GERMAN CINEMA NOW! – What Remains / Re-Visited (Was bleibt | Šta ostaje) [Online]

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** This film is only available to viewers in the US, Canada, and Mexico. **

Clarissa Thieme
Germany, Austria, Bosnia & Herzegovina
2020
1h 10m

About

The monthly Goethe Pop Up Film Series GERMAN CINEMA NOW!, curated by Jasmin Krakenberg, supports artistic works that amplify a plurality of voices and experiences to inspire public dialogue.

About the film:

Films end. Biographies end. Life goes on. Can we break this law? Clarissa Thieme takes a stab at it. In “Was bleibt | Šta ostaje | What remains / Re-visited” (2020) she travels to certain cities and villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She takes a single shot in each of the places where countless people have been raped, tortured, and murdered during the Bosnian War. Ten years ago, Thieme had been there already. Was bleibt | Šta ostaje | What remains (2009, 2010 world premiere at Berlinale) showed these places without accompanying words. Each of the images questioned: Does the location give testimony to the horror, or does it stay silent?

Ten years later, everything is different, or is it? In each of the places, Thieme and her film team unfold a life-size transparent with a still from the preceding film from 2010. Sometimes this comparison of ‘now and then’ is simply a silent act of recognition. At other times it sparks conversation. Some are evasive, some full of lived-through memories. Who died where, is one of the questions. Who left to build a new existence elsewhere; who stayed; who returned – are some of the other. Between the lines and between the images it becomes clear: these topics haven’t been processed yet. And, how could they? It is difficult enough to keep on living.

At the same time the filmic intervention prompts a reaction: In front of Thieme’s camera, momentary public spaces arise. The old images provoke exchange. This exchange takes the form of what the reacting people are giving it. The film does not unravel a mystery – it is doing something mysterious: It dives into a space between remembrance and continuation and interlocks retrospection with the present. The void is everywhere. And Thieme’s film is never finished. On the contrary, it proves that there is a chance to act through film. To be continued.

Text by Jan Verwoert. All images on this page © Clarissa Thieme

About the filmmaker:

Born in Oldenburg, Germany, Clarissa Thieme studied Media Art, as well as Cultural Studies, and Aesthetic Practice. Thieme works in the fields of film, photography, performance, installation and text, combining documentary and fictional forms with a focus on the processes of memory, identity politics and strategies of translation.

Her work includes Was bleibt/Šta Ostaje/What Remains (film, 30′, 2010), The Place We Left (film, 60′, 2012), Resort (film, 15′, 2013), Die DDR hat es nie gegeben/Appell (Video, 4′, 2016), Izmedzu Nas/Between Us (open archive project, ongoing), Weiter war nichts, ist nichts (installation series, ongoing), Vremeplov/Time Machine (installation & performance, 2017), Today is 11th June 1993 (film, 13′, 2018), Can’t You See Them/POV (installation 2018), Can’t You See Them? – Repeat. (film, 8′ as well as installation, 2019), Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains / Re-visited (film, 70’, 2020).


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