Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
Woman with a Camera: Female Filmmakers from the Bauhaus with introduction by Laura Frahm. Monday March 11, 2019.
[APPLAUSE]
Laura Frahm 0:05
Thank you so much, Haden, for the wonderful introduction. Good evening, and a very warm welcome to all of you. We're excited to see this room almost filled to capacity for what we hope will be a very unique and special film screening that sheds light on the often overlooked film work of female Bauhäusler.
I want to say just a few words about the series as a whole, and then talk about the four individual female filmmakers whose work we'll see tonight, because I think they need some more introduction, some more background, before we lead into the program. So “Film by Design: Bauhaus and the Moving Image,” is a five-part film program that we're presenting both here at the Harvard Film Archive, and next door at the Harvard Art Museums, in close connection, as Haden said, with the exhibition, The Bauhaus and Harvard, which highlights the work and the impact of the Bauhaus, this highly progressive art, architecture and design school that existed from 1919 to 1933, on the visions of architecture, and design, and art education across the world, from the early 20th century to today; in fact, to this year, the year of the 100th anniversary of the school.
There are, of course, many histories that have been written about the Bauhaus. Yet very few of these histories talk about film, let alone about the film work of female Bauhäusler. Tonight's program will precisely focus on this aspect; on women with a camera at the Bauhaus, which is certainly one of the most overlooked aspects within Bauhaus research. The fact that female Bauhäusler were not only visionary in their work across the different Bauhaus workshops, and often, a work that was confined to their participation in the Weaving Workshop, often called or often referred to as the “Women's Workshop” at the Bauhaus. Rather, what today's program wants to highlight is that female artists were also visionary in their engagement with media, and especially visual media, from photography, to photo collage, to, not least, film.
If we look closely at the work of female Bauhäusler, one of the most striking aspects is that many of them worked across different media at once, and often combined their uniquely visual work with their work in the different Bauhaus workshops, from mural painting to furniture design; from metalwork to stage and dance performances; from typography to, most prominently, perhaps, weaving. In this process, female Bauhäusler often began to actively expand, and push the boundaries of what could be conceived as film, both at the Bauhaus and beyond. Apart from taking to the camera in order to document Bauhaus life and Bauhaus architecture through the medium of moving images, female Bauhäusler also engaged in a striking range of material experiments with film strips, which we find all across the Bauhaus in the mid-to-late 1920s. Their experimentation did not only yield a striking range of celluloid objects, such as celluloid sculptures that were made in the preliminary course, celluloid earrings for Bauhaus festivities, or celluloid collages, a beautiful work that you can see on display in the exhibition next door. Weavers in the Weaving Workshop also began—and this is probably one of the most striking aspects of this experimentation at the Bauhaus—began to cut sheets of celluloid and cellophane into long thin stripes, or threads, that they would weave into their curtains, wall coverings and screens, creating a new generation of fabrics that would be elastic, flexible, water repellent, sound absorbing, and, not least, light-reflective.
Thus, in the hands of Bauhäusler, as I argue in my work, in my book, celluloid became a malleable material, a material that could be adapted and stretched into the most different directions. And it is from this viewpoint, to my mind, that we can describe female Bauhäusler as a new kind of media pioneer at the Bauhaus, who explored and activated a wide range of hybrid media practices, avant la lettre. And yet, large parts of the history of film work of female Bauhäusler still remains unwritten. One of the most unique cinematic documents of Bauhaus life in Dessau in the year 1930, by Bauhaus student Ivana Tomljenović, only exists in a fragment of one minute, the final minute of what was originally a 20-minute experimental documentary, shortly before she would leave the Bauhaus in solidarity with a group of left-wing Bauhaus students who were expelled from the Bauhaus in 1930.
Other female Bauhäusler wrote about their film plans in the 1920s, without leaving any further traces, such as, in the case of Ise Gropius, the wife of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who himself had actively turned to the field of film, and particularly to the architectural film, in the mid-1920s.
Even if the film work of female Bauhäusler still exists, their contributions often remained uncredited and unnamed, which holds particularly true in the case of the first two female filmmakers whose work we'll see tonight. Especially two female filmmakers who worked for well-known avant-garde artists like Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman, and whose work remained virtually unknown for decades. Meta Erna Niemeyer, Renata Green, Ré Green, Ré Richter, and Ré Soupault. These are not the names of different female filmmakers from the Bauhaus. But in fact, they are the names of one and the same woman, a young female artist who studied at the Bauhaus from 1921 to ’24, and who is certainly one of the most oscillating and complex figures emerging from the Bauhaus in the early ’20s. Drawn to the Bauhaus because of its radically new visions for art education, she renamed herself Renata, “the reborn,” and the idea of transformation and self-transformation, runs like a golden thread all across her life and her work. Already during her time as a student at the Bauhaus, she met Viking Eggeling in Berlin, in 1922, and they began to collaborate on his Diagonal Symphony, the first film that we'll see tonight, for more than a year, to a point of complete exhaustion, as many contemporary accounts underline. The fact that she acted as an assistant for Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony has remained virtually unmentioned until the late 1970s, not least since Hans Richter, who would become her first husband in 1926, and with whom she worked on several film projects, including his Film Study, a film that we'll see in our “Metal Party” film program in April, actively denied and obscured her involvement, both in his own and in Eggeling’s films
In the late 1920s, after her divorce from Richter, she started her own fashion studio, called Ré Sport, and her designs were published widely in contemporary magazines, including well-known architectural magazines. In her drawings, the fabrics always seem to be in movement. And it is precisely this fascination with movement and transformation, as one might speculate, that did not only lead to her striking design of a so-called “transformation dress,” that you see on the right side, published in the journal Die Form. It also certainly inspired her own first film sketch for a fashion film, now considered to be lost, which was featured prominently in Hans Hildebrandt’s seminal book, The Woman as Artist, in 1928.
Secondly, we will turn to the film work of Lore Leudesdorff, another female Bauhäusler and close friend of Ré Soupault, who had created a series (here we see a photograph by her Bauhaus colleague, Otto “Umbo” Umbehr), who turned—who first turned to weaving at the Bauhaus, and then, subsequently, to the field of animation. And this oscillation between weaving work, and film work, and especially animation, is, to my mind, one of the most crucial ideas that female Bauhäusler brought to the field of film. Tonight, we will see three of her collaborations with Walter Ruttmann, Opus III and IV, alongside a very short, playful, advertising film, entitled Play of Waves.
Now, if we embed these works, both Ré Soupault’s and Lore Leudesdorff’s collaborations, into the context of avant-garde filmmaking in the mid-1920s, it is striking to note that when the November Group organized their famous film matinee, entitled The Absolute Film, in Berlin, on May 3, 1925, they included not only the work of yet another Bauhäusler, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack’s Three-Part Color Sonatina, but also Opus III and IV, alongside the Diagonal Symphony: films, in short, in which two female Bauhäusler had played a crucial role.
And yet, it would be misleading to claim that these young female artists from the Bauhaus were only working for well-known avant-garde filmmakers, and predominantly male filmmakers, at that time. For especially Lore Leudesdorff would become also known for her work for another female filmmaker, Lotte Reiniger, the pioneer of silhouette animation, whose feature-length film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, gained a high degree of popularity in Germany in the mid-1920s. A film, as is worth noting, that was shown here at the Harvard Film Archive last summer. If Ré Soupault and Lore Leudesdorff were particularly engaged, and worked within the fields of the abstract film and silhouette animation in the mid-1920s, the two female filmmakers who will close our program tonight explored a different potential of the moving image.
Ella Bergmann-Michel and Ellen Auerbach were particularly engaged in the field of documentary in the early ’30s, and their films significantly shaped the ideas of the architectural film, and the social reportage, two fields that had captured the interest of progressive architectural circles in the early ’30s. Especially the relations between Ella Bergmann-Michel and the Bauhaus are multiple and complex. As a young student, she had already studied at the Weimar Academy of Fine Art, the institution that immediately preceded the Bauhaus—the founding of the Bauhaus, in 1919. At that time, her work was still mainly focused on Constructivist drawings, which put special emphasis on the exploration of movement, and especially mechanical movement, works that had also attracted the interest of Walter Gropius, to the extent that he asked her to exhibit her works in the halls of the first Bauhaus in Weimar in the early ’20s. The second encounter between Ella Bergmann-Michel and the Bauhaus, however, was of a quite different nature, and it was distinctly focused on her film work, which she took up in Frankfurt in the late 1920s. As a member of the progressive urban reform group, the New Frankfurt, which had close ties and stood in a vivid exchange with several members of the Bauhaus, she functioned not only as the organizer of the group's highly influential film matinees in Frankfurt in the early ’30s, but she also, and even more crucially, became the main filmmaker associated with the reform projects of the New Frankfurt. Tonight we'll see three of her short films: Where Do the Elderly Live?; The Jobless Cook for the Jobless; and Flying Merchants in Frankfurt. Three films, as these titles already insinuate, that accentuate the distinctly sociocritical impetus that we find in all of Ella Bergmann-Michel 's films. They further extend the New Frankfurt group’s focus on addressing the most pressing social problems, and especially the housing problems, in the early ’30s. Yet at the same time, Ella Bergmann-Michel’s films, in their highly nuanced and often fluid camera movements, also articulate a fascination with film's unique potential to capture the new architecture on screen, an aspect that had already animated Walter Gropius’s active involvement in the architectural film series, How Do We Live in a Healthy and Economic Way, which, apart from Gropius’s own Bauhaus film, which you see here on the screen, also included episodes around the reform projects of the New Frankfurt.
We will close our program with two films by Ellen Auerbach, a photographer and advertising artist who, apart from studying with Walter Peterhans in 1929, the year in which he joined the Bauhaus to lead the newly established photography workshop, also founded an advertising studio with Bauhaus student Grete Stern, in Berlin, in 1930, entitled “ringl + pit,” which were actually their childhood nicknames, the first female-led advertising studio, that was pivotal in articulating the image and the idea of the New Woman. Deeply immersed in avant-garde film circles in the early’30s, her first experimental short, A Joyful Day on Rügen, playfully captures a day with friends at a fair on the island of Rügen, interspersed with nature imagery that repeatedly punctuates the image. We will close our film program with Ellen Auerbach’s both maritime and architectural film, Tel Aviv, which subtly highlights the political underpinnings that animate both her own and Ella Bergmann-Michel’s film work. Described by Thomas Tode as, I quote, “the tragic endpoint of film work of the Bauhaus,” Tel Aviv documents Ellen Auerbach’s emigration across the Mediterranean Sea to Palestine, in 1933. And more specifically, to the city of Tel Aviv, where she would spend a few years working in a children's photography studio. Tel Aviv is both a city portrait that captures the urban transformations of Tel Aviv in the early ’30s, and an architectural film that chronicles the rise of the so-called White City, an entire city constructed by Jewish immigrants from Germany, many of them former Bauhäusler, who fled the Nazi regime in the early ’30s, and who transposed the elements of the new architecture onto this newly emerging city. The process that Ellen Auerbach captures, in a highly nuanced tone, through the moving eye of her camera, or, in Auerbach’s own words, through a third eye, which she described as an embodied mode of, I quote, “being one with the object, with the camera, and with oneself.” In closing, let me briefly announce that our film program will run for about 77 minutes. And many of these film documents are literally coming from the archives, which means not all of them are restored, right? You will see that archival quality, especially in the case of our final films, by Ellen Auerbach. These are—some of them, at least, are very rarely seen materials. So we want to apologize for the lack of film quality in some of these pieces. I also wanted to say that we're very honored and grateful to have Robert Humphreville with us tonight, who will accompany all of these films with the piano. Thank you so much for being here. I wish all of you a wonderful film program, and I hope you'll enjoy these films. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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