Catalogue > At random

“Machining of Steel”, “Mating of Two Males”, “Dumdum Bullet Effect” and “String Figures” played by the Inuit, the Krahô or the Taulipang in Guyana exemplify that the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen aimed at capturing all the movement processes of the world on celluloid. The scientific films that the IWF produced, archived and distributed were supposed to be “documents of reality”. Without using commentary, they should make movements visible, storable and re-analyzable at any time. Can there be pictures that are more real than others? The essay film “unlearning flow” examines both National Socialist prehistory and the legacy of the IWF. It reveals the ideology of the distant, objectifying camera view and also the active white washing of the Institute’s history after World War II. With their film, filmmaker Christoph Oeschger and the historians of media and knowledge, Sarine Waltenspül and Mario Schulze, touch only the tip of the iceberg: (war) research with film, the (re-)production of colonial power relations and the creation of (a lack of) knowledge through film.

Christoph Oeschger (1984*) lives in Zurich as an artist, photographer and publisher. In 2014 he founded the book publisher cpress an in 2020 cpressfilms an agency for artist films together with Christof Nüssli. He works with various forms of the documental. His work has been shown in various museums including Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie , Karlsruhe (DE), Centre de la Photographie Geneve (CH). Mario Schulze (*1986, Halle/Saale) is a cultural scientist and scientific researcher who works on the history of exhibitions, object theories and scientific films. His doctoral thesis is due in 2017 under the title "How things learned to speak. A History of the Museum Object 1968-2000". He has taught at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, Zurich and Frankfurt as well as at the Zurich Art Academy. Sarine Waltenspül (*1986, Basel) works as a media historian on scientific films. In 2018, she received her doctorate on cinematographic models in films. She co-directs the SNSF research project Aerial Photographs/Light Images and the DFG network Lens On! Furthermore, she has been involved in various functions in the conception and production of music videos, theatre documentaries and feature films and was head of the "Hungerkünstler Verlag".