____in for a penny, in for a pound, oder: wer a sagt muß auch b sagen
matei bellu, madeleine bernstorff, emilie bujes, guillaume cailleau

http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/berlinale-forum/archive/program-archive/2010/artists-expanded/ian-white.html

KOPIETHEATER initiated by curator Ian White:
„Kopietheater is an experiment in radical cinema and the culmination of a research project by London-based curator and artist Ian White. It explores context and the act of reading as material content. In the Kopietheater film, video, still images, sound, text and performance are radically juxtaposed into unique, simultaneous presentations - a theatre of reproducible units proposed as fundamental cinema.“

Kopietheater continued a series of experimental screenings and events that had taken place in March 2009. For the 2010 Berlinale Forum Expanded, Kopietheater included two screenings: on one side it re-presented one of the March events; a screening of Rosa von Praunheim’s film “It’s Not the Homosexual…” projected alongside a series of photographs by American artist Emily Roysdon. While von Praunheim’s film is widely regarded as instigating the gay rights movement in Germany and yet an incisive, hysterical and challenging indictment of a gay culture becoming increasingly mainstream, Emily Roysdon offers a re-gendered, contemporary version of David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-9). The simultaneous projection of both works creates affiliations, conflicts and questions.

Parallel to this screening, Kopietheater consisted of works specially conceived for the event by artists, writers and theorists. The requirement was that the screened works should be composed of at least two elements that the audience would simultaneously see, hear or read. As such they aimed to further explore - and possibly criticize - the cinema space, going beyond the classical cinema setting and its implied audience-screening relationship. A new kind of cinema without moving images: Kopietheater.

Contributions by: Rosa Barba; Rainer Bellenbaum; Matei Bellu, Madeleine Bernstorff, Emilie Bujes & Guillaume Cailleau; Anne Breimaier; Martin Ebner; Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth; Judith Hopf; Matthew Lutz-Kinoy; Henrik Olesen; Klaus Weber; Florian Zeyfang

our contribution:
in for a penny, in for a pound, oder: wer a sagt muß auch b sagen

The corporeality of cinema, both as space and institution, allows a collective experience that is simultaneously personally appropriated. The piece consisted of a 7 minutes self-developed 16mm film of the closed curtains in the large cinema of the Arsenal. It included at the beginning a few tiny last movements of the closing curtains - barely visible. Thus it was a still image referring to the room where the Kopietheater audience was sitting.

After this screening we were standing at the exit doors of the cinema distributing carambar sweets wrapped in „wer a sagt muß auch b sagen“ papers. Opening the wrapping, the audience could find various images borrowed from early cinema (film palaces, vaudeville, etc.) as well as early medical photography picturing experiments in hysteria and hypnotism. Some papers also included late 19th century quotes about hypnotism by Hippolyte Bernheim and Sigmund Freud.
Allowing for a reflection on the potential of corporeal immersion, the whole project aimed to re-contextualise the contemporary cinema space in relationship to early forms of spectacle and at the same time commented the concept of Kopietheater as such.
(bellu,bernstorff,bujes,cailleau)