Ain't Nothing With You (Frankenberg, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This screening will be introduced by the season curator, Laura Staab and followed by an in-person Q&A with the director Pia Frankenberg.
The main feature will be shown after a 35mm screening of director Pia Frankenberg's short film The Assault. “Someone can just slap me and call it art,” bemoaned the West German
interior minister in 1983, while restricting funding for cultural
productions that he deemed more “provocative” than “entertaining.” Pia
Frankenberg’s striking satire runs with that image – the slap as art –
and plays up the riotous fun that can be had in political provocation.
Chasing after a frenzied wave of face-smacking, The Assault
mobilises speed and associative montage to suggest how quickly
individuals can fall in line with a new reality – whether that reality
is violent and repressive, or liberatory and hilariously absurd.
ICA introduction:
In Pia Frankenberg’s self-reflective first feature, a filmmaker,
Martha, reckons with her commitments to the feminist and activist
politics of the ’60s and ’70s. Martha shares her Hamburg flat
with Portuguese immigrants, and speaks with an interviewer about
filmmaking. Questions of feminist aesthetics, along with mediocre
flings and class guilt, threaten to freeze Martha in a state of
doubt. When she crashes into Alfred, an architecture student, while
skating home from the cinema (swooning with admiration at Wim
Wenders’s latest), she finds a partner in indecision. Taking
place in Hamburg one winter, Ain’t Nothin’ Without You is
filmed beautifully by New German Cinema cameraman Thomas Mauch in
hibernal black-and-white. Frankenberg casts herself as Martha,
performing with self-deprecating charm and delightfully noisy
musicality in her first lead role. A comedy of several moving parts –
“like an orchestra… loud… and not necessarily in sync” –
this lively film is capacious enough to poke fun not just at
individual characters, but also at the wider sociopolitics of the
’80s. From the incompetence of immigration administrators to the
superficial diversity of new media, little eludes Frankenberg’s
wit.
Here (and above) is an extract.
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