Mimesis Without Organs: The Irrational Remains by Thorsten Trimpop

Mimesis Without Organs presents
The Irrational Remains by Thorsten Trimpop 

on 35mm
with filmmaker in attendance

February 26 | 7pm MT | Solomon Screening Room | Atlas 102

in collaboration with Cinema and Moving Image Arts

 

 

 

 

In 1987, everything changes for Suse, Matthias, and Susanne. Just twenty years old, their lives in the GDR are only just beginning when Matthias and Susanne attempt to escape to the West. The escape fails: both are arrested and imprisoned, while Suse is left behind. Sixteen years later, the three meet again for the first time. They return to the sites of their shared past—the border forests between the former GDR and Czechoslovakia, the prison cell where Susanne was held—confronting the distance that has grown between them and the painful persistence of memory. Once bound by friendship and love, they now face one another as near strangers, connected only by the remains of a collective past.

 

 

Thorsten Trimpop’s film is shaped by restraint and closeness. Avoiding reenactment and explanation, the film focuses instead on the present encounter and the lasting effects of the past. Meaning emerges through observation: in faces, gestures, and the tension between what is said and what remains unspoken. An approach that gives weight to the psychological consequences of political repression and to the fragile dynamics between three former friends. The Irrational Remains premiered in the International Forum of New Cinema at the Berlinale in 2005, where it was awarded the Prize of the International Federation of Film Societies (FICC).

 

 

 

 

Thorsten Trimpop is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Boulder Colorado. His latest film Furusato古里 is a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan's nuclear exclusion zone. It premiered at DOK Leipzig where it won the grand prize the Golden Dove and was shown at dozens of festivals. His first feature film The Irrational Remains premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won numerous awards. For his new film he has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Memorial Award.Thorsten taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder.