Berlin from 7th to 10th May 2024
in the rooms of CITTIPUNKT
3 FILME VON WILF THUST
auf der Suche nach Antworten
WHERE IS THE GAIETY ? 1973
WO IST DA
DIE FREUDE ?
DON’T THINK SO !
1980
LASST MICH
ALLEINE !
IS THAT IT ?
1986
BLEIBT ES DABEI ?
3 WORKSHOPS
took place in Berlin from 7th to 10th May 2024
in the rooms of CITTIPUNKT
I had the chance to demonstrate in 3 workshops my way of interacting with young people there and then. It was a challenge to my independent approach, as it was REAL. From that perspective my films on show became at best “ein VORSPIEL”, a stage performance apart from and next to the 3 of my films on show like in a Video Gallery.
The question to me is and always was, how these films I made in the 1970s and 80s with young people in mind could function in communication with Young People now
and in Germany. Less and more, I would say, AFTER my experience. I heard Leonie rightly saying “It felt a bit like a seminar to me”. For me It demonstrated contradictions.
My special thanks for making this challenge possible go to
LEONIE NAGEL and TIPHANIE KIM MALL
The outside of Cittipunkt + Inside the display of scrapbook pages
The outside of Cittipunkt + Inside the display of scrapbook pages
The invitation to German Young People to my workshops
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
heißt so viel wie mit den einfachsten Strichen wieder anfangen.(nochmal ganz von vorne anfangen)
Ich habe zwischen 1970 bis 1986 in London 3 Filme mit Teenagern gedreht.
Ich möchte mich mit Teenagern 2024 in Berlin treffen, die Interesse am Filmen und an kreativen Vorgängen haben.
Ich lade Euch ein, mir zu meinen Filmen und
den drei Stichworten die ich Euch auf der Rückseite vorgeschlagen habe,
Skizzen, Einfälle, Bilder, Töne, Schminke, Hüte und anderes mitzubringen (solange das einfach zu- und ertragen ist).
Mit Euch, und Hilfen von uns, und sorgfältigen Proben, werden wir einen kurzen Film “drehen”, den wir am Ende der Woche in CityPunkt zeigen werden und Euch dann schicken können, wenn Ihr das wollt.
Meldet Euch, wenn Ihr Lust und Zeit habt (und dafür Zeit nehmen könnt). Wir lassen Euch dann wissen was möglich ist.
Es sind die kleinen Happen, die mich interessieren. Bringt also Erwartungen mit, ohne großen Aufwand, und ich werde gleichfalls bescheiden sein. Aber ich mache sehr gerne mit und bin gespannt
This poster brings it all back to me when I took photos on MY adventure (?!), in this ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND in 1972.
For me now most important is how I got to interview Sylvester with the help of my colleague from Germany and black people of parents who had arrived with the ship, the Windrush, as migrants from the Caribbean in the 1960s !
My “THE PLAYGROUND FILM” in 2014 explains the follow up discussions in May Day Rooms in London 2013. At that time I was invited to talk to playground leaders. People wondered about the stillness of the film but also asked what this boy himself thought about being there. HE wanted to become an actor but fell out with school teachers and his father excluded him from coming back home.
We did not have IPhone cameras then ! That could have given him the way to TELL HIS STORY. But the question is, would he have done it ?
Would any young person taking this up, even now ?
This is the song in the film “DON’T THINK SO”
That loosened the atmosphere a bit as we listened to explanations and the options to use these products in a film. Tiphanie generously offered her camera to people and fulfilled our aim to let them be the creators.
We then tried some actions and used the pictures as they are. We all moved in without exception. Suddenly a package of white dots created a snowy effect and somebody made noises of a storm.
We named the pieces, then cut out and glued words and images into suitable places. Even the ground paper was cut into, leaving only the names of the people on the edges.
Tiphanie managed to edit the film immediately, while we were still processing the pieces.
One of the girls found a title for the film Ey, Komm raus!
We offered to send the video on the next day to those who wanted it, and invited everybody to the opening of this CITTIPUNKT project two days later.
Here is Leonie and Mania her friend who was responsible for looking after the children.
One boy didn’t join in at all. He was asked several times but lying there hardly even moving his seal like body. I said that he had fulfilled the title in his own way LEAVE ME ALONE.
We later heard that one boy who had prepared a whole script stated to the carer that he had gone back to school. But she found out that he had made up a fictitious account of his movements. Imagine his story. In my mind he was a step ahead of what I wanted to achieve, but couldn’t reach, namely stories.
But … what we can achieve counts.
And… does it matter if things don’t go our way ??… as we always have to start from scratch again…
We were prepared though,
We had in mind and I wanted
to show our group a video that Tiphanie and Leonie had shot in London holding their Iphone on the window of a bus driving and stopping along the road. I had done just that in 1980 with a hard to hold 16mm camera and we had used it in the opening part of this, our film,
DON’T THINK SO…
But, never mind …
We had suggested to the teacher and her teenagers before to hold phones to the window of the bus that carried them on the long journey to Cittipunkt.
But here we are, I call this a REAL experience.
This is a film about steps. The design is influenced by a poster that John Heartfield produced against Hitler. The film reflects the horrors of that time as well as the Racism in the 1980s. I made this film with young people as diary notes in Tower Hamlets. Out of 6 parts I chose 2 of the politically harshest for my workshops in CITIPUNKT. “Why did you choose just these parts” Tiphanie asked and I understood what she meant: All this is bloody serious and how will you get Teenagers interested in THAT ?.
In this third workshop we expected a group of immigrant boys. But a very short time before their expected arrival their guard was needed for another duty. He was very apologetic and keen to come at any other time…
We were left with one girl who had taken her own initiative to apply. And she told us, in the entrance, that she didn’t want to see anything scary. In her hand she held drawings of stairs she had drawn for us.
We had prepared to show the 3rd scene of IS THAT IT showing the incident when in the Bethnal Green Underground 174 people died in a crush on the stairs in an effort to escape a possible German bomb attack. I had in mind to reenact this disaster in our workshop und to film the physical effect. Instead now and here,
I changed tack and brought up my own weakness when carrying a heavy suitcase down the steps of a plain on arrival.
I drew a falling person with simple lines and asked her and the others to do the same. I had steps prepared arranging coloured A4 papers with blues on the ground leading up to a final pink sheet. We filled in the figures some climbing, others falling.
Meanwhile this creative person had come up with some ideas of her own and we played and filmed scenes where people pushed in. SHE could use the camera. I felt that we all enjoyed that.
In retrospect I discover NOW that the film “IS THAT IT ?” and its traumatic undertones reveal an underlying TRAUMA in ME. In the ME 1940s section on my homepage my mother said that I was “himmelhoch jauchzend und zu Tode betrübt”, “highly excitable and deadly sad.” I was always anxious and uncertain and often ill and send to places to relax or to put on weight. I worried my mother.
The Cinema Workshop 1979/80 in an enjoyable way express dramas of people who wanted to break out of “the system”. That is a success and satisfied me, it gives me pleasure in the way that it was an intriguing theatrical act swiping anxiety away.
What it comes down to is to tease and squeeze out the many unexpected anxieties and withdrawals that I noticed even in the few young people who came to our workshops in CITTIPUNKT.
To prepare against fears we need to face up to the Unexpected. That could be anything, even something outwardly successful.
Anything that causes us to become inwardly angry.
Every single enjoyable enterprise on TV nowadays seem to be framed to encourage competitiveness.
Why should THAT be ?
I should keep us free from that kind of pressure.
With that in mind our workshops were indeed a success !!
