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Berlin [Underground]

GER 2021, 102 min

The Basis of Make-Up (IV). Photography and beyond – Part 33.

Synopsis

The film presents 171 notebooks and sketchbooks by Heinz Emigholz from 2004 to 2021; nine subway stations in Berlin, as they were in 2018; two advertisements for a fictitious perfume brand; and sixty-seven roadside trees in Buenos Aires, their roots fighting back against the paved surfaces of the sidewalks. It was all filmed by Heinz Emigholz in the summer of 2018.

The Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta showed an impressive degree of clarity in answering the highly Western question of whether there was acinematic “underground” in India: “We don’t have an underground practice of political art because our architecture has no concept of basement.” The film Berlin [Underground] makes use of this clarity for its title. While the animated, drawn, collaged, and written motifs represent an artist as a contemporary witness, the underground subway stations are the real counterpart to an obsolete notion of the artistic “underground,” and the studies of trees and roots are documenting an active, natural deconstruction of architecture by nature. At the same time, the drawings on paper show the continuing existence of wood as a raw material in the form of solidified pulp.

Press reviews

A breeze of nostalgia, a shrug, and self irony: The portraits of Berlin subway stations in Berlin [Underground] may start in the Schöneberg Regenbogenkiez, but only to flee to Dahlem, the location of the Freie Universität. Western Underground academically cooked. The trees in Argentina are way more interesting. And reprising throughout: The inexplicable notes of Heinz Emigholz. – HKW

Awards and Festivals

- HKW Berlin 2021- Retrospective Counter Gravity