On the occasion of the publication of Figures of Absence. The Films of Dore O. Women’s Experimental Cinema (Strzelecki Books; ed. Masha Matzke), the first monograph focusing on the film practice of the German artist Dore O., this event honors the work and legacy of one of Germany’s most prolific and internationally renowned—yet overlooked—experimental filmmakers. The program offers the rare chance to see the recently restored films by Dore O., many of which haven’t been accessible for a long time.

Dore O. The name was a lynchpin, a bridge to an earlier moment in fringe movies when counterculture politics and aesthetics sang the same tune, or so we imagined. [...] Dore O. belongs to this moment when form and content could be held in the same breath. Where the celebration of eccentric, personal cinemas was part of a broader countercultural gesture of revolt. [...] From the faraway couch universe of this Canadian writer, Dore O. appears as a bright light of second-wave feminism. Dore O. remains a role model and inspiration.

In the 1960s, the artist Dore O. (1946–2022) became one of the first and few women in Germany to turn to experimental film in such a consistent and self-determined way. As the only female cofounder of the Hamburg Film-Coop, she was actively involved in exploring new forms of cinema alongside her then-husband Werner Nekes while developing her own “signature, her own tone, her own film method” (Harun Farocki). Radically following her individual path, Dore O. laid the groundwork for a later generation of mainly female artists by cultivating personal filmmaking in a strong intersection with medium-specific experimentation. Her defiance of highly politicized currents and prevailing theories both structural and feminist rendered her work hard to categorize, ultimately pushing it to the margins. But Dore O. carried on for thirty-five years, crafting a sensuous and strikingly hypnotic flow of multilayered images and radical soundscapes. She transformed painterly and musical concepts into a distinctly cinematic language, using complex in-camera editing, meticulous and “hyperbolic” (Annette Michelson) superimpositions, and rephotographing techniques to “create new architectures of old forms” (Dore O.). Going beyond the strictly personal or formalistic, her work’s highly enigmatic and elusive poetics convey modes of introspection, states of consciousness and vaguely evoked stories from inside the layers of film.

A long-overdue reappraisal of Dore O.’s avant-garde film practice, the new publication Figures of Absence exposes the formal rigor and inventiveness, as well as the cultural connotations, of a previously underresearched cinematic vision that significantly contributed to an international continuum of radical film art. Figures of Absence features unpublished archival material, rare interviews with Dore O., extensive image material and new contributions from international scholars and experts on women’s experimental cinema from Europe and North America, including Ute Aurand, Robin Blaetz, Christine Noll Brinckmann, Stephen Broomer, Vera Dika, Mike Hoolboom, Sarah Keller, Anthony Moore, Lucy Reynolds and Maureen Turim, among others. Ultimately, the authors’ revisionist accounts of Dore O.’s films spark a debate on still underrepresented areas of women’s experimental cinema. – Masha Matzke