Ken
Kobland

The New York-based filmmaker Ken Kobland (b.1946 in New York) came to Berlin in 1986/87 as a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP). Havingstudied art, philosophy, and architecture in New York, Kobland began working in film production in 1971, among others as a cameraman, sound engineer, and cutter. He began experimenting with the medium of film very early on, for example by optically reconstructing images. In the 1980s Kobland collaborated with the Wooster Group in New York on their theater productions.

Berlin’s Arsenal Cinema presented a selection of Kobland’s films in 1986; these included Vestibule (1978), which was also shown here in 1997 as part of the DAAD series “Filme aus USA.” Kobland describes his experimental early film as follows: “Landscape, dreams, and biography are the stuff my work is made of. The feeling of places, the weight of spaces, ghosts, and the strangeness of the everyday.” The presentation also included a second film from this body of work, The Communists Are Comfortable (1984). Here, in a highly encrypted form, Kobland tells the story of the playwright and actor Clifford Odets, who was a leading figure in leftist theater.

Kobland layers the images in his films with fascinating sound montages that can quickly change the mood of a scene. In his 20-minute film Flaubert Dreams of Travel but the Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986), which was screened at the daadgalerie in 1986, a man repeatedly peers through the slats of a Venetian blind, a group of artists seem to be hallucinating, and a woman knocks along a wall. In this work, Kobland knowingly plays with the viewer’s imagination and takes them on an associative journey.

Ken Kobland’sfilms often have a transitory quality; something beautiful or long past seems to herald the end of all hopes. His works are visions—sometimes taking the form of surreal sequences, at others diaristic: Berlin: Tourist Journal (1988), for example, is a response to Kobland’s experiences as a DAAD fellow in West Berlin before the Wall came down: “I wanted to describe the landscape of Cold War Berlin, which immediately means dichotomy and invoking the imaginary; the landscape that isn’t there as well as the one that is.” His video is a journalistic collection of impressions of an enchanted, elusive place. Through still images and archival film clips, he evokes the landscape of past and present Germany. These images are intercut with footage shot from an airplane, including a view of the Berlin Wall. In this way, the film constructs a portrait of the divided city through the eyes of an outsider—a tourist.

Ken Kobland has received numerous awards for his films, which have been showcased at numerous experimental film festivals, including the New York Video and Film Festival, and the International Forum section of the Berlinale. In 1990, a retrospective of his film and video works from 1976 to 1990 was shown at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Text: Laura Windisch
Translation: Jacqueline Todd