LIGHT CONE PRESENTS A TRIBUTE TO DORE O. (1946-2022)

The Scratch session screening at Luminor City Hall in Paris pays tribute to the work and legacy of one of the great pioneers of German experimental cinema, yet relatively unknown to this day. In the 1960s, within the post-war German artistic landscape, the painter Dore O. was one of the first women to make experimental films independently and consistently. The event also celebrates the release of Figures of Absence - The Films of Dore O. (Strzelecki Books, editor: Masha Matzke). This book presents unpublished archival documents and rare interviews with Dore O., numerous images, as well as new contributions from the main researchers and experts in (female) experimental cinema in Europe and North America.

GME Streamline distributes several of Dore O.’s films in the FIGURES OF ABSENCE (1968-1976) collection, which includes several of the films being presented by Light Cone, and which is available as a downloadable from GME as a 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