PAR FIGURES: WORKS BY KEJA HO KRAMER AND STEPHEN DWOSKIN ON BILL BRANDT AND ROBERT KRAMER

This Ecran d’Art screening features a double bill, with the work of two avant-garde filmmakers who take the person and the work of two other artists, in this case Bill Brandt and Robert Kramer, as the starting point of an associative route that explores memories, the reciprocity of looking and being looked at, and the position and responsibility of art. The figures of the portrayed artists function as a medium, even beyond their death.

Shadows from Light, by Stephen Dwoskin
16mm film, 1983, black & white, 59 min.

Stephen Dwoskin (b.1939) contracted polio at the age of seven and was left disabled. His entire oeuvre is an attempt to explore the issue of voyeurism and of the relationship with the Other whom Dwoskin’s human camera attempts to approach or appropriate in spite of his lack of mobility, thereby adding a whole new tactile dimension to the camera’s way of looking. Dwoskin’s closeness to surrealism (Aragon, Georges Bataille) and its forerunners (Jarry, Carroll) informed his approach to eroticism in his films of the 1980s. ‘Shadows from Light’, a filmed journey through the photographic works of Bill Brandt, is a characteristic example. Born in 1904, Brandt was a shy and enigmatic man who dominated British photography for decades. His early studies of class-divided Britain were followed by the post-war series of ‘distorted nudes’, shot on beaches and inside rooms. The film made in the photographer’s apartment is a fitting final portrait of Brandt (it was completed the year he died), and recomposes his work in cinematic terms.

I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine, by Keja Ho Kramer & Stephen Dwoskin
Video, 2006, colour, 47 min.

Filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in 1999, was a militant through and through. Taking a very different tack from the negative image the Americans had of him, his daughter Keja Ho Kramer (1974), together with Robert’s filmmaker colleague and friend, Stephen Dwoskin, revive their relationship in the form of an imaginary dialogue. They search and reinvent Robert Kramer’s late body in various places he visited. ‘I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine’ is based on the narrative framework of an investigation: a detective, Keja Ho K., searching for a ghost, Robert Kramer. In their poetic ode the filmmakers, are using footage from Kramer’s archive and interviews with close friends of his.