A Searching Eye – A Retrospective of Karl Kels (I)

Art Cinema OFFoff presents a complete retrospective of the work of German filmmaker Karl Kels – the first in many years. The filmmaker will be present on both evenings. All films will be screened in their original formats (35mm and 16mm).

The films of Karl Kels are marked by poignancy and restraint. To his observant eye, each visual encounter embodies an infinite set of possibilities, every unstaged (documentary) reality functions as a vehicle for boundless imagination and creative speculation. It is as if Kels relies on the medium of cinema – or more specifically, the radical possibilities of montage – to realize the infinitude of subversive meanings left untapped within the encountered realities. In many ways, Kels’ films bring us back to the history of cinema – the Lumière brothers as recorders and reproducers of events, and Georges Méliès, as a conjurer of fantasies. 

It was Peter Kubelka, Kels’ teacher, who exemplified how montage can express meaning not merely as a result of collision between shots, but rather, when carefully utilized, between frames. Operated at the level of frames, montage – a rupture in the space-time continuum – is freed from its subservience to narrative, rather than being stealthy, it makes itself apparent. Kels’ use of montage pursues similar radical ambition that seeks to generate autonomous meanings purely as a result of cuts. His recording process cultivates a multitude of restraints – fixed camera positions, minimal motion within the frame, no imposition of sound, and quite often, no distraction of color. The recorded images become archival without necessarily being momentous (Condensation Trail and Starlings are exceptions). In the early short films, such recordings are rhythmically patterned, they rely on the compositional principle of repetition with variation. Visual illusions are created, they are always important for Kels, but the nature of such illusions in the films are highly plastic and evident, absurd and funny, in stark contrast to their reactionary deployment in narrative cinema. 

It would however be wrong to characterize Kels’ films in purely formal terms. There is a human attachment – be it to the inebriated dwellers at the Bowery or the animals in the zoos – that is at the heart of Kels’ filmmaking. The animal-films are deeply invested in studying behavioral patterns. As Kels’ filmmaking matured, it relied less on primary visual appeal. The effect of montage enters an ambiguous space, where it becomes a means to unify disparate timelines with minimum variation in space. These variations, subtle and understated, demand rapt attention from the audience, any complacency on their part of having exhausted the field of vision will alienate them from the charms of the films. Filmic time can be real time, and it can be pure construction, one of the great rewards and challenges of Kels’ films is figuring out when it is one or the other; it is there for all to see, if only one is looking closely. (Arindam Sen)

→ In the presence of Karl Kels

→ The evening consists of two parts, separated by a break: a first (55′) and a second one (65′), comprising Sidewalk and Hippopotamuses.

→ Program and introduction by Arindam Sen, film curator and critic