Art & Power: Lutz Dammbeck

In September 2019, German director and media artist Lutz Dammbeck will be our artist-in-residence guest and tour the USA with 18 of his documentaries and animation films, which we will make available for rental and educational streaming. 

Thanks to funding from the Deutschlandjahr project, the DEFA Film Library will bring filmmaker and artist Lutz Dammbeck to the U.S. in fall 2019. We showed Dammbeck’s early animated shorts to a full house, as part of Arts Night at GSA in 2016. Please contact us if you are interested in bringing the films or the director to your institution: video@german.umass.edu

Now 70, Dammbeck—who left the GDR in 1986—is a thought-provoking and productive multimedia artist with decades of work to his name. Most recently, Dammbeck has become best known for two incisive full-length documentaries that critically delve into contemporary issues:

• Das Netz – Unabomber, LSD und Internet (2004) — Käthe Kollwitz Prize of Berlin’s Academy of the Arts

This film explores the history of the creation of the internet in relation to contemporary art and lifestyles. He contrasts this cluster of cultural phenomena to the paranoid and technophobic motives of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

• Overgames (2015) — Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize at DOK-Leipzig

Here the overarching questions have to do with the psychiatric roots of game shows and to what extent games impact people’s behavior. Starting with the recollections of Joachim Fuchsberger, the host of a 1960s West German game show—and his claim that the FRG was a ”crazy, psychologically disturbed nation”—Dammbeck delves into a wide range of gameshows, interviewing a range of people including people involved in creating them.

Under the rubric ART & POWER (Kunst & Macht is the name of a new 5-DVD set of his work), our plan is to bring Lutz Dammbeck to the US in September 2019 as an artist-in-residence here in the Five College area, with shorter visits to other institutions in the northeast; we are seeing to it that all his films are accessible to English-speaking audiences.