“Four Stages Of Denial” is based on a study by sociologist Stanley Cohen on personal and political denial, compassion fatigue, and the question of how people manage to block out the violence and suffering of others as passive spectators.
In four chapters, Herbert guides us through the world of powerful perpetrators, all of whom use similar methods to deny their violence, oppression, wars, and atrocities.
Running Time: 10 Minutes
1-Channel Video
unreleased
For Festival Screener Link please contact via mail.
STILLS
In times of rapid technological leaps and ever more complex alogorithmic systems, the number of tech-anxious people and their fear of the new is increasing significantly. Lintu's music lends its dramatic structure to the abstract narrative of the myth-making of human curiosity and thus also to the experimental music film: a riddle whose solution is the question and the questioning of oneself.
Directors: Lena Zwerina & Max Viktor Herbert
DOP: Max Viktor Herbert
Edit: Lena Zwerina
Composer: Lintu (Julia Merelind)
Running Time: 7 Minutes
1-Channel Video
unreleased
STILLS
How does the depiction of war change in times of Smartphones and the internet? This documentary uses only YouTube material filmed by soldiers, journalists, civilians or war zone tourists to portray the absurd global theater of war and its depiction through GoPro cameras, TV and VLOGs. A study of modern war aesthetics, the promotion of romanticizing and glorification of war.
Running Time: 70 Minutes
Documentary Feature Film
Available with English, Italian and German Subtitles.
Click Here to Stream the Film on Vimeo Video on Demand.
More on: @conflictingimage, MUBI, Letterboxd, German-Documentaries and IMDb.
STILLS & POSTER
"I Don't Know You, You Don't Know Me" is a 2-channel Video Installation filmed in Beijing, China. The whole video was shot from exactly the same position, out of a window of a flat on the 14th floor of a skyscraper, over a course of 3 months. Documenting daily life, smog and the harsh Beijing winter.
Running Time: 22 Minutes
2-Channel Video
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
On 11 May 2016, I counted 296 things from the United States of America in my life. I did without (almost) all of these things for (almost) a month. For a total of 35 days, I accompanied myself with a compact-camera. I only realized the true extent of my asceticism during shooting. Not only tangible things constitute the representation of the USA, but also American pop culture and all means of modern communication, including the internet. American culture with its post-industrial achievements and innovations has become a kind of ersatz religion for many people, including myself. These insights exposed the naivety of my original idea. It became a challenging task to become an American recluse from one day to the next.
The 70-minute documentary film American Abstinence describes my attempt to cope with this task.
Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Michail Lermontow’s A Hero of Our Times rescued me for the first week, but reading texts about great, suffering men was not a sustainable substitute for my actual main problem: my apparently truly existing internet and communication addiction.
And so a film about abstinence became an amusing insight into my personal life and my doomed attempt to be abstinent.
Running Time: 67 Minutes
Documentary Feature Film
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
„Pachinko“ is a documentation of a typical gambling hall often found in Japan.
The game Pachinko is a mixture of a traditional pinball arcade and a slot machine.
To play the game, players rent small metal balls that function as the active object as well as the bet and price. The slot machines are bright and colorful, featuring super heroes and depictions of famous anime characters. Each machine creates a constant noise, overlaying with all the other machines.
The 7-minute documentary short is divided into four chapters, which are introduced by one line of a text in faulty english, written outside the hall.
Starting outside, the viewer is gradually introduced into the absurdly loud inside of the pachinko parlor. The calmness in the small Ogu-Ginza shopping street is interrupted every time the door opens.
In a voyeuristic style the camera slowly approaches the situation trying to draw as little attention by the gamblers as possible. The constant humming and the mechanical clicking of the metal balls being tossed around in the machines create a dominant sound layer that increases with every other step one takes inside the hall, where players can be seen ordering more metal balls, playing while simultaneously smoking or texting and seemingly ignoring the unbearable sound backdrop that surrounds them. In these weird circumstances one must remember that betting is involved. Players often stay for hours, loosing huge amounts of Yen.
Running Time: 7 Minutes
1-Channel Video
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
A performance in an urban underpass in Karlsruhe filmed in an uncut wide-angle shot.
Resemblance with usage of pyrotechnics by football fans and demonstrators create a anarchically seeming disturbance in the location of the performance. The artist enters the rundown site, with the already lit object in his hand and starts making circles in a rounding in the middle of the underpass. The four minute video documents the change of color, diffusion of light and sight in the underpass caused by the heavy blue smoke. Because of the artificial lightning placed on the top corner of the rounding, the blue smoke shifts into green, the tagged yellow tiled walls get covered with a brown blur and the whole film frame gets fogged.
By the time the fog has almost vanished, the smoke grenade taped to the glass bottle gets thrown in to a hole in the rounding. Smashing the ground and rolling around on the floor in a jerky, uncontrolled movement. As the motion of the object stops, the video loop starts from the beginning.
In contrast to the content of the video the presentation of the work itself is temperate and is not imposed on the visitor. Only a quiet hiss sound generated by the smoke grenade is audible in addition to a occasional clink, caused by the object hitting the ground, which also marks the end of the video.
The performance shown in “Erster Gang” crashes with the petit bourgeois of Karlsruhe.
A small but inevitable loss of control in a strictly regulated city.
Running Time: 4 Minutes
1-Channel Video
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
A performance on an intersection in Karlsruhe filmed in an uncut wide-angle shot.
A quiet night in an idyllic part of town. The intersection shown is empty, but well lit by large high hanging street lights, only a cat strolls around.
After a few seconds of silence a bicycle enters the frame from the right. Attached to the bicycle are two smoke grenades, one yellow, one black.
The cyclist starts driving in a wide circle, trailing behind a big cloud of thick smoke. The smoke cloud grows with every lap the driver takes.
Occasionally some sparkles appear, and the bicycle vanishes and reappears out of the yellow and black haze, until it cannot be seen anymore.
For it‘s last appearance the attached smoke grenade starts to catch fire, even visible through the now solid smoke, the burning grenade and it‘s invisible vehicle then disappear out of the frame.
The whole frame is filled with smoke, the street lights are only fuzzy dots.
Slowly the smoke is clearing and the intersection get‘s back to it‘s initial state, the cat
is lurking under a car, then running across the street.
Finally a car lights up the remaining haze, and the video loops starts from the beginning.
Running Time: 5 Minutes
1- Channel Video
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
A selection of videos from the ongoing documentary series #60SecondsIn, which is presented solely on instagram @max.viktor
Running Time: 1 Minute (each)
1-Channel Videos
BEHIND THE SCENES AND STILLS
