Raw Stuff (3): In & Out of School

December 7 to 10, 2005

Part three of the series Raw Stuff, curated by Sylvia Szely and Dietmar Schwärzler, investigates the "small form" in films which were either made in the course of an art of film school education or by autodidacts.

Directors like Charles Burnett, Jane Campion, Hans Scheugl and Lars van Trier, who completed their degrees in filmmaking, are placed opposite directors who took up filmmaking without studying it, such as Léos Carax, Todd Haynes, Maurice Pialat and Paul Verhoeven.

Then there are Harun Farocki and Ulrich Seidl, who decided to abandon their studies soon after starting them. Several of the works which will be presented in this context became part of film history from the moment they were first screened. Two examples are Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town) or Mosaik im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence), by Chantal Akerman and Peter Kubelka respectively, who created key works in their very first go.

Other films in the programme share a history of difficult production, reception or distribution. They were either rarely shown, not recognized at all, or were only rediscovered in recent years.

In & Out of School questions the mechanisms of reception, the why and how of forgetting and remembering, and the fate of remaining invisible. It aims for a lively "discussion" between the debutant(e)s, one which cuts across genres, decades and all socio-cultural backgrounds.