with Telemach Wiesinger as well as with composer Misato Mochizuki, was a further development toward the connection of image and sound.
His works can be characterised by an exact and often rhythmic-like montage, as well as extremely short takes that result in overlapping images. After living for a brief period in Berlin, Wolfgang Lehmann has resided in Rümpel (Schleswig-Holstein / Germany) and Stockholm (Sweden) with his wife and his son since 2006.
Country: Germany
Year: 2002, 2003
Synopsis: I love signs of transience such as patina, scratches and age; they are traces of history and existence in pictures. They are signals for irreversible time.
There are no longer any negatives of the original footage because all the material was combined to form a whole during editing. The images on the screen are the result of the extremely short sequences of shots, as a rule in two or three frames. The >smudge< is anything but a reduction of the image; on the contrary, as a result the pictures gain a degree of diversity and richness. The marks where the film is spliced was something that excited me even in the >classics< of film history, and here this has been taken consciously to the extreme by me. What interests me is not the analysis of the material but rather the very conscious way of dealing with the aesthetics of it. The nakedness of the body is not the most essential aspect of the film. Nakedness is something natural, no more and no less. The desire to work with material, the rhythm of the images, the editing and assembling of the pictures, the light and the colours - these are the real self-portrait because it is in these that I find my passion for creating. (Wolfgang Lehmann)
Language: without dialogue
