DDR/DDR

Opening at New York's Anthology Film Archives this weekend: DDR/DDR, directed by Amie Siegel

From the Anthology Film Archives website:

“The films of artist Amie Siegel deftly transform heady philosophical musings – about history, psychoanalysis, voyeurism, modernist design, cinematic narrative – into elegantly playful and provocative mosaics of carefully loaded images and pointed associations. … The restrained self-reflexivity and deadpan humor that unite Siegel’s films lend them a rich meta-cinematic dimension that actively questions the limits of traditional nonfiction cinema.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

DDR/DDR, the latest feature by Amie Siegel, is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the film weaves together mundane Stasi surveillance footage, interviews with psychoanalysts, East German “Indian hobbyists”, and lolling shots of derelict state radio stations into an extended and self-conscious assemblage to meditate on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art.

“Siegel’s ‘ciné-constellation’ DDR/DDR combines vérité interviews with staged dialogue to excavate East German traumas associated with both the Socialist state and reunification. Siegel’s lens finds filmic lessons, too, in her analysis of Stasi information operations and her inquiries into the suppression of psychoanalysis in the DDR. Lying on a daybed in what was formerly a Stasi director’s office, Siegel intones a series of equivalencies into the camera: ‘Psychoanalyst as Stasi; Stasi as psychoanalyst; filmmaker as psychoanalyst; filmmaker as Stasi; Stasi as filmmaker.’” –Michael Wang, ARTFORUM

“[Siegel’s] polymathic style recalls Countdown (1990), Ulrike Ottinger’s account of the two Germanys uniting their currencies. DDR/DDR also evokes Godard’s SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968), a provocative essay mixing a Rolling Stones session, Black Panther rhetoric, and Native Americans… DDR/DDR is an alluring and allusive dossier.” –Bill Stamets, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES