What happens when a master challenges the people? When everyone is invited to reinterpret some of the greatest art pieces of our time? Is it within everyone to make art? And do we stand out the most when we stand together?
Gesamt asks the questions. You give the answers in this user-generated film that places you, me and everyone else face to face with some of the greatest and most controversial artists of our time.
The Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has set the rules of a project that aims to challenge and inspire people worldwide. While he creates the frame - you must create the content.
Female director Jenle Hallund will grapple the big boys
Once the material starts coming in, Lars von Trier will be standing in the background and the young female director Jenle Hallund will step forward into character. She has been chosen by Lars von Trier to look through all the incoming material, choose what to include in the film(s) and put it all together.
The final number of films can be anywhere between one and four, depending on the material submitted. The film(s) will be shown in a dark room on four large screens, which will all be running at the same time. However, they may NOT show the same material simultaneously. The screening of the work will in this sense follow the idea of a gesamtkunstwerk.
Jenle Hallund is currently working as a script consultant for Lars von Trier and her groundbreaking international work includes working with child prostitutes in Brasil and with Catholic and Protestant prisoner in Hyde Bank Prison in Belfast. She also won the recognized Danish Film Award Robert in 2011 as co-director for the movie Limboland.
While Trier sets the rules and you create the material it will be Jenle Hallund who pulls the final strings.
The art inside you
To be a part of Gesamt you must find inspiration from six artists and their work - all carefully selected by Lars von Trier. These are some of the major classic artworks of our time and we ask that participiants reinterpret and give life to these works through picture and sound.
Artists include: Irish writer James Joyce's work Ulysses, which was once banned in the United States because it was labeled obscene and radical. There is August Strindberg's famous play The Father, that still in our time stands as a striking example of a dysfunctional family. And then there is the German architect Albert Speer's Zeppelinfield in Nürnberg, a large monument build for the Nazi rallies during World War II.
There is a total of six works. And while they might seem a little difficult to grasp at first – through your interpretation, you are the one who can pull them down to earth. Or. who knows, maybe throw them up toeven higher altitudes.
It is actually quit simple. Look into the six artworks, get inspired, grab a camera, film max five minutes of material and submit it to gesamt.org. The material can be raw and unedited, animated and polished, with audio, without audio, consist of still images, be in black and white or in color - only your imagination and the six art works set the limits.
There is no script, just a cinematic experiment that gradually comes to life by you and the people around you.
Gesamt will premiere 12th of October 2012 in Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
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