THE FILMS OF TED SONNENSCHEIN

On Saturday April 29th at 7:30pm, Film Diary NYC and the Millennium Film Workshop are proud to present the New York Premiere of The Films of Ted Sonnenschein, organized by Robert Orlowski.

Ted Sonnenschein (Brooklyn, NY, 1970) is a Berlin-based filmmaker who studied under Ernie Gehr and Peter Hutton in the late 80’s/early 90’s. After moving from New York to Berlin in 2007, Ted started working on his “S-Bahn” series in 2008.

Part poetic portrait, part historical document and part city symphony, Ted’s films are strictly structured with each take beginning as the train leaves one station and ending after arriving at the next. With a static camera and a locked focal point and exposure, the project intended to blur the line between still and motion photography. Utilizing angles that capture multiple windows in the frame, the result is an impressionistic view that is part documentary and part poetic cinema. The project, which has largely been overlooked up until this point, ran from 2008-2015, accumulating hundreds of hours of footage captured through the video mode of consumer digital still cameras.

The screening will introduce the audience to a range of styles, forms, themes and devotions that recur throughout Ted’s considerable body of work. Public transit, mainly Berlin’s “S-Bahn”, is the cinema which Ted frequents, producing and projecting images while it rides through the city, becoming both projector and screen. The passengers play both actor and audience while they travel through the network, going to and fro, on and off the train. Berlin moves forward while it moves back with its changing landscape & turning of the seasons, merging both the new and the old.

Organizer/filmmaker, Robert Orlowski, will briefly introduce the screening by focusing on how Ted’s films have operated within the larger economy of moving-images. What is to be learned by re-situating Ted’s film not strictly within the genre of experimental cinema, but at the intersection of where orphan films and experimental films often meet but are seldom recognized? What does it mean for a film to be “over-looked” or “lost”? Are there similarities between Ted and other filmmakers whose films were “overlooked” and subsequently “discovered”, and if so, what can they tell us? How are Ted’s films both deeply entangled with and distant from the experimental canon? Is there a constructive perspective to be gained from this contradiction?

Most importantly, the screening provides an opportunity to help create a space where his films can be appreciated with the dignity that has been deserved for so long. Ted will be traveling all the way from Berlin to make the screening, so please show up to give him a warm welcome! Some form of food will be served, and please do not be shy to introduce yourselves to those you don’t know!

FILMS:

City Within the Glass - 13 min

2 Light Studies - 5 min

The Sky Rolls Under Our Feet - 2 min

Fall Colors  - 13 min

Light Study (Wall) - 2min

it sets in the west (going east) -  10 min

von Lichtenberg nach Charlottenburg (5. Dec 2009) - 26 min

TRT: 71 min