Die Stadt

While studying law in Paris, Wolfgang Ramsbott met the dancer and visual artist Harry Kramer, with whom he made several experimental films. Kramer's kinetic artworks, "automotive sculptures" and marionettes built from found objects, filmed in real environments, served as their "main characters" in "Die Stadt", "Défense 58-24" and "Die Schleuse": "sky and walls, a liana of water pipes, dilapidated backyards, cracks in walls, cracked walls full of lost, enigmatic children's signs, rusty railway station grounds, deserts, within them the figures, not conformed to the environment in their sightlessness and obsessive deformation to themselves. clinging to legalities of mechanisms that had become senseless and fused with them, that had perhaps once served them, hovering as if in a dream of condensed emptiness, without moving from the spot, they stumbled and rolled with the machines through sun-hardened, burnt-down landscapes, deflected only by objects, by congealed meteorites. " This is how Georg Jappe describes the particular spirit of these films in "La Marionette Artistique" (1961).(Source: German Historical Museum/fl)