Re-interpretations of real life in regional family films – A ciné film evening with commentaries

Everything can be different! In the 1970s, the Fiedler family made a silent film in which they turned their party cellar into a space station. In the film, they move beyond gravity and the ordered structures of everyday life. The private Super 8 camera becomes a medium that allows the new role models and life plans that are gradually slipping into German everyday life to be tried out and developed.

In 2018, as part of the project »Schmelztiegel Ruhrgebiet – Alltag schreibt Geschichte« (Melting Pot Ruhr – Everyday Life is History), the Interkultur Ruhr initiative began collecting old family films from the Ruhr region. In response to the public appeal, local citizens submitted almost 1000 ciné films from their private collections. Although men were behind the cameras for most of the amateur films, images and plots were frequently dominated by female protagonists. In the course of time, women then started to take over the camera work, and a change in role attribution and body images also became apparent.
In post-war Germany, amateur films offer increasingly large sections of the population a chance to re-invent themselves, or observe themselves from the outside. Filming in this context is more than just an extended arm of the memory. It is an opportunity for performative self-alienation. The boundaries between documentation and performance become blurred. There is a desire to re-write history, but also to endorse familiar images in order to sound out the possibilities of social change. Using individual film excerpts, the ciné film programme Café Kosmos from Johanna-Yasirra Kluhs and Betty Schiel follows these dynamics. The selected films oscillate between derailment and normalisation, providing a concrete opportunity to examine the conditions of emancipation in a conservative society.
Johanna Yasirra Kluhs

We would like to thank Forum Geschichtskultur an Ruhr und Emscher e. V., LWL-Medienzentrum für Westfalen, LVR-Zentrum für Medien und Bildung and Ruhr Tourismus GmbH for their invaluable support.

In cooperation with Regionalverband Ruhr, Interkultur Ruhr, Ruhr Museum, Akademie der Künste der Welt

Film Series New Archives