• Fri 20 03 2020 / 7:30 pm •
Exophony: Translating on Frame

Due to the current situation regarding the coronavirus (COVID-19), Exophony: Translating on Frame has to be cancelled.

film: Calendar by ATOM EGOYAN
discussion with MADHUSREE DUTTA, STEFANIE SCHULTE STRATHAUS

In the 1993 film Calendar by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, an Armenian Canadian photographer travels to post-Soviet Armenia with his wife to photograph a series of old churches for a monthly calendar. They are accompanied by a local driver and tour guide. The guide speaks Armenian, the photographer English and his wife translates between them in a relationship triangle that becomes increasingly conflict-laden. The marital conflicts of the couple dovetail with the experiences of alienation, diasporic longings and post-communist, nationalist ideologies. The calendar structures the film both at the level of plot and form. Interludes show the photographer back in Canada meeting with a number of women he has hired, repeating his experience of alienation over the calendar year: at his home, he has each date telephone a presumable lover, making romantic declarations in their first languages. The film continually foregrounds (communication) media like the telephone, answering machine, camera and letters and highlights the fragility of language and processes of communication.

Calendar was filmed in multiple languages and delivers thus implicitly a commentary on the handling of ‘foreign-languagedness’, translation and subtitling in film. This interplay is the theme of the subsequent discussion between Madhusree Dutta, Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Co-Director of the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and Director of the Berlinale program Forum Expanded.


Start: 7:30 pm
Languages: German | English
Venue: Filmclub 813, Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne
Tickets: 6€ | 5€ (regular | reduced)


Exophony: Translatig on Frame is a part of the Exophony: program, which explores the processes of writing, reading and listening, manipulations of and through language as well as interaction and communication. There is a particular focus on experiences of and with multilingualism, translation and translatability. Exophony: offers the opportunity to collectively rethink communication structures and language practices and to explore the diversity and simultaneity of a shared language landscape.

The program series Exophony: is funded by Kunststiftung NRW.