Movies: Lutz Dammbeck

From Stag Beetle to Swastika narrates in a richly detailed, associative montage the boundless possibilities of manipulating images and using images to seduce....

On a talkshow, actor and German TV ikon Joachim Fuchsberger recalls how the games for his show "Nur nicht nervös werden" (Don't Get Nervous), first broadcast on West German TV in 1960, were developed along the lines of American psychiatry. Asked "So ...

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The film explores what transformations in power and politics do to art, how much opportunism can be found in “pure” art and whether fascist symbols can ever regain their aesthetic innocence. The questions it addresses about the relationship between e...

More of a film essay - of the type pioneered by Orson Welles and Chris Marker - than a standard documentary, German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck's The Net: The Unabomber, the LSD and the Internet begins with the typical format and structure of a nonfictio...

The very first images in the film set unprecedented standards in East German animated film: a Buñuelean eye that fills the entire screen, real-life sequences of fleeing animals and a sound collage running contrary to what is seen on the screen. This ...

This short film traces the story of a man from birth to old age. The magical dreams of his youth appear from time to time, but daily routine quickly takes over. His striving for material wealth – including a Trabant car, a shelving unit, a boat – lea...

Despite seeing his film project HERCULES rejected by DEFA Studios in 1983-84, Dammbeck remained fascinated by the Hercules story. He started experimenting with different media combinations, using overpainting, photography, film clips, collage, painti...

Masao Adachi, the author and director of experimental works and pinku-eiga in the 1960s, was a member of the Japanese New Left that shifted from being a filmmaker to a guerrilla fighter. In 1974, he joined the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, which work...

At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his ow...

Dammbeck made this film – a reference to the myth of Icarus and a metaphor for failure, hope, and human exploration – at the invitation of the legendary animator Kurt Weiler. It’s the first example of Dammbeck’s experimental, grotesque, surrealistic ...

Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before th...

A little bumblebee is tired of her daily routine and the other boring bumblebees. She flies to the place of her dreams and meets a frog who is also seeking something new. Despite their differences, the two animals become friends and start their adven...

For the multimedia exhibition Tangenten I (Tangents I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dres...

In 1984, the “First Leipzig Autumn Salon” took place – a risk and a caesura for Dammbeck. Bypassing every state institution, six painters, sculptors and filmmakers organised an art exhibition. It was the first and last of its kind. This recapture of ...

"This multimedia collage, which includes performances by pantomime artist and dancer Fine Kwiatkowski, painter and filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck and musician Robert Linke, is a reflection on the medium of film and its elements: sound, light and movement. D...

Two men sit on an island watching the sunset. When a storm gathers, they decide to build a boat. While one man is mindful of the coming danger and urges speed, the other wastes his time on decorative details. Dammbeck’s last film made in the GDR befo...

Young Duke Ernest wants to become a good knight. The circumstances are not in his favour: The emperor wants to claim the Duke's castle and marry his mother. He has Ernest wrongfully accused of murder and thrown in the dungeon. Duke Ernest's only chan...

THis program for young viewers includes eight short films produced with different animation techniques by the DEFA Studio for Animaion Film in Dresden....

In this film, Dammbeck explores his own decision to relocate to Hamburg, West Germany, and tries to sort out his past as an artist. In the process, he interviews artists Cornelia Schleime, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling, and Hans Scheib, who had been core me...