Under the title Exquisite life: Film screening and artist talk Liz Rosenfeld show her short films Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited) from 2005, and Frida & Anita from 2010. Afterwards, Isander Freiman, who initiated the screening, Tova Gerge, writer and actor, and Liz Rosenfeld, filmmaker and actor, discussed the films.
In Dyketactics Revisited we see friends of Liz, who are part of the same queer community as she is. The film has no verbal dialogue, it is rather bodies communicating. The bodies move in a playful and intimate manner in harmony with each other. Liz explains that Dyketactics Revisited represent a contemporary queer community or scenery, by referring to a historical work. The film is a remake of Barbara Hammers Dyketactics from 1974, which is said to be the first film made a lesbian with lesbian sex scenes. The film show naked women running in a forest, swimming and having sex, and was intended as a document on lesbian women.
– My friends idealized images of the 70s annoyed me, Liz says. I thought we were stuck in history, in our view of what happened. Instead of recreating an era, I find it interesting to look at how a period of time is translated to present. We think Berlin in the 20s was so cool, but I want to highlight what we have today, and how that mirrors and echoes those contexts we look back at in admiration.
Frida & Anita is about Frida Kahlo travelling to Berlin 1924, and about the experiences Liz imagines she had there. Frida goes to a lesbian club and meets Anita, an actress performing at the club. Frida & Anita involves, just like Dyketactics Revisited, people from Liz' own queer community.
– People ask me if this is pornography, since Frida & Anita contains explicit sex scenes, but to me this is absolutely not pornography. To me, it's more like: my friends having sex, Liz explains, and continues: You could say that my films are an idea of a queer utopia. It's about interaction through bodies, touching, and so on.
– You could say we make our sexuality understandable to ourselves and to others through art, Tova Gerge explains.
Frida & Anita is the first film in a trilogy on queer artists in Berlin in the 20s, and will be followed by a film about dadaist Hanna Höch, who was one of the first artists using photomontage.