ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie

Gideon Bachmann

Film Art on Air

09 Nov 2016 - 30 Apr 2017

2014-gideon-bachmann / © Gideon Bachmann
GIDEON BACHMANN
Film Art on Air
Gideon Bachmann’s interviews with cinema personalities.
9 November 2016 – 30 April 2017

Curator: Holger Jost

Description
Film history without pictures: Gideon Bachmann’s interviews with cinema personalities were broadcast on New York radio between 1955 and 1964. During his »Film Forum« and »The Film Art« broadcasts, Bachmann presented film personalities, many of whom are world-famous today but were not yet discovered back then.

»Film Art on Air« presents a selection of 44 of the approximately 500 interviews that Bachmann conducted: documentary filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Leni Riefenstahl, representatives of experimental film such as Maya Deren and Hans Richter, greats of new European films such as Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini and actors such as Jean Seberg and Rod Steiger can be heard.

In his half-hour interviews, conducted solely in English, Bachmann did not delve into the technical details, gossip or success and failure of films. Instead, he posed the simple question: »Why do you do that?«

Bachmann (1927–2016) lived in Heilbronn until 1936, before settling in Palestine, the USA, Italy and England. Since 1996, he was living in Karlsruhe. Bachmann considered his extensive audio archive, collected from all over the world, as part of his »Vox Humana« project, an archive of human voices, the medium for which is radio.



The Vox Humana Archive

Gideon Bachman's collection of interviews – »Vox Humana« – belongs to the archival collections of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and is currently being indexed in cooperation with the State University of Art and Design Karlsruhe (HfG).

Partner
MFG Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg; Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG)
 

Tags: Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Hans Richter