Suzan Pitt / Amos Vogel

Jefferson Circus Songs
Suzan Pitt, USA 1976, 16 min., 16mm

Asparagus
Suzan Pitt, USA 1979, 19 min.

Amos Vogel was a pioneer of the independent New York film and cinema scene. Even today, his main work Film as Subversive Art (1974) offers a cross-reading of film history as a story of continued rebellion that is well worth reading. In German, the book was published under the somewhat lurid title Kino wider die Tabus (Cinema against Taboos), which, however, touched on one of Vogel's central concerns: taboos, censorship and bigotry are unworthy of a free society, and the cinema must be valued and protected as a place of individual and social emancipation. Two films by the animation artist Suzan Pitt, Jefferson Circus Songs and Asparagus, provide the framework for a conversation with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus about Vogel's cinema vision, whose own work at Kino Arsenal was strongly influenced by her friendship with Vogel.

Screened as part of re-selected, a project by Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in cooperation with the Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst in the context of “Archive außer sich”.

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is film curator and co-director of the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art as well as director of the Berlinale Forum Expanded. From 2001-2019 she was a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum. From 2010-2013 she conceived and directed the project "Living Archive - Archive Work as Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice". Schulte Strathaus is co-initiator of the silent green project "Film Field Research" and member of the board of Harun Farocki Institute, Master Program Film Culture at the University in Jos/Nigeria and NAAS | Network of Arab Alternative Screens.