TALK & FILM : Screening & Discussion as part of 12 Evenings of Remembrance at Library, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, 3 Kasturba Gandhi Marg > 5pm-8pm on 16th & 17th January 2016

Time : 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm Add to Calendar 16/01/2016 17:00 17/01/2016 20:00 Asia/Kolkata TALK & FILM : Screening & Discussion: 12 Evenings of Remembrance presents a series of video works by noted artists exploring the idea of memory Event Page : http://www.delhievents.com/2016/01/talk-film-screening-discussion-12.html Library, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, 3 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-110001 DD/MM/YYYY

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Venue : Library, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, 3 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-110001
Venue Info : Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Barakhamba(Blue Line)'

Area : Events at Kasturba Gandhi Marg

Event Description : The programme has been facilitated by curator Olaf Stüber who will be present at the screenings and will lead the discussions.

Screenings are as follows : The following first three videos in the inaugural presentations deal with questions and situations arising from historical memory, anecdotal memory, trauma and memorials.

16th January : 

Nacht und Nebel, (Night and Fog), 2011, 22 min

Gal’s works often reveal overlooked historical facts and question the ways in which meaning and information are typically conveyed in documentary film. Nacht und Nebel was originally commissioned for the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and is based on an interview Gal conducted with Michael Goldman — a Holocaust survivor and one of the policemen who took part in a secret mission to dispose of the remains of the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in 1962.

Eichmann was tried and convicted in an Israeli court for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was executed by hanging on May 31, 1962. After Eichmann’s body was cremated, a group of police officers were ordered to sail six miles offshore to scatter his ashes in international waters off the Jaffa coastline. This mission was designed to ensure that no future memorial could be built for Eichmann at a burial site and that no nation would serve as his final resting place.

Nacht und Nebel is a cinematic reenactment of Michael Goldman’s experience transporting, guarding, and scattering Eichmann’s ashes at sea. In this work, Gal creates a telling psychological portrait of the policemen charged with keeping the mission a secret. The phrase “Nacht und Nebel”—literally translated from the German as “night and fog”—was also a term for Adolf Hitler’s covert operation, during which political activists and resistance members opposed to the Nazi regime were eliminated. It is also the title of a film by Alain Resnais (1955) on the German concentration camps.

Wie aus der Ferne (As From Afar), 2013, 26:49 min

Wie aus der Ferne is based on a text by Ludwig Wittgenstein about memory images. To what extent are images of a memory different from images that come with expectation from images of a daydream? With this question as a central theme he examines the friendship between Simon Wiesenthal and Albert Speer. The former was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the search for Nazi criminals, the latter was Hitler’s architect and confidant who showed regret after being sentenced to 20 years imprisonment and was prepared to take responsibility for Nazi crimes.


Gal’s documentary approach and his poetic narration highlight the gap between reality and representation and between memory and invention by revealing history as an open process of subjective interpretations. The 30-minute film is a quiet reworking of a sub-plot of the postwar period. In the style of a historical reconstruction Gal plays out a possible meeting between Wiesenthal and Speer. The fact that they met several times in Vienna in the 1970s is documented in their correspondence.

17th January : 
Die leere Mitte (The Empty Center)
Directed by : Hito Steyerl
Year : 1988
Duration : 62 mins. 

Background : Screening & Discussion: 12 Evenings of Remembrance 
A series of video works by noted artists exploring the idea of memory.

How do we remember? What happens when knowledge and history replace memory? Does it help to forget? Is remembering, repeating and working through memories the only way to come to terms with them? And what do we actually learn from history except, that, as Hegel has put it, no one learns from history? Is the permanence of ignorance, oblivion and forgetting the only lesson to be learnt? What do outside observers know that those involved do not?

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