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Dore O.

Dore O.

Directing

Biography

Trained as a painter, O. was cofounder of the Hamburger Filmschau, alongside with her husband and collaborator Werner Nekes. For all the psychedelia of her early work, subsequent films are rigorous in refractory experimentation: rear-projections, double-impositions, repeated frames and breathtaking lunges of the handheld camera, which seems bolstered as much by raw impulse as it does by any guiding principle of onscreen organization. O.’s work establishes its own space-time linearities, then argues them against each other–sometimes content with a mild flicker, a closing or opening aperture or a flurry of blunt smears. This is a playful and often freefalling visual poetics, best left to wash over you pure and analyzed later (or better yet, not at all.)

Known For

Uliisses
4.3

Director Werner Nekes has created this experimental film in the mode of James Joyce's Ulysses to the extent that human interactions are represented by poetic, symbolic images and language, with a certain amount of nudity added in.

Uliisses

1982
Home Movies 1971-81
N/A

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Home Movies 1971-81

1985
Beuys
6.0

The German artist Joseph Beuys is reflecting on his theory of art, being filmed as a kinetic sculpture. In 1981, the film has won the German film critic's award for “Best short film in Germany”.

Beuys

1981
T-Wo-Men
4.8

The film is divided into five parts differing in pictorial and musical structure. The plot, two women and their love for one another, is of secondary importance. An ingenious combination of stereoscopic images and montage of individual pictures make new qualities of perception accessible to the viewer. In the final part of the love scenes pictorial sequences and music build up to a delirious rhythm.

T-Wo-Men

1972
Mama, da steht ein Mann
N/A

Dore O. and later Nekes speak to each other and into the camera, slowly and deliberately like a speech exercise, quickly like a tongue twister or in competition with each other, accentuated rhythmically or rubato, until the silent noise becomes piercing and rings in the ears. As in a mirror joke, Zerroptik also involves the viewer in the erotic duet, which persistently elicits all the comedy and latent horrors of a sudden discovery from the field of associations of the strange sentence.

Mama, da steht ein Mann

1968
No image
9.0

A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.

The Critical Mass

1999
Lawale
10.0

A strange succession of tableaux of four women and a man which gives the sense of a sort of dream family locked in an antiseptic world of endless afternoon teas, dinners and waiting. Often her images seem to be stills either before or after something has been said.

Lawale

2025
Blonde Barbarei
8.0

A female figure wanders inside a warehouse interior and through various motifs, including a fan and a birdcage, set to a medieval chant.

Blonde Barbarei

1973
Hurrycan
N/A

Hurrycan has nothing to do with whirlwinds, although in this Nekes film the pictures journey across the screen, excitedly, spasmodically and flickering. The title weds the element of haste with the notion of a film can, which in this case turns out to be something of a Pandora's Box and contains expectations for a new way of seeing. A computerized shutter system that Nekes had built.

Hurrycan

1979
No image
7.3

Diwan, a lyric anthology, an outdoor movie with people. With people living in the surrounding precious and very beautifully photographed nature, are neither more nor less than one part of it. What Nekes manages there with landscape, as a cunning and quote many fine artist in a medium that runs in time, as he defeated the time changed, by themselves for change of scenery uses, as it interferes with the laws of chronology through the rewind ability of the camera or destroyed, which is a compelling and highly aesthetic experimental company.

Diwan

1974
Frozen Flashes
8.0

A series of still photographs, is various states of photographic exposure.

Frozen Flashes

1976
No image
9.0

"...Nekes retreats behind his film. What is left is a double portrait, in which neither Dore 0. nor the grand landscape remain unchanged. The cold of the icy coastline - long shots of stones, snow and the sea - dwindles away before the image of Dore 0. Solitude is superflous, when the grandiose mountain meadow invites somersaults. ... In this case Nekes handles what he shows considerately. He releases the objects he portrays. He allows them to unfold. And so model and patterns actually serve another purpose: to let poetry grow, and energy and beauty and confidence nell'abbandono."

Abbandono

1970
Alaska
7.0

Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.

Alaska

2025
Kaskara
7.0

An experimental film where a particular space is constantly "present" : there is a complex usage of superim- position, and of split-screen effects. The place shown is a part of a house in the country. Doors and windows are continually shown, emphasizing the film's concern with framing. Other images are present: city-scapes of a particularly sinister nature, implying a sense of ruin, and shots of a chorus on a stage. These shots begin and end the film which is accompanied by a vocal chant on the soundtrack.

Kaskara

1974
Xoanon
9.0

A painter surrounded by images - his own and those of the reality that surrounds him - is the protagonist of the latest film by Dore O., moves exactly in the border area between the two, only apparently separate worlds.

Xoanon

1994
Thermoment
10.0

For "Thermoment" Dore O. filmed the clarinetist Eckard Koltermann with a heat recording camera and thus translated the heat regions of the body's interior into images while making music.

Thermoment

1998
Vis-à-vis
9.5

A fixed shot showing six persons, looking into the camera inertly. Gradually tiny, minimal movements can be registered.

Vis-à-vis

1968
Kaldalon
9.0

Attracted to Nordic landscapes, [Dore O.] filmed KALDALON (1970/71) in Iceland where images of water, rocks, steam and smoke were technically enhanced to appear blue-tinged.

Kaldalon

2025
Stern des Melies
7.0

The reality of the film is the fantast of the viewer. My north pole in the Ruhr valley. Dedicated to Georges Méliès.

Stern des Melies

1982
Blindman's Ball
N/A

A painterly, poetic experimental film with narrative elements. A woman is looking after an obviously blind man. She undresses, bandages and dresses him again. Since the action takes place on two temporal planes running in opposite directions, the couple's relationship appears to be in a state of stagnation. In-between, we are shown the images in the protagonists' minds: nightmares, an optical machine, but also erotic dreams from perhaps better days. Tango motifs and an aria (composed by Anthony Moore) reinforce the impression of a romantic chamber piece. The man's blindness refers to the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, who destroyed his sight through keeping his naked eye fixed too long on the sun while researching into the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina. The pictorial technique, with layer after layer dissolving into one another, is reminiscent of the overpainting technique deployed by the director in her work for the canvas.

Blindman's Ball

1988