Film Night: Old and New and Old...

Join us for our April Film Night at Loring-Greenough House! 

OLD AND NEW AND OLD…

Since January 2012 Dagmar Kamlah volunteers - in co-operation with Polina Marshakova - as programmer for our Tuesday Club film nights. This month she introduces her own work as filmmaker to the audience of the Loring-Greenough-House. The program entails her last film made in Germany and the first she realized in the US during her process of acclimatization to this country. The gap between OLD and NEW is also an issue in the earlier film, which deals with the short life span of technological progress.

BRAVE OLD WORLD   D 2000, 15 min, engl. subtitles, found footage film

EDP at work anno 1970 – the tip of the iceberg of the late industrial revolution. Electronic dinosaurs sort mountains of punchcards and define scores for white, grey and blue collar workers. Punchcard operators pushing to be programmers… Only the apprentices seem to be not yet entirely in the ban of monster computers. Historic 16mm footage is taken from an educational TV program for school children. The soundtrack points into the future.

BLUE JAY TERRITORY   USA 2009, 65 min, engl. version

When I came to live in Boston, I was anxious to quickly lose my foreign eyes. I started videotaping my everyday life. Americans wouldn’t bother to look at colorful water hydrants or trash barrels dancing in the streets after being emptied. Or a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. And a whole new animal kingdom! Being an amateur birder I was fascinated by all the new species. My first approach was like an environmental research, scanning the differences. With time passing the issue got more complex. As a 50 year old with personal and professional ties I had left quite a bit behind. Immigration means identity loss at first and if you are lucky, you find a new one. I procrastinated, stayed biased. I had a nice home, but outside I remained a foreigner.