formal gestures that draw on a history of a somewhat authoritative ethnographic filmmaking. The omniscient and unchallenged voiceover transforms the visual evidence of the performing monkeys into a tale of rather human-like social stratification and liminality. Named after the proponent of literary socialist realism, the cruise ship “Maxim Gorky” was the most luxurious ship sailing under the flag of the USSR from the mid-1970s, and was often used to take West-German tourists to faraway lands. In Travelling with Maxim Gorkiy (2014), Kolja Kunt and Bernd Lützeler combine found footage from a tourist onboard the ship and in exotic surroundings with spoken analyses of eleven paintings taken from a German TV series called “1000 Meisterwerke” (1000 Masterpieces). Sound and image become accomplices in a game that seems to aim at a fundamental relativisation of efforts to apprehend the world by making and looking at pictures of it, unhinging certainties of judgment and perception. “Let the world become a picture” is a line from one of the poems in Maria Kourkouta’s Return to Aeolus Street (2014), a film that re-orders and choreographs images from popular Greek cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. What appears inherited from several generations of film copies has lost much of its finer shades of grey. The contrasted black and white images and the slowed down and repetitive movements have a hypnotic quality—as if belonging to an illusory dream of encapsulated time containing a common past and identity, emanating from another black hole.
Philip Widmann adalah seorang sineas, produser, dan sesekali programer. Lahir di Berlin Barat pada 1980, Widmann lulus dari jurusan Komunikasi Visual di Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg dan Antropologi Kultural dari Universität Hamburg. Sejak 2009 ia merupakan anggota laboratorium filem yang dikelola seniman, LaborBerlin. Karyakaryanya telah dipertunjukkan di ruang-ruang seni dan festival-festival filem, di antaranya Wexner Center for the Arts, WRO Biennale Wroclaw, Berlin Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, FID Marseille, CPH:DOX, dan Visions du Réel. Widmann adalah seniman residensi di Akademie Schloss Solitude di Stuttgart pada 2014. Pada 2015, ia menjadi seniman residensi di Villa Kamogawa di Kyoto. 356 | ARKIPEL: GRAND ILLUSION
Philip Widmann is a filmmaker, producer and occasional programmer. Born in West-Berlin in 1980, Widmann graduated in Visual Communications from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hamburg. Since 2009 he is a member of the artist-run film laboratory LaborBerlin. His works have been shown in art spaces and film festivals, among them the Wexner Center for the Arts, WRO Biennale Wroclaw, Berlin Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, FID Marseille, CPH:DOX und Visions du Réel. Widmann was artist in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2014. In 2015, he is artist in residence at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto.