• Thu 30 09 2021 •
Border Cases. Documentary Practice between Film and Literature

with MERLE KRÖGER, PHILIP SCHEFFNER, NICOLE WOLF
moderated by KATRIN MUNDT

Merle Kröger and Philip Scheffner’s film works range between experimental essay and documentary films. The artistic collaboration between the producer, screen writer, and novelist and the filmmaker is based on their extensive collective research processes and is characterized by a kind of historical and multiperspectival investigation. They have been realizing projects together since the late 1980s, and in 2001 they founded the production company pong. Edited by the film scholar, anthropologist, and curator Nicole Wolf, Grenzfälle is the first publication about Kröger and Scheffner’s literary and audiovisual oeuvre. Wolf explores questions regarding methods of artistic research and collective authorship.

The focus of this conversation on 30 09 2021 was the genesis of their projects, which evolve out of their examination of the situations, places, or archival material they encounter. In the case of the film Havarie (Shipwreck; 2016), a YouTube clip proved pivotal to addressing the subject of Algerian refugees and their flight across the Mediterranean, as well as their place of arrival, the Spanish port city of Cartagena, and the structural violence of the location. Interrogating our understanding of fiction and reality is a central aspect of their artistic practice, in which past and present enter into a reciprocal relationship from which future possibilities for thought and action are derived. The idea of documentary practice as a political praxis that makes use of multiperspectival narrative forms will be examined in closer detail in this conversation. The talk will be moderated by curator and author Katrin Mundt.

Border Cases. Documentary Practice between Film and Literature is a cooperation of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) and dfi – dokumentarfilminitiative im Filmbüro NW and held to mark the publication of Grenzfälle. Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner (Borderline Cases. Documentary Practice Between Film and Literature in the Work of Merle Kröger and Philip Scheffner), edited by Nicole Wolf and part of the dfi’s series Texte zum Dokumentarfilm (vol. 23).