Disturbed Ecologies

Soils_Habit_Plants

16mm, color/sound, 11 min. 21sec., Japan 2017

With Mikhail Lylov

Commissioned by Akademie der Künste Berlin for the exhibition

Tell it to the stones. The Work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

Makoto Mochida

I is an-onther

Eroticism in Marhöfer and Lylov’s film Soils_Habit_Plants

2020

In the essay A Tomb for the Eye (1975), Serge Daney uses the term eroticism in his discussion of the short film Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” (1972) by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The eroticism Daney detects in this film,is represented by an ankle of Straub or a knee of Huillet that protrude into the screen. When Daney evokes eroticism in the Huillet and Straub film, he thinks of “the most neutral parts of the body, the less spectacularly consumable.” According to Daney, eroticism in the film has nothing to do with the naked body as a commodity that has exchange value on the market. More than thirty-eight years after the publication of Daney’s A Tomb for the Eye, Jean-Marie Straub is interviewed by Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov and talks about eroticism [continue reading]

Soils_Habit_Plants:
A public conversation with Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 11. November 2017

2020

Mikhail: Like some of the films we have seen today and yesterday, our film Soils_Habit_Plants also has to do with the notion of landscape, even though we prefer not to use the term. One can speak about landscape as a material entity that bears readable marks and through these marks enters into history. A film can be an exercise of reading these marks. The landscape can also become an intensive character corresponding with the mood of the film’s protagonists. But I think that in our work we understand landscape in a different way.

Elke: The idea of landscape is problematic, because it messes all the different protagonists into one kind of perception. And maybe this relates a little bit to what we are trying to do, which is not to mess everybody up, and still being out in something that is called „landscape.“ [continue reading]

Thanks to Katsue Fukamachi, Naomi Sakuramoto, Tobias Hering, Annett Busch, Yoshirou Takamura

International post-doc at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Global Environment Studies in association with Gothenburg University, Valand Academy 2016 – 2019. Additional support provided by the Swedish Research Council.

For public or institutional screenings, please contact Arsenal Distribution Berlin