“Thresholds and Sensations: The Cinema of Marie Louise Alemann,” curated by Federico Windhausen. October 13, 2015
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- Legitima Defensa
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- Umbrales
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- Autobiografico 2
Thresholds and Sensations: The Cinema of Marie Louise Alemann
curated by Federico Windhausen
“This programme provides an introduction to the cinema of Marie Louise Alemann, a major experimental filmmaker who remains virtually unknown outside of her adopted homeland of Argentina. Born Marie Louise Steinheur in Germany in 1927, Alemann left Europe for Argentina in the late forties and began her filmmaking practice in the late 1960s. She later became associated with a loose-knit collective of fellow filmmakers in Buenos Aires, which included her fellow émigré Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini, and Juan Jose Mugni, among others. Distinguishing Alemann not only within the Argentine group, but also in the broader context of the era’s alternative cinemas, is her unique exploration of cinematic performance: she often presented herself and other performers in staged and improvised scenarios, populating urban and rural spaces with odd, menacing, or humorous props and costumes, and filming them in a visual style that ranged from the decorative to the minimalist.
Beyond the films themselves, Alemann’s legacy extends to the artist’s important work within institutions of culture, most prominently the Goethe Institut that was established in Buenos Aires in 1967. At a time when Argentina’s military dictatorship was waging a campaign of state terrorism against anything that smacked of leftism and political dissidence, Alemann helped establish the Goethe as an institutional home for experimental cinema—and remarkably, none of the Super 8 filmmakers whose work was screened at the Goethe were subjected to direct political repression during the dictatorship.
As this programme of her own and her colleagues’ work demonstrate, Alemann was not only attentive to the need for a semi-protected space for alternative culture in Buenos Aires, but was also willing to take risks within that space. Among the most notable dictatorship-era works in her neglected filmography are her allegory of “disappearance,” Sensation 77: Mimicry, and Thresholds, which deserves to be regarded as a major work of Latin American queer cinema. —Federico Windhausen
Autobiografico 2 dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1974 | 5 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Vanessa dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1974 | 6 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Untitled dir. Juan José Mugni | Argentina 1975 | 5.5 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Self-Defense (Legitima defensa) dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1980 | 8 min. super 8 to sd transfer Sensation ’77: Mimicry (Sensación 77: Mimetismo) dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1977 | 8 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Table Scenes (Escenas de mesa) dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1979 | 8 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Thresholds (Umbrales) dir. Marie Louise Alemann | Argentina 1980 | 19 min. super 8 to sd transfer
The Bengali Night (La noche Bengali) dir. Narcisa Hirsch | Argentina 1980 | 6 min. super 8 to sd transfer
Federico Windhausen in person.
Co-presented with FADO Performance Art Centre.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015 6:30pm