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: 1996
Synopsis: The Film is based on excerpts from the novel Genji Monogatari (The story of Prince Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu, written around 1004 and 1011 in Japan. It is not a traditional film version of a book. Instead, it uses the text as a narrative thread spoken from the "off" to tell a love story: From the beginning, the time of estrangement and its end. Everything happens, repeats itself and yet, is never the same. A woman is seen walking from behind, she is moving continuously. She goes through a forrest, over a field, a graveyard, a room. The Film is drifting in time, frozen time, fragmented time. In summer, autumn, winter and spring, nature and life repeat their cycles seemingly endlessly. In truth time is spiralling, not circling, and no spring is identical though it shares the same characteristics such as: the plants blooming. But with each year it is nevertheless ever changing. A simple example being: As we grow older each year we change. "Could but Dream that Dream Once More" is a visual game, a love story from its beginning to the moment of a remembered love past and at the same time it is a ritualised, formal, continuous repetition of the same - yet different pictures of a woman dropping a veil as she passes. (Wolfgang Lehmann)
Language: German