Berlin Remake

2005 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

14 min

Amie Siegel

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Berlin Remake ( 2005) combines extracts of East German films with images filmed by the artist in Berlin. While staying in Berlin, the artist found the locations where the official films were made and she juxtaposes the two in a synchronised double projection. Therefore on one screen there is Berlin between 1945 and 1989 and on the other Berlin in 2004. The contrast between the two is troubling, strange and uncanny (Freud would say unheimlich). History in both continuous and ruptured. It is as if the artist was remaking these films but without the actors, or the plot; in a way it is a meditation on absence as well as a demonstration of the changes in Berlin. She also uses an extract of the last film to be shot under the Communist regime. The scene occurs in a place that has been entirely reconstructed since. At the beginning, the film itself looks like a remake of an old East German film but during the projection it transpires more like a comparison rather than a reconstruction. The film is simultaneously a search for lost time and for recaptured time.

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Amie Siegel works with the cinematic image—the precise production of filmic and still images—to produce artworks that address deeper social issues. She fakes and remakes, to purposefully tell lies as a vehicle to a greater truth. Through researching and implicitly critiquing the history of film, Seigel makes use of genre tropes, such as those found in science fiction, noir and the western. She also has a keen interest in politics, critical theory and a marked distrust of capitalism.

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Colors:

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• transformation.n.05
• reshoot.v.01
• east_germany.n.01
• perturb.v.01
• comparison.n.02
• communism.n.01
• american