Description
Russian premiere
“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here”. Abraham Lincoln, 1863. In 1939, a second unit with a double and extras filmed scenes for the Hollywood classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the Lincoln Memorial. The succession of the sorted-out plan sequences undermines the usual cinematic narration; the plot does not progress here. The neoclassical architecture is merely the setting for a recurring ritual: The inconspicuous protagonist is lost between the pillars of the hall. He often pauses in the face of the monumental Lincoln, as if he himself were freezing into a sculpture.
About the director:
Christoph Girardet
Born in 1966, he is a German video artist and filmmaker. Girardet makes both the accidentally found and the extensively researched found footage from the archives of film history the subject of his art. Montage, omissions, and repetitions reveal the underlying structures and inner mechanisms of cinematic reality. Beyond this analysis of material and its clichés, his work engages with a melancholic sense of absence, creating an individual pictorial world. Girardet’s films were twice showcased in the In Silico competition: Personne (2016) and It Was Still Her Face (2017).