documentary, HD, colors, 59' - 2021
selections:
Sound of silent / Festival International du film muet de Chartres, 2023
shortlisted for the Focal Awards 2022
Festival La Rochelle Cinéma 2021
Il cinema ritrovato, Bologna 2021
IndieLisboa 2021
Athens International Film Festival 2021
Festival International du Film sur l'Art, Montreal 2021
synopsis
Lotte H. Eisner (1896-1983) was one of the most fascinating figures of
the past century. Little known by the general public, the author of the
celebrated essay L'Ecran démoniaque (The Demonic Screen) and curator in chief
of the Cinémathèque Française was admired by Fritz Lang, Murnau, Stroheim,
Sternberg, Chaplin, and Renoir, but also by Brecht, Man Ray and, later, Herzog
and Wenders, Godard and Truffaut. Persecuted by the Nazis, living as a refugee
in France, Lotte E. Eisner was an eternal exile. Or how History (of the
twentieth century), the history of cinema and the life of a woman were aligned.
With this EISNERIN Timon Koulmasis and his editor have
achieved something truly great. The whole attitude of the film towards Lotte
Eisner, the selection of the documents, the way he made us - the formerly young
filmmakers - speak, create a a rarely successful portrait.
Volker Schlöndorff
Rarely has a documentary on cinema made such an
intelligent use of images. By subtly mixing Lotte Eisner's interviews with
archive footage and film excerpts, but also by superimposing fiction on real
and tragic landscapes, the director brings out stunning analogies and
reflecting resonances ... A magnificent lesson in cinema and history.
Télérama, 17/2/2021
The simple unfolding of her life, between the
Berlin of the Roaring Twenties and the cinema-loving Paris, between mythical
film shoots and meetings with the creators, would have been enough to make an
interesting documentary. But what makes it original is the way Timon Koulmasis
makes the film excerpts collide with the archive material and newsreels from
Berlin at the time, in a formidable montage.
Le Monde
The history of cinema, like a fresco to be
drawn, is full of unknown people who, out of love for this art, have strongly
contributed to its influence and vibrancy. Lotte Eisner is one of them. Timon
Koulmasis draws her portrait.
Les Inrocks
Lotte Eisner - A
place, nowhere is a
cinema film in the most magical sense of the renaissance of the cinematograph.
I have seen no archive there except that of the words of witnesses giving
evidence about Lotte. But I saw the documented soul of the German tragedy - the assassination of the German cinema by the Nazis - as well as the "Stimmung" of Timon
Koulmasis' film writing, reanimating the bruised body of the cinema of love.
What is commonly known as the
"archive", I saw it suddenly disappear to make way for the adjacency of
the image and its pellicular transparency, giving birth to this luminescent
habitat of the soul of the cinema lover (Eisner).
Like an anti-remembrance of the past, Timon
Koulmasis' cinema presents itself to the future of all living memory: when the film (emulsion) forms the shape of the image and merges into the moving figure of the poetic that
suspends the image from all representation. Thus Lotte Eisner becomes
immiscible with any image of herself to become this solar woman, overexposed
with love.
Philippe Tancelin, poet -
philosopher
starring |
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Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders
Martje Herzog, Laurent Manonni, Bernard Eisenschitz
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director
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Timon Koulmasis
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editor |
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Aurique Delannoy
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photography |
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Rüdiger Kortz
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sound |
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Holger Jung
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composer |
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Ernst August Klötzke
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producers |
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Ilona Grundmann, Christophe Gougeon
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production |
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Ilona Grundmann Filmproduktion, acqua alta,
zdf/arte, HessenFilm, ORF Weltvertrieb,
ciné +, CNC, Procirep-Angoa,
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah |
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