Lisa Rave

In-between Matters

This exhibition shows the first draft of Lisa Rave’s film made in collaboration with the ethnographic filmmaker Hermann Schlenker. Born in 1932, Schlenker completed more than 400 ethnographic films of indigenous communities around the world. In the decades between 1960 and 1980 he traveled mostly alone, producing a vast number of short films for museums, the BBC, and Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC), a project produced by the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, Germany. Now age 82, Schlenker is in the process of setting up a museum dedicated to his own work. The film portrays the filmmaker using the same techniques he used to create his ethnographic films. Captured using a 16 mm camera and analogue sound equipment, the resulting film by Lisa Rave with co-author Anna Vetter playfully examines the many ambiguities of ethnographic fieldwork, institutional archiving and the conservation of memory. Working within the “gaps” of montage and with the juxtaposition of image, text, and sound, the film’s shifting narrative moves between filmic document, recounted memory, and the act of staging.

Excerpt from Burning-in Patterns, Lisa Rave 2015 from Lisa Rave on Vimeo.