This is the first publication on the plays of New York–based experimental theater director and playwright Richard Maxwell (born 1967) and his company New York City Players. His plays have been commissioned by The Wexner Center, Columbus; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Performance Space 122, The Kitchen and Soho Rep in New York; and The Barbican Centre, London. The book captures the experience of actually watching the plays by way of screen-grabs and captions, and in doing so documents nearly 20 years of work.

Text by Jim Fletcher, Emily Hoffman, Richard Maxwell, Robert Snowden.
Published by Westreich Wagner and Greene Naftali.

€45.00

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Die vorliegende Publikation erscheint im Rahmen der Ausstellung “Alexander Kluge. Gärten der Kooperation” im Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart: einer umfassenden Einzelausstellung des Schriftstellers, Filmemachers und Theoretikers Alexander Kluge, die auf der gleichnamigen Schau im Kunstzentrum La Virreina in Barcelona basiert. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit La Virreina sowie Alexander Kluge selbst hat der Kunstverein eine Neufassung und Erweiterung von sieben Eizelaspekten dieses Projektes entwickelt.

Entsprechend der Ausstellung setzt sich auch das Buch aus sieben “Inseln” zusammen, die jeweils mit einem Bild und Text aus Alexander Kluges Büchern eingeführt werden. Darüber hinaus versammelt es eine Auswahl ergänzender Texte von Alexander Kluge, die auch ind er Ausstellung zu finden waren.

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The publication accompanies the exhibition “Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation” in the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart: a comprehensive solo exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge, based on the show of the same name at the La Virreina Art Center in Barcelona. In close collaboration with La Virreina and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Kunstverein has developed a new version and expansion of seven individual aspects of this project.
The book, like the exhibition, is composed of seven “islands”, each introduced by a picture and text from Alexander Kluge’s books. In addition, it brings together a selection of complementary texts by Alexander Kluge, also found in the exhibition.

German / English

19 x 12.5 cm

ISBN: 9782940524723

199 pages

Co-published by Motto Books & Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

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In Autumn and Winter 2013/2014, Christa Blümlinger and Harun Farocki worked on the dialogical “ABCs of the Essay Film,” which is published here for the first time in its original German version. In 26 short paragraphs, reacting to key terms suggested by Christa Blümlinger (from “A for Adorno” to “Z for Zidane”), Farocki explores his proximity, but also his distance to filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Artavazd Peleshian, or Alexander Kluge and speaks about specific operations in his films, TV programs, and installations.

The text is complemented by a short text by Farocki which was published in 1987 to accompany a film program at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, where the essay film is described as a film “that is useful without being subservient and without standing to attention.”

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A hybrid attempt at coming to terms with a particular amnesia of the West German left in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Harun Farocki’s 1982 feature film BEFORE YOUR EYES – VIETNAM combines ideas about the distant, image-guided participation in the war in Vietnam with speculations on Vietnam as a laboratory of advanced modes of capitalist production, whilst reflecting intensely on the dyad of love and work.
This publication assembles selected material produced in 1982 to promote the film and make it accessible discursively. It includes the facsimile of a promotional leafleat that provided not only factual information but also directions for reading, a selection of unseen photos from the set and from a tiny piece of film (excavated in the archives of the Harun Farocki Institut), documenting a performative trailer put on an improvised stage by Farocki and actor Ronny Tanner during the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. The brochure is introduced by a commentary penned by the Harun Farocki Institut.

Harun Farockis spielfilmlanger Film ETWAS WIRD SICHTBAR von 1982 ist der hybride Versuch, mit dem in den späten 1970er/frühen 1980er Jahren spürbar schwindenden Gedächtnis der westdeutschen Linken umzugehen. Der Film verbindet Überlegungen zur bildgeleiteten Teilnahme am Krieg in Vietnam aus der geografischen Distanz mit Spekulationen über Vietnam als einem Forschungslabor für neue Methoden kapitalistischer Produktionsweise, während er gleichermaßen kontinuierlich über das Verhältnis von Liebe und Arbeit reflektiert.

Die Publikation versammelt ausgewählte Materialien, die 1982 entstanden sind, um den Film zu bewerben und ihn zudem diskursiv zugänglich zu machen. Sie enthält das Faksimile einer Werbebroschüre, die nicht nur Fotos oder Besetzungsliste, sondern auch Lektürehinweise und ein Interview (das Farocki mit sich selbst geführt hat) bereitstellte, sowie eine Reihe von bislang kaum bekannten Fotos vom Dreh und einer performativen Werbeaktion, die Farocki während der Berlinale 1982 gemeinsam mit dem Schauspieler Ronny Tanner zur Aufführung brachte (und die in einem kurzen Film, der 2016 im Archiv des Harun Farocki Instituts aufgetaucht ist, dokumentiert wurde). Das Heft wird eingeleitet durch einen Kommentar des Harun Farocki Instituts.

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In the mid-1970s, Harun Farocki wrote a two-page call programmatically entitled What Ought to Be Done, followed by a survey addressed to potential collaborators and supporters. He envisioned an institution to “organize a coalition of working people, not from an abstract understanding but from the contact points of their work.” The purpose of this institution, devoted to documentary practices, was twofold. It was “intended to collect, i.e. secure what is there,” but also “to produce, i.e. initiate what is not yet there.” In doing so, it was meant to facilitate social and collaborative processes, comprehensive and interdisciplinary studies without time pressure.

At the occasion of Farocki’s working paper, the Harun Farocki Institut, founded in 2015, historically situates Farocki’s initiative and reflects upon the proximities and differences between creating an institution in 1976 and forty years later.

The publication includes Farocki’s text, a commentary by Tom Holert, Doreen Mende and Volker Pantenburg, as well as a letter written in 1975 by documentary filmmaker Peter Nestler in response to Farocki’s circular.

Editorial responsibility: Elsa de Seynes.

€5.00

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Essays: Peter Baxter, Andrew Chan, Jordan Cronk, Dan Edwards, Adam Nayman, Vadim Rizov, Ellena Savage, Oscar Schwartz, Esther Yi

Postcards From The Cinema: James Butler, Mark Cousins, Tomas Hachard, Molly Lukin, Chiara Marchini, Christine Smallwood

Visual Art: Dar Al Naim, Berliac, Anthony Cudahy, Samuel Davison, Pat Larkin, Gaurab Thakali, Amanda Vähämäki, Miguel Angel Valdivia

Poetry: Paul Cunningham, Gareth Evans, Aurelia Yueyi Guo

Fiction: Dom Amerena, Monika Kalinauskaitė, Aoko Matsuda (trs. Asa Yoneda), Tod Wodicka, Justin Wolfers

Interview with Claire Denis by Giovanni Marchini Camia.

15€
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Scrapbook of the Sixties is a collection of published and unpublished texts by Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, writer, poet, and cofounder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded moments of his daily life. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958, he published his legendary “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists like Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Erick Hawkins, and Nam June Paik. Some of these will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of the Sixties. Mekas’s writings reveal him as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the times—a practice that he has continued now for over fifty years.

Jonas Mekas (*1922, Semeniškiai / Lithuania), lives and works in New York. Film-maker, writer, poet and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Mekas’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

92 black-white images, adhesive bound softcover

Designed by Fabian Bremer and Pascal Storz

€28.00

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Plassein is a collection of short stories, told through a series of sequential drawings that intertwine to create unsettling, dissonant dreamscapes. The stories observe the forms and textures of the built world and trace their strange, melancholic entanglements.
Set out like a storyboard for a speculative film, with a single frame per page, the images accumulate into fleeting scenes and shifting narratives at once familiar and otherworldly.

About the author
Joji Koyama is a filmmaker, animator and graphic artist. His short films and animations have screened internationally. In 2015 he published his first book of short visual stories Plassein, and an illustrated colouring book Elsewhere, for Penguin books. He is currently working on a film in collaboration with musician and songwriter Tujiko Noriko.

Graphic design: Dan Solbach with Katerina Trakakis

€25.00

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Fireflies is a print film magazine created between Berlin and Melbourne.

Each issue assembles an international group of writers, artists and critics to celebrate the work of two extraordinary filmmakers through personal essays, interviews and creative responses.

Satisfaction: Consumption Art from the communist Poland of the 1970’s.

During the revitalization of avant-garde practices in 1970s Poland, a strain of artmaking emerged that applied Pop aesthetics to the unlikely subject matter of consumer identity in a Communist state, responding to a new initiative by the government that encouraged the private consumption of luxury goods in the service of a more modern socialism. The films that arose from this moment engage with absurd, colorful and even scandalous content. Informed by Marxist analyses of the Western culture industry, they examine the effects of a socialist-consumerist experiment through sensuous fantasies of desire and excess

2 x DVD, poster and booklet

Polish / English

D 25€

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