About

This curated selection of work casts a long glance back at the film-poetry of Ute Aurand, surveying the new beginnings and returns that mark her 30 years of practice. In a remarkable body of work, Aurand harnesses the animistic life around her into forms of attention, creativity, rebound, and response.

“The act of filming is irrevocably linked to the act of returnings. To return to people, places and pasts is a central element not only of Aurand’s way of making films but the way we watch them. The double bind between the encounter and the return is what makes her work truly cinematic. To film is to allow time to be replayed, to make a film is to enable the return to places and people over and over.”—George Clark

OH! die vier Jahreszeiten (OH! The Four Seasons) 1988

An early, exuberant work, co-directed with Ulrike Pfeiffer and featuring both Aurand and Pfeiffer as players and travellers. The film reflects on extravagance (travelling out) and return (homecoming)—on circles, cycles, and spontaneity.

The opening text-frame acknowledges the influence of diary-filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who is one of the key points of initiation in Aurand’s practice as a filmmaker. She had seen Mekas’s work while at film school with Pfeiffer, and noted that it “triggered an unforgettable feeling in me. Intimate and almost private, while at the same time speaking to the entire world.” Mekas’s inspiration would later lead her and Pfeiffer to borrow a Bolex camera and to begin a collaborative project. This would eventually develop into Oh! The Four Seasons, organised into the seasonal cycles and its location in four different European cities (Berlin, Paris, Moscow, London).

The film’s sparkling energy and its sense of discovery and feedback (where character, environment, and camera interplay) are felt throughout Aurand’s work.

20 minutes | Ages 15+

Am Meer 1994

Filmed on the beach at Hiddensee in North Germany, Am Meer integrates the rushing of the sea with the filmmaker’s own fleeting, material, poetic images. The film opens itself up to the sea as a force both of destruction and creation, reflecting an immanence that is in the nature of the work.

3 minutes | Ages 15+

A Walk 2008

Throughout her work, Aurand frequently makes her camera and her images felt as an active, moving body—spinning, rushing, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, hanging upside down. In A Walk, her film goes walking. The camera occupies a snowy Swiss setting, as Aurand creates a material, tonal landscape that is both nebulous, serene, and wonderfully energetic.

“A walk involves the whole person; it is not reproducible; its shape occurs, unfolds; it has a motion characteristic of the walker”—A.R. Ammons, “The Poem as a Walk.”

5 minutes | Ages 15+

Kopfüber im Geäst (Hanging Upside Down in the Branches) 2009

A return home. A portrait of the filmmaker’s parents and their passing, Hanging Upside Down in Branches is a tough, generous, and lyrical study of family and domestic life. It immerses in the “medium” of the image, treating filmmaking as an act of recall and commemoration, but also of vigour and presence. Hanging Upside Down in Branches represents one of Aurand’s most vital acts of cinematic portraiture–observing figures over the years, in processes of change, development, and decline.

15 minutes | Ages 15+

Paulina 2011

Aurand repeatedly turns to friends and families for the subject of her films, creating portraits of life in motion. In creating these portraits, she allows the “temperaments and moods” of her subjects to indicate the direction of the film: “I tune into their fundamental tone to build the composition of my images.” In these two portraits, she follows young Paulina and Franz as they grow into adulthood, moving along with their changing forms and “tones.”

5 minutes | Ages 15+

Franz 2011

Aurand repeatedly turns to friends and families for the subject of her films, creating portraits of life in motion. In creating these portraits, she allows the “temperaments and moods” of her subjects to indicate the direction of the film: “I tune into their fundamental tone to build the composition of my images.” In these two portraits, she follows young Paulina and Franz as they grow into adulthood, moving along with their changing forms and “tones.”

5 minutes | Ages 15+

Sakura Sakura 2015

A portrait of two Japanese women whom Aurand met while filming in Japan in 2010. In two parts (one colour, one black and white), it is another rich demonstration of the filmmaker’s intimate style of portraiture; a study of the fragrance of character, of temperament, and of the image.

3 minutes | Ages 15+

Zuoz 2008

Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[ing] a space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”

2 minutes | Ages 15+