Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 7:30pm
Das Schleyerband
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Introduced by Redmond Entwistle
Das Schleyerband
Klaus vom Bruch, video, 1977-78, 112 mins
"Das Schleyerband (The Schleyer Tape) is a compilation of television and news footage comprising two hours of media accounts regarding the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang. Klaus vom Bruch's material begins with the September 1977 kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the dramatic news reportage from the scene of the car accident in Cologne where Schleyer was abducted. Vom Bruch then proceeds to chronologically relay footage from official press conferences, talkshow speculation, public interviews and the news, giving a broad and detailed account of the events leading up to the final downfall of the Red Army Faction and group suicide of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and other RAF leaders. Bruch contrasts this with short episodes from other aspects of popular culture: a fashion commercial advertising lipstick, images of a space shuttle launch, disco shows and John Lennon's song 'Working Class Hero.'" – KVB
"Starting a project on the RAF in 1998, an archeology of the time and its media, library index systems, slides and tape, re-filming the period details of interviews with sympathizers from a dated 1985 documentary, filming in leftwing archives in Germany, aging former terrorists and their memoirs, broken traditions of resistance, media iteration and the muting of events. A momento mori or time capsule, Das Schleyerband watched today accomplishes some of what I wanted to achieve with this unfinished project." - RE
"All representations of the RAF are the RAF. They made and starred in what Timothy Leary called a ‘reality movie." – Matthew Todd Grant, Critical Intellectuals and the New Media
"Can one argue that the violence of the RAF was, despite its very real victims, essentially symbolic? Symbolic violence in this sense would connote the use of spectacle in order to interrupt the circulation of goods and people, to render visible the security zones and spaces of exclusion, to let flare up the last ambiguous moment of a politics of the street, before the street became safe for shopping, for the multiplex cinema and the mall, for market research and opinion polls? The question repeats itself: was the RAF the last (violent) snapshot of a political culture of the street – ambiguously coded in both right and left wing terms – that was trying to uphold essentially ‘democratic’ principles of the forum and the agora, or was it already operating in the space of the spectacle it seemed to attack, but could not but help to usher in?" – Thomas Elsaesser, "Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism?"
Many thanks to Robert Janitz for making me aware of the video, Rebecca Cleman for putting me in touch with Klaus vom Bruch, and Klaus for generously providing the video and subtitles.
Redmond Entwistle is an artist-filmmaker currently living in New York. Entwistle employs documentary and abstract modes of film-making, often investigating histories of social displacement and creating portraits of cities anchored on the invisible or the implied. Recent works include Monuments (2009), a narrative exploration of the origins of Post-Minimalist art in the economic and spatial relationship between New York and New Jersey, Skein (2007), a video portrait of migration to the towns that spread out from New York, and Paterson – Lódz (2006), a 16mm expanded film about two towns (Paterson, New Jersey, and Lódz, Poland) and their interrelated history of politics and migration in the early years of the 20th century. Redmond Entwistle studied at California Institute of the Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has presented projects at group shows at Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY), Nought to Sixty (ICA, London) and Art in General (NY).
Tickets - $7, available at door.