In Bed With

In Bed With is a speculative installation based on archival fragments about Santiago Álvarez’s film NOW! (1965) and its reception and political circulation in West Berlin in the 1960s.

NOW! is an agitational montage film composed of found newsreel footage of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, edited to Lena Horne’s song “Now.” One of the few surviving copies is preserved in the archive of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. While researching its presence there, we came across an anecdote: during a visit to West Berlin in 1965, Álvarez handed several of his short films to the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), at the time led by Rudi Dutschke, for use in political screenings. Two years later, he reportedly asked the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek to retrieve the reels from underneath Dutschke’s bed so they could be preserved and kept in circulation.

The installation invites visitors to lie in a replica of Dutschke’s bed (Vereinigte Möbelwerke Magdeburg, model “Angela”) and speculate about what else might have been hidden beneath it. Above the bed hangs a banner used in screenings of La hora de los hornos (1968) reading: “Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor." – an excerpts from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which can be browsed in the bed, while a research board traces connections between archival fragments, political cinema, and the mythologies that form around them. Cinema becomes a space of collective encounter, where the reality of the screen meets the reality of its audience.

• installation
• archive
• research
• video
• 2012