What is printed in this notebook is film material, if not in the physical sense of celluloid, chemicals, video cassettes. For me, film material is everything that accumulates during a film project and accompanies it. That includes rejects or what was merely thought of and remained notes. Many things shape a film, not just the script but also the working environment and production processes, self-censorship and prohibitions. Certain of one’s aims remain unfulfilled, falling victim to constraints, or only in post production is the right tone found. The script is the working template for director, cameraman, and actors during shooting. Why was ...

This publication introduces the exhibition documenta (13) in Kabul as well as documents the preliminary seminars that were held between 2010 and 2012. The four main positions around which dOCUMENTA (13) is articulated—Siege, Hope, Retreat, and Stage—correspond to four possible conditions in which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present. These positions are not comprehensive and acquire their significance through their mutual interrelation and resonance. Kabul and Bamiyan together constitute a crossroad of these conditions. Here, simultaneously with the state of hope, artists frequently experience the condition of being under siege, as well as that of withdrawal and ...

Of Other Spaces asks us to consider the ways in which spaces are charged with authority, and both serve and suppress our actions and ways of relating. It follows within a discourse on the sociocultural conditions embedded in different spaces, institutional and otherwise. The concept of “other spaces” is inspired by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, from his 1967 essay, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias, on the social relations and cultural conditions associated with the weight of space, architecture, and history. Foucault’s essay is reprinted in this book.

Last year we went to China to shoot a remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). There we met Mr. Lu Yi and his team who had already made much progress with the film set. We worked together in order to complete the research. This book is the result of the first stages of the remake of Metropolis.