Maria Lang (filmmaker)

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Maria Lang (born July 11, 1945 in Zusmarshausen near Augsburg ; † September 28, 2014 ) was a German filmmaker , writer , film curator, feminist and lesbian activist.

Life

Born the daughter of a seamstress and a beer brewer, she had the desire to become a photo reporter as a girl. After completing elementary school, she trained as a photo laboratory technician and worked from 1961 to 1973 in Augsburg, Siegen, Darmstadt and Hamburg. For a short time she worked as a parenting assistant in a children's home. The confrontation with the balance of power there prompted her to grapple with communist theories, to deal with socialization research, to work in an anti-authoritarian children's shop and to catch up with university admission in Bremen. In 1973 Maria Lang moved to West Berlin to become active in the Homosexual Action West Berlin (HAW), out of which she and other women founded the Lesbian Action Center West Berlin (LAZ).

Between 1980 and 1985 Maria Lang studied at the DFFB (German Film and Television Academy Berlin). She started with group film productions and attended seminars with Elfi Mikesch , Silke Grossmann, Ingo Krati and Helmut Färber. Her first film, Family Crypt - A Love Poem to My Mother , made in 1980, portrays the mother and father and focuses on silence. Bresson's, and especially Chantal Akerman's, films become important to her. The graduation film - the feature film Tenderness - paints a picture of part of the lesbian subculture in West Berlin in the mid-1980s.

In the 1990s, Maria Lang and filmmaker Ute Aurand first founded a film club in the dffb and, from June 1990, the monthly “female film workers evening” at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin , where Aurand and Lang only showed films by women. (The “female film workers evening” emerged from the 10th anniversary of the female film workers' association).

In 1991, the book Women Make History - 25 Years of Female Students at the dffb, edited with Ute Aurand, appeared in two volumes, with biographies and filmography of all female students who studied at the dffb between 1966 and 1991. In the same year Maria Lang moved to the countryside in Zusmarshausen to look after her mother; here she was active in the Augsburg women's center. In 1990/91 Maria Lang took part in the video news project of the Hamburg umbrella association for women + / media / culture image change , in which VHS tapes were recorded in different cities and circulated in a mixture of diary, telling news and everyday recordings.

Writing became more and more important for Maria Lang in the 1990s, she dealt intensively with Gertrude Stein and in 1991 she began making daily entries in her “logbook”, which has not yet been published. Maria Lang committed suicide in September 2014.

Her writings are archived at Bildwechsel . In 2017 the text collection Maria Lang: Texts for the film was published by Ute Aurand. She and her work have been honored with various exhibitions and events

Two of my films about myself was the name of a retrospective of her films, which was shown from September 21 to 24, 2017 at the Zeughauskino in Berlin and on September 16 and 17 at the Filmmuseum in Frankfurt . Umbildern was the title of a film program in the special section of the 30th Lesbian Gay Film Festival Hamburg in 2019 where her films were shown together with film and video works by the artists Hella Böhm , Muriel Utinger, Tina Z'Rotz, Sabin Tünschel and Verena Moser. In 2019 the film Tenderness was shown at the Berlinale .

Filmography

  • 1980: Delighted because I was there , group work, D 10 '16 mm mute; Production: dffb, Ingo Krati basic course, with: Heike Behrend, Ingeborg Meyer, Verena Rudolph, Gisa Schleelein; Actress: Maria Lang; Archive: Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation
  • 1981/1982: Family crypt - a love poem to my mother , D 10 '16 mm; Idea, camera, editing; Production: dffb, Distribution: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek; Advancement award of the AG der Filmjournalisten, ⅓-Preis of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto
  • 1985: tenderness , D 28 '16 mm; Graduation film dffb, script, direction, editing; Camera: Lilly Grote, Light: Konstanze Binder, Mixing: Margit Eschenbach, Production Manager: Renate Kratschmer; Actors: Annette Sojc, Renate Kratschmer, Helmi Broens, Verena Rudolph, Ruth Schienke, Martina Siebert, Christina Metzdorf, Rita Babo, Regina Krause, Li Levy, Guy St. Luis, Angela Burkhard, Tina Neuhardt, Gabriele Niemeyer, Josje Pater and others; Production: dffb, Distribution: Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation
  • 2006: The butterfly in winter , D 29 '16 mm; Idea: Maria Lang; Camera: Ute Aurand; Editor: Aurand, Lang; funded by Medienboard GmbH; Distribution: Arsenal Distribution
  • 2006: It is very nice here at the moment , D 52 '16 mm; Idea: Ute Aurand, Maria Lang; funded by the Berlin artist program; Distribution: Arsenal Distribution

Fonts

literature

  • Hans Helmut Prinzler : Maria Lang: Texts for the film , ed. by Ute Aurand, Berlin 2017 ( review )
  • Ute Aurand: We made other films - memories of my studies at the dffb and of Maria Lang (1945–2014) , published in: Filmblatt 64/65 , 2018

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maria Lang: Texts on the film , ed. by Ute Aurand, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-00-057410-8
  2. ↑ Program archive website Zeughauskino. Retrieved July 30, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Werkschau - What is not told. Retrieved January 28, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Festival 2019 - Specials 2019 :: Lesbian and Gay Film Days Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival. Retrieved January 29, 2020 .
  5. ↑ caresses | Tendernesses. Retrieved January 28, 2020 .
  6. ^ Teddy Award - The official queer award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Retrieved January 29, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Volker Pantenburg: Maria Lang, in: new filmkritik , September 24, 2017
  8. ↑ FEATURES | DFFB. Retrieved January 28, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Long, Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German filmmaker, author, film curator, feminist and lesbian activist
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Zusmarshausen near Augsburg
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 2014