in the moment. ute aurand's films

Is perhaps the fairest film the one that in some way IS the person who made it? We could then think of films as self-portraits of the person who makes them, since they are the way in which filmmakers project themselves to the world. It seems that this is what this program reveals, which can be seen globally as a self-portrait of Aurand as a filmmaker. In a direct and overt way in her first film, Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft and in a more oblique way in Terzen, where Aurand's life intermingle with fragments of her films, without distinguishing between one category and the other. Terzen can be seen in a certain way as a vital but also artistic compendium, in which alternative versions or fragments of other films appear from time to time. This is how Ute Aurand explains where Terzen comes from: “From 1992-98 I filmed continually: while travelling, in the flat, during winter, friends, my nieces, Tanja and Xenia in Ukraine, blooming chestnut trees, Paris, New York, the Orkney Islands. These short pieces correspond to various moods and sounds”. There are children’s games, everyday and festive moments in Terzen, where there is also room for direct animation scratching on celluloid. It is pure joy concentrated into a collection of simple pleasures, which Aurand presents to us as if it were possible to project the cheerful moments of our lives straight from our fragmented, skipping and diffuse memory. And in the midst of it all, there are also the films. We see their titles, the germ of some, pieces of the creative process of others, and even, as in the case of Zu Hause (which is a self-portrait of Aurand shooting her own shadow shooting), the whole unit of what would be an independent film with a variation. In Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft there is a tension that has already dissipated in Terzen. By 1998, Aurand understood (and has been doing so for several years) that her vocation as a filmmaker lies in throwing herself into the world, without categorizing what is big and what is small. A shadow on any given day in her apartment is no less powerful than a monumental picture in Paris. Her identity lies in inserting herself into the world through what she looks at. That is why Terzen can be seen as a total self-portrait, while Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft is a self-portrait in struggle, which Aurand carries out through a play of mirrors and mise-en-scène. Her identity here is fragmented into an introspective part, and a part in which she herself is projected and reflected in the world. She and her double dance in a choreography underwater, at a time when the distance between reality and representation, or between life and cinema, still occupies space. It was therefore necessary to develop a way of making films that would break that barrier, and that way of making films is that life and films are one and the same thing.

( Elena Duque )

In the presence of Ute Aurand.

Travelogues are the means by which travelers, since time immemorial, bring back home what they have seen in distant lands. Each traveler sees different things: in the same place, two people may be struck by disparate things, which they will also record in their own ways. If there is something that moves people to fill these notebooks, it is discovery, the desire to tell what is new to them, foreign to their daily experience. The author of the travelogue arrives where she goes with what she knows and with what she feels, and with these tools she tries to understand what she sees. There is an awareness (not at all contemporary) that everything must be treasured because the occasion is unique and fleeting, and because there are no other accounts of that experience. Let us think, for example, of how Humboldt described the American continent. It seems to be in that spirit that Ute Aurand travels with her camera. In the films of this program, carnets de voyage, one can see the curiosity and openness of her gaze, which seems to discover a new world. In this program we will see journeys to other continents. To Brasil brings us what was collected on a trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro: images and occasional sounds between silences (Aurand's usual modus operandi, which from time to time lets us hear recordings that underline the images or give them new dimensions). The lush vegetation, but also the things made by human hands. The beach, and the streets. The friends, and also the people oblivious to the camera. Black and white and color alternate: seeing the monochrome beach, then the explosion of color astonishes. Aurand plays with colored filters and superimpositions, and the rhythms alternate, as when the rhythm of a pattern on the lattice of a wall is superimposed on the rhythm of the girls' hand clapping. Her agile and attentive gaze is bathed in a tropical balm. Sakura, Sakura is just the meeting of two Japanese gestures, which in their simplicity bring an idle but fair comparison with the poetic form of haiku. Sakura is the cherry blossom, which punctuates the poem divided between the portrait of a woman who makes beautiful embroidered balls, and that of another who observes and escapes on a bicycle.
Although on another side of the world, in this case New England, Four Diamonds is also composed of a couple of notes taken on the fly, which place us in a vivid way in a precise moment and its light. Women playing cards, birds on the shore of a stormy sea to the rhythm of a melody (played by Etienne Grenier). Junge Kiefern is a travelogue of Japan (filmed in several cities over three trips, in different seasons), in which we palpably feel the transfers between places, with the collection of images that the journey generates. People absorbed in their daily chores, actions with a purpose or an execution fascinating to a gaze coming from this side of the world. Fruits, trees, plants, colors, textures. The countryside but also the cities, where there is also a place for nature in one way or another.

( Elena Duque )

In the presence of Ute Aurand.