Moderator     Chung Yuen Kay Sociologist ; Senior Lecturer, Human Resource Management Unit, Faculty of Business Administration, National University of Singapore

Participants     Irina Aristarkhova Lecturer /Theorist ; Asst. Professor, University Scholars Programme & the School of Computing, National University of Singapore     Amanda Heng Artist       Binghui Huangfu, Director/Curator, Earl Lu Gallery, Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts      Dana Lam Artist/Writer ; President, AWARE  Shirlene Noordin Visual Arts Project Consultant.

n FILM SCREENING n   FRI 12 OCT 2001 ©  7 PM TO 9 PM Auditorium, Goethe-Institut Inter

Nationes Singapore Screening of  six Walther Ruttmann�fs films (Total duration : two hours) - Berlin, The  Symphony

Of The City (1927, 65 min), Opus 1 (1919-21, 10 min), Opus 2 (1922, 3min), Opus 3 (1923, 4 min), Opus 4

(1923-25, 4 min), The Dream Of The Falcon (1923, 1 min), The Wonder (1925, 3 min), World Melody (1929, 55�e)

and At Night (1931, 10�e).   A contemporary of Hannah Höch, Walthur Ruttmann (1887-1941), a painter, filmmaker

and a keen musician who had made a radical experiment in montage of film and sound. His Berlin, Symphony of a

Great City (1927),is one of the most important and influential films of the Weimar period - a timeless demonstration

of the cinema's ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level. With high-speed montage techniques, creating a dizzying

series of images, it captures a day in the life of Berlin - the fierce and gruff spirit of a city in a very exceptional and

often poetic way.

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Hannah Höch ( 1889-1978 ) Born in the Thuringian city of Gotha.  A pioneer in the field of photomontage and the sole female member of the Berlin Dada movement. continued to produce innovative works into the 1970's. Much of her work focuses on the political and psychological dissection of the representation of women in the mass media during the Weimar era.       Dada An European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity.   Montage The actual term montage - from monter : to mount as in fixing a photographic print to a piece of card - did originate in the cinema. It describes the means by which a sequence is made by cutting between different elements of a scene, or scenes which may have been shot at different times in different places.

Photomontage   A technique of making a pictorial composition from parts of different photographs and to the composition so made. Photomontage was popularized by the Dadaists as a method for political propaganda, social criticism, and generally to assist the shock tactics.     The German Dadaists made montages from stills taken from newspapers and magazines cut up for political effect. Raoul Hausmann worked with his lover Hannah Höch and friends John Heartfield and George Grosz right through the days of the Weimar Republic until the victory of the Nazis in 1933. Höch got the idea from humorous mutilations made by amateurs tampering with photographs of authority figures like the Kaiser whose dignified uniforms and frock coats were topped with the faces of nobodies. During the First World War Höch sent home-made subversive postcards to Heartfield and Hausmann who reciprocated, pasting their own cut-ups over the printed picture side. While the censors carefully read the handwriting on the message side to see if it conveyed breaches of security or protocol they completely missed the anti-war messages the picture side carried through the public mails. The censors didn't expect to see anything wrong, so they didn't.