Broad Underground || For an Institute of Light: Absolute Film and Beyond at the Bauhaus

Broad Underground || For an Institute of Light: Absolute Film and Beyond at the Bauhaus

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When:
October 18, 2019 @ 7:00 pm
2019-10-18T19:00:00-04:00
2019-10-18T19:15:00-04:00
Where:
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum
547 E Circle Dr
East Lansing, MI 48824
USA

For an Institute of Light:
Absolute Film and Beyond at the Bauhaus

7:00pm || Friday, October 18, 2019 || Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum || Michigan State University
547 E Circle Dr, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

In 1926, Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy proclaimed, “give me or the Bauhaus an experimental film laboratory, then we can begin our work.” He sought to put into practice in Dessau the visionary ideals of his own groundbreaking multi-media treatise, Painting, Photography, Film, published the previous year in the school’s Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus books) series. While Moholy’s plan for a film school at the Bauhaus failed to materialize in Germany, the school’s faculty and students experimented widely in film and moving images, ranging from abstract student films and “coloured light plays” to various workshop-based encounters with the materiality of film, evident in “celluloid collages” and the widespread use of the form of the filmstrip in posters, “typophoto” scripts, exhibition design, and architectural publications. The Bauhaus also hosted a range of film screenings and lectures in the 1920s featuring the European avant-garde, as well as scientific, instructional, and animated films. If there was no formal “laboratory” for filmmaking at the Bauhaus, film, and an expansive idea of the cinematic, were omnipresent at the school.

This program gestures to this range of Bauhaus enthusiasm about film by recreating a program of “Absolute Film” first screened at the sold-out, 900-seat Ufa Palast in Berlin in 1925 and later repeated at the Bauhaus the following year. Featuring major works of the European avant-garde that intersected with Bauhaus aesthetic strategies and utopian aspirations, our selections expand on the Absolute Film program to also include a few examples of Moholy’s own filmmaking and film theory, from his early experiments in Germany to a few of the films produced during his rebooting of the Bauhaus in Chicago, beginning in 1937. There and through World War II, Moholy finally realized his ambitions for an “institute of light.”

—Programmed by Justus Nieland & Joshua Yumibe

Films

Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, Germany, 1921, 3m)
Symphonie Diagonale (Viking Eggeling, France, 1924, 9m)
Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, France, 1923–24, 14m)
Lichtspiel Opus 2, 3, & 4 (Walter Ruttmann, Germany, 1921, 1924, 1925, 10m)
Der Sieger (Walter Ruttman, Germany, 1922, 3 min)
Entr’Acte (René Clair and Francis Picabia, France, 22m)
Lightplay: Black, White, Grey (Moholy-Nagy, Germany, 1926–1930, 6m)
Design Workshops, (selections) (Moholy-Nagy, USA, 1940-1944, 10m)

In collaboration with 100 Years of Bauhaus: http://linglang.msu.edu/degree-programs/german/bauhaus


Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies Program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.

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