Cynthia Beatt

Cynthia Beatt (born November 12, 1949 ) is a British filmmaker . She lives and works in Berlin .

Life

Beatt was born in Kingston , Jamaica in 1949. Her mother was an American painter and her father was an Irish-born policeman in the British colonial police. At the age of ten, Beatt and her family moved to the Fiji Islands . She studied art at the Bath Academy of Art in Great Britain and then worked in an experimental film and video rental company in London. She has lived in Berlin since 1975. There she worked in the 1970s and 1980s for the Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Arsenal cinema as well as at the International Forum of Young Films , and worked as a translator for screenplays and subtitling. Beatt also worked in various performance, film and video productions, including those of Joan Jonas Ulrike Ottinger , Yvonne Rainer , Rudolf Thome and Harun Farocki .

In 1979 she released her debut film Description of an Island , which Beatt shot together with Rudolf Thome on Ureparapara . In 1979 Beatt was one of the first to sign the manifesto of women film workers , in which the Association of Women Film Workers demanded an equal distribution of funds, jobs and training positions and committee seats for film funding .

Her short film Being Evil Is Also A Proof Of Emotion (1983) gained widespread attention. The artist Barbara Kruger described the film in a review in Artforum magazine as "a sort of cranky, witty, intellectually astute rendition of a Frommer's Guide replete with architectural treats and warnings about the unwieldy temperaments of the natives." In 1984 the short film was included the jury prize of the magazine Frauen und Film , "because it combines different genres and tones in a daring and surprising way, objectifies personal experience and argues metaphorically, emotionally and politically with a close look at the architecture of Berlin." A sighting of evil too his is also a proof of feeling in the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art e. V. in 2004 was the reason for the conception of the film series “Who says that concrete doesn't burn, have you tried it? West Berlin 80s ”in 2006.

Together with Silvia Voser, Beatt created the catalog “Berlin im Film 1965–1985” in 1985 for the Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek eV, the forerunner of the Arsenal. The catalog was created in the run-up to the international building exhibition in 1987 and as part of a film event at the Arsenal cinema in 1984. The catalog includes films and video tapes on the subject of “Stadt-Strasse-Wohnen” as well as films produced in Germany, the plot of which is wholly or partly set in Berlin.

In 1988, Cynthia Beatt made the short film Cycling the Frame . The film accompanies a tourist, played by Tilda Swinton , on a bike tour along the 160-kilometer-long west German side of the Berlin Wall. In 2009 Beatt made the film The Invisble Frame with Swinton and repeated the bike ride, this time on both sides of the reunited city.

A house in Berlin was published in 2014 . For her film, Beatt received a nomination for Best Female-Directed Narrative at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2014.

Beatt is married to the visual artist Raimund Kummer . The couple have two children.

Filmography

• 1978/1979: Description of an island (together with Rudolf Thome)
• 1983: Being angry is also evidence of emotion
• 1988: Cycling the Frame
• 1991: The Party - Nature Morte
• 2009: The Invisible Frame
• 2013/2014: A house in Berlin

Web links

• Cynthia Beatt's website
• Cynthia Beatt in the Internet Movie Database
• Cynthia Beatt on filmportal.de , a department of the German Film Institute and Film Museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A Different Light. In: The Beautiful Mind Series. Retrieved February 27, 2020 (English). 
2. ^ Association of women film workers (ed.): Women film handbook . 1st edition. Berlin 1983, p. B21-B22 .
3. ↑ John G. Hanhardt, Joan Jonas: Joan Jonas. February 22 - March 13, 1983 . In: Whitney Museum of Modern Art (Ed.): New American Film and Video Series. Exhibitions of Independent Film and Video . Exhibition catalog. New York 1983 (English, archive.org ).
4. ↑ Cynthia Beatt. In: filmportal.de. DFF - German Film Institute & Filmmuseum, accessed on February 27, 2020 . 
5. ↑ Cynthia Beatt. In: https://harun-farocki-institut.org/ . Harun Farocki Institute, accessed March 12, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Commentary from "Pictures of the World and Inscription of War" . In: Discourse . Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. tape 15 , no. 3 . Wayne State University Press, 1993, pp. 78-92 , JSTOR : 41389287 .
7. ^ Association of Film Workers V .: Manifesto of the women film workers . In: Hans Helmut Prinzler, Eric Rentschler (Ed.): Eyewitnesses. 100 texts by new German filmmakers . Publishing house of the authors, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-88661-089-6 , p. 34-35 (564 pp.).
8. ^ Barbara Kruger: “Fury Is A Feeling Too,” written and directed by Cynthia Beatt, Collective For Living Cinema. In: Artforum . No. 23 , p. 87 (English).
9. ↑ [News] . In: Women and Film . Psychoanalysis and film. No. 36 . Stroemfeld Verlag Buchversand GmbH, February 1984, p. 111 , JSTOR : 24056238 .
10. ↑ Who says concrete doesn't burn, have you tried it? West Berlin 80s. Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, accessed on February 27, 2020 . 
11. ↑ Silvia Voser, Cynthia Beatt: Berlin in the film from 1965 to 1985 . Ed .: Friends of the German Kinemathek eV Berlin 1985.