Ute Aurand

Beavers revisits locations in Berlin first filmed in Diminished Frame (1970), alongside sites in Massachusetts, to reflect on how lived places shape vision and memory. Moving between past and present, the film becomes a meditation on perception, time, and the persistence of personal landscapes.

An imaginary journey on a ship. We turned the building of the Film Academy into a ship. Claire and Solange from a Jean Genet piece, a polish woman with her Madonna, screaming sailors are a few of the passengers on this artifical journey.

Young Pines grew out of three trips to Japan between May 2009 and November 2010. Invited to Japan for a series of film screenings, I began filming in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kanazawa. Even in the big cities, I experienced how strongly the Japanese feel connected to nature and how they tend to see no contradiction between culture and nature. I found this stimulating and in harmony with some of my own impulses. I wanted to return and film more in other seasons. In Spring 2010 I visited Kamakura, Kyoto, and Nara, in November I went Northeast and filmed in Matsushima, Tono, Miyako in Atsumi, Yamadera, and Nikko. All of my film images have been filmed before the disaster of the Tsunami and Fukushima, but the final editing was done in the following months.

A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Aurand’s 16mm films are portraits of people and place, often prompted by the discovery and experience of travel. As George Clark has written, the journey is a cornerstone of Aurand’s filmmaking: "“Her work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, Aurand’s work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading and dissecting space."

Experimental film about a train ride. The carriage window becomes a screen, the landscape a mood, the mood a landscape.

A small cinematic poem from subjective street scenes, mirrored faces, and the city passing by, as well as naked female bodies underwater, creating an essay made from observed images.

Four women film each other getting dressed in this four-part film. The motive for making the film was to work with a Bolex camera. A protected space is created, to which only women have access – and in which the female gaze is directed towards the female body.

No description available.

Shot on 16mm, Ute Aurand documents the archive of Kino Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst before its contents underwent a thorough 'repotting' operation

The film follows the construction of the new expansion of Zurich's Museum Rietberg, from the groundbreaking in May 2004 through to the opening in February 2007.

Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[ing] a space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”

“Fadenspiele 2“ (Toying with String 2) is an animation made with the painter, my sister, Detel Aurand. We filmed inside the studio and outdoors in the forest and fields. From various elements like paper, wood, plastic and fabric come images that continuously change their form. We see one image evolving out of the other, becoming something new.

Jón in Akureyri is the second part of Detel + Jón. I filmed Jón Sigrurgeiersson walking through the streets of his childhood, meeting his filmmaker brother and telling childhood stories.

Ute Aurand films Maria Lang in her daily activity as she cares for her mother. The presence of the filmmaker is visible in the camera movements and in the editing rhythm. Admiration and discretion are sensed. We enter into the intimacy of mother and daughter through the eyes of a friend. The silent images create an occasion for attentive observation and balanced awareness.

“In the day after seeing Terzen, there was a surprising sense of the film that developed for me. The rhythms were still present and helped to unify a multitude of impressions. This lead me to reconsider the general tone of the film because, as I reached beyond its quick pace and rhythmic lightness and beyond the everyday content, I realized that its Heiterkeit grows out of a serenity or courage in facing mortality. This is the surprising sense of the film, its inner music. (…) Early in the film I recall a chair held in the strong afternoon sunlight. Even though you show it from many angles, it has a potent stillness. This strikes me as a good example of how you embody an active sense of seeing in your filming, and you reflect back to us the paradox that it is in movement that we create stillness. The eye, constantly moving yet creating stillness." — Robert Beavers

A short portrait of the filmmaker Renate Sami.

A film about my friend Maria Lang. The light falls on a few details, chance selections, out of which a place is composed, the place where Maria lives with her mother. A landscape, a village, a kitchen, 25 her room.

For a year at monthly intervals, Ute Aurand and Bärbel Freund filmed In the Garden, a lovely portrait of a Potsdam-Bornim garden designed in 1910 by gardener and philosopher Karl Foerster. An extraordinary variety of flora, natural lighting effects, textures and colors unfold in this gentle, expertly edited film, which forms a bridge between the natural world and the individual soul.

"Glimpses of my life. Friends, snow, two tulips, skaters on the frozen lake of my childhood, balloons in the morning sun, my godchild Paulina running up and down the hill, Ulrike’s 50th birthday on the Baltic Sea, my desk in November 2003." - Ute Aurand

A new short film portrait that, as often in Ute Aurands work, was filmed over several years and in different places, in this case Germany and Japan. "Filming portraits allows me to emphasize private gestures and moments, and thus to transcend the narrative or documenting." (UA)