School of Moving Images & New Media Society in collaboration with Austrian Cultural Forum in Tehran (OKF) present
Screening of 2 films by Micheal Pilz “Cage” and “Rose and Jasmine”

Monday, June 11 and Tuesday, June 12, 2018 – 7 pm

CAGE
140 minutes, Beta SP, 4:3, colour, PAL

In August 1992 we met for a four-week international symposium on dance, music, and film. As a result, the video State of Grace is a cinematic attempt to a maximum of exertion and a maximum of relaxation basing on the thoughts – among others – by John Cage and Chuang Tzu.

• It was just a beautiful memory to me, it was something like I built up together with fifty more people and then also what we did with the girl, it had a very nice atmosphere, just really the air stopped, I didn’t do it for them but more I have taken their energies into me to do something together like if you make contact with somebody and you don’t know where it will lead, your movement goes somewhere, and it worked very well and then I walked out and the game was going on and I lost this feeling and from that point on when I lost it, it was not so interesting, my wife told me.
• Your wife?
• Yes, she told me at the beginning it was so solid, the atmosphere and the air in the room that you could really have cut it and she saw that, my God, what will happen here till the end if it goes on like this, she was really afraid at a point that it would really go too far maybe, because
  it is so –, and then I lost, I just forgot when I entered again, when I went out maybe this experience to me was too much, I forgot about going on with it, it was just somehow, a satisfaction, I should go home instead of running the whole.
• Maybe you should not have been so satisfied.
• Yeah, but how can you do that? Yes, you should get a lot of satisfaction during the work and then you are not so surprised when there is satisfaction at the performance.
  
  Ferenc Kálmán,
  in dialogue with Raffaella Giordano,
  from the film

Rose And Jasmine
Video, 106 minutes
digi-Beta, 16:9, color, stereo

In ancient China before an artist began to paint anything – a tree, for instance – he would sit down in front of it for days, months, years, it didn’t matter how long until he was the tree. He did not identify himself with the tree but he was the tree. This means that there was no space between him and the tree, no space between the observer and the observed, no experiencer experiencing the beauty, the movement, the shadow, the depth of a leaf, the quality of color. He was totally the tree, and in that state only could he paint.
Michael Pilz, Vienna, April 2010

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old – this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

A cinematic poem based on the director’s journeys in Iran from 2006-2007. By patiently and gently observing both people and place, Michael Pilz collects images and sounds of ravishing beauty. A meditative experience.
40th International Film Festival Rotterdam, January/February 2011

This event is open to public and free.
New Media Projects: No. 3, Araabi 3 Alley, North Kheradmand St. Karimkhan Ave. Tehran
@newmediasociety