Culture tips and favorites of the week: Godard as a wildlife filmmaker – Culture

Hardly any other filmmaker has been written about as much as Jean-Luc Godard, who died last September. However, Roxy Miéville, the dog who has lived with Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville in the Swiss role since 2010 and who makes her big appearance in Godard’s penultimate feature film, “Adieu au langage”, has so far been criminally neglected.

The (also Swiss) film scholar Vinzenz Hediger has now filled this research gap in his illuminating contribution to the anthology he co-edited, “Jean-Luc Godard: Thinking about film according to the history of cinema,” which has just been published. Hediger identifies Roxy as a “mix between an Appenzeller Mountain Dog and a Pinscher” and describes “Adieu au langage”, Godard’s first film in 3D, as his first animal film. It’s about a couple of people, or about two of them, or about their falling apart – who knows for sure with Godard, whose revolutionary film practice doesn’t mix well with classic storytelling. But in terms of screen time and staging, the real protagonist of the film is the couple’s animal. Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Dépardieu used to be the stars of Godard’s films. Later, as Hediger shows, it was Roxy.

While walking on the shores of Lake Geneva, Godard filmed his dog in 3D and built his film around these shots. The advantage of the leading actress: Unlike human film stars, she doesn’t need a fee, just food. If Godard, as a philosopher and poet, works a lot with quotations, Roxy himself is a “philosophical dog” who, in the midst of the human film couple, emphasizes, based on Levinas, the “otherness of the other” and the “excess of infinity”. In connection with 3D technology, Hediger portrays Roxy as a “protagonist in the search for a new way of seeing.” What “significance” it has in Godard’s film is a misplaced question. What is more important is to watch it or let it look at us in order to achieve a new perception of the world, beyond the entrenchedness of human existence and ways of seeing. Philipp Stadelmaier

Comic: “Woman, Life, Freedom”

Marjane Satrapi, who became world famous with her autobiographical graphic novel “Persepolis” (2000/2001), expresses her solidarity with the protesters in her country of origin, Iran. After twenty years in which Satrapi, who now lives in France, worked primarily as a director, the illustrator is now publishing an anthology and has also taken up the pen herself: “Femme, vie, liberté” is on Thursday, shortly before the anniversary of her death by Jina Mahsa Alimi published by L’Iconoclaste and brings together works by illustrators from Europe, the USA and Iran, which show what is often difficult to get to the outside world because of censorship in the country. Among the artists are heavyweights from the Bandes Dessinées such as Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), Coco von Charlie Hebdo or Lewis Trondheim (“Donjon”). The project was led by Satrapi, who campaigned for the volume to be freely available on the Internet in Iran. “Because you can’t imagine,” she told the newspaper Le Monde“how much our support benefits them.” Leonardo Kahn

Lego at Berlin Art Week

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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been recreating famous works of art using Lego bricks for almost ten years. If you stick with Brecht’s “Questions of a Reading Worker”, you would certainly have to specify: lets build. For example, several hundred thousand stones had to be put together when he exhibited a replica of Monet’s “Water Lilies” from the Museum of Modern Art in London in the spring. About the same number of people really want to see it, either live or at least in pictures. This strange fascination is almost as fascinating as the thing itself. That’s why we can already predict that Galerie Neugerriemschneider will prove to be the biggest crowd puller at this year’s Berlin Art Week, where this time Ai Weiwei has even legoized Leonardo da Vinci’s fragrant sfumato so mercilessly that it looks like North Korean schoolchildren rolled into one Stadium recreated with colored angular elements. The viewer learns that it is the aspect of pixelation as in electronic media that interests him. When this even appears on television news for the sake of the above-mentioned show value, when what has been pixelated with Lego bricks is further pixelated electronically: Then something is obviously happening that makes analogue originals appear almost deficient in their perfection. It seems only a matter of time that the pixelation of our perception of the world will at some point bring the level of abstraction of QR codes into focus aesthetically.

Otherwise, the practical thing about Art Week is that it’s actually just a long weekend. If you arrive on Saturday, you haven’t missed much and there’s a lot to see. In addition to many new exhibitions in the city’s galleries and art institutions, this time it is mainly performances. In the former Hotel Mondial on Kurfürstendamm, an entire festival is dedicated to this ephemeral form. In the Neue Nationalgalerie, Yoko Ono’s early “Cut Piece” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and, more of an administrative performance: director Klaus Biesenbach will give tours of the construction site to the ecologically redesigned Museum of Modernism after registration. Peter Richter

George Saunders’ Story Club on Substack

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George Saunders once said that he was gentler, more forgiving and more intelligent in his writing than in real life. You immediately believe this because George Saunders’ narration voice is as mild, forgiving and intelligent as a human being in reality cannot be. You can get an idea of ​​it yourself, in his novels or in Saunders’ Substack newsletter, a kind of digital seminar in which people think about literature together. Saunders has taught creative writing at Syracuse University for decades and recently made this seminar widely available in the must-read book, “Swimming in a Pond When It Rains.” The “Story Club” on Substack is, in a sense, a further colloquium for everyone who writes literature or perhaps just wants to understand it. Felix Stephen

Fundus Children’s Theater

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When children determine what research is done, there is little concern about efficiency and competition. Instead, they investigate how humans can talk to mushrooms, look for “monsters” in public spaces, organize a glue meeting to talk about protest, or seek clarification about depression. And yet there is only one institution in Germany that really gives space to these curiosities. The research laboratory of the Fundus Theater in Hamburg, which turns 20 on Sunday. Here, little ones work with big experts on a bench for children, in a beauty salon or about freedom in virtual space. To mark the anniversary there is now a round of wishes for the future. It is promised that it will generate such a large pool of topics that it will be enough to found many more children’s faculties in the country. Till Briegleb