Directing the Off-Screen: Work by Jeanne Faust

About This Screening

Jeanne Faust is a German filmmaker and photographer whose work examines the relationship between word and image-showing how spoken language can both reveal and supplant what lies outside the frame. A student at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg during the 1990s, Faust works within a strong tradition of contemporary German visual artists. Included in this two-night overview is The Mansion, a subtly layered drama confined to a small and sparsely lit recording studio. Whether its four actor/characters are simply dubbing a script or discussing their affairs is unclear, but the shifting hierarchical structures and resulting tension are manifested both in verbal cues and use of framing. Faust's Reconstructing Damon Albarn is based on a press image that is absent from audience view of British pop musician and singer Damon Albarn playing in Kinshasa, Congo. The two protagonists describe the image through verbal and visual means, restaging the photo of Albarn and a Congolese musician. Both of these pieces in addition to her film Interview star actor Lou Castel, most well known for his turn as the director in Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. Cinema Project welcomes Faust to Portland to screen and discuss her work and influences. Jeanne Faust breaks open the different dimensions of filming and shows the constructedness of film and perhaps of life as well. We are shown the camera lens, the recording studio, the inside and the outside, the director, etc. The various worlds—the filmic world as well as the inner life of the actors-merge. One sees through the eye of the cinema, and precisely this ‘cinema’ becomes interesting in that it is divided, transformed, imitated, and introduced again in a different way. — from The Film that Attracts You and Eludes You, The Film—A Holy Whore: A conversation between Bettina Steinbrugge and Hannes Loichinger on the filmic works of Jeanne Faust