ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES HONORS THE LEGACY OF DORE O.

This recent screening series (June 17-19) paid tribute to the work and legacy of Dore O., one of Germany’s most influential and pioneering experimental filmmakers, who tragically passed away in early March 2022. The series also marked the announcement of the publication “Figures of Absence. The Films of Dore O.” (ed. Masha Matzke), which will be released in English by archivebooks in late 2022.

GME Streamline distributes several of Dore O.’s films in the FIGURES OF ABSENCE (1968-1976) collection, which is available as a downloadable DSL file or on Blu-ray/DVD.

“Being located in the “antechamber of language, even of consciousness,” her newly restored films occupy a state of in-betweenness that cannot be easily interpreted nor approached verbally. Their associative stream of images and sounds acts as a deliberation on their sensuality. In a dream-like density and strange suspension of time, Dore O.’s films induce a heightened sense of perception between hypnosis and clarity.” -Masha Matzke

“O.’s work is often noted by contemporary critics to resemble the American avant-garde film of the period. And this is precisely the point. Her films are not simply derivative of Maya Deren or Stan Brakhage. Instead, by recalling these works, they cause an inner disturbance. O. uses a method of allusion to American avant-garde lyrical film styles, a cinema traditionally invested in the objectification of a first-person vision, while now speaking from a West German subject position. A shifting double exposure results, at once evoking connotations of a cultural past, the present of the films’ making, as well as our own era – a positioning that reveals as much as it hides.” -Vera Dika

“Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing... It's time to proclaim loudly that Dore O.’s work is unique in German avant-garde film.” -Dietrich Kuhlbrod

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Click here for a full list of works by Women Filmmakers distributed by GME