Gropius 2010 Film piece

                               
                                        16mm short by Jonathan Trayner & Yvonne Riepl

'Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the Past' is a multi-layered project that rotates around a central film piece. This film was shot on discontinued Kodak 16mm stock using a Soviet-era Krasnogorsk-3 camera in a field in Brandenburg, in the background of the shot can be seen the high-modernist tower blocks of Gropiusstadt, a suburb of the old Western Sector of Berlin, placing the location in the death strip of the strip.


Naked figures march in and out of shot in the early morning carrying seven different flags representing various strands of enlightenment thought marked with a barely identifiable symbol (in fact the floor plan of Walter Gropius' design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow). The soundtrack to the film is an excerpt from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana suite, a politically dubious choice considering the favour his work found with the Nazi regime; but also interesting because of the Rabelaisian nature of the original cycle of profane monastic songs and poems on which it was based.