Stadium
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Single-channel video installation with sound: projection screen, vintage cinema seating, and speakers | 2008 | 10:47
Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, the infamous site of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1938), is both setting and protagonist in Stadium. The video employs techniques favored by Riefenstahl in her documentation of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, including the crane shot, the long tracking shot, and the low-angle shot. In this, it critically tackles the lasting legacy of Olympia’s photographic and cinematic representations of power and control, and points to their contemporary currency, from video games to epic films.
The film opens with a 3D animation of the architectural model of the stadium’s recent renovation. It then transitions to the stadium itself, where sweeping perspectives from multiple cameras produce sensations ranging from vertigo to ennui. Dressed in white, an avatar-like hooded figure enters the frame and performs a choreography that hovers between a contemporary pedestrian’s navigation of public space and early twentieth-century calisthenics, producing tension. In Stadium, a terse and uncanny visual dialogue connects the architecture’s relentless uniformity and the anonymity of the individual.
Production support: Olympiastadion Berlin GmbH, Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, and Architectura Virtualis GmbH
With funding from: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Vertretung der Regierung von Québec, Botschaft von Kanada, and University of Hertfordshire
Credits
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Performer:
Gail Skrela -
Choreographer:
Ayman Harper -
Composer:
Stefan Nemeth -
Cinematographer:
Daniel Sippel -
Camera crane:
Matthias Wahle -
Gaffer:
Tobias Castorph -
Grip:
Michael Gänssle -
Dolly:
Peter Zöphel -
Production assistants:
Johannes Bock, Irmgard Berner, Hadley Howes, Mi-Kyung Jun, Bahar Sanli, and Maxwell Stephens -
3D Animation:
Sol Rogers -
Postproduction assistance :
Christoph Manz
Video still
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