FRIDAY, OCT. 4, 2019 – 03.00PM – THIS IS A FREE EVENT!

DIRECTOR LUTZ DAMMBECK WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE – Q&A after the film

Germany 2003, 121 min.

Director: Lutz Dammbeck

Cast: Lutz Dammbeck, Eva Mattes, Thomas Vogt, Stewart Brand, John Brockman

Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck‘s The Net explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of Refusal. For those that embrace it, as did and do the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils. Dammbeck‘s conceptual quest links these multiple nodes of cultural and political thought like the Internet itself. Circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Net exposes a hidden matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and conspiracies.

Dammbeck began his career in the context of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Born in Leipzig in 1948, he studied painting and graphic art, and eventually directed six short animated films for East Germany’s DEFA film studios. At the same time he was working on his own, more experimental short films, including METAMORPHOSES I – one of the first experimental films to be shown publicly in the GDR. This work marked the beginning of his long-term art project, the HERCULES CONCEPT, which Dammbeck conceived of as a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) comprising research materials, media collages, photographs, texts, painting, dance, film, and music. He has continued to work on various sequences for and variations on his Hercules project ever since, as well as a related website, herakleskonzept.de.

In 1986, after many obstacles and official interference in his work, Dammbeck and his family moved to Hamburg, West Germany, where he continued working on the HERCULES CONCEPT and soon began creating the full-length documentaries that he’s become known for more recently – complex, carefully-researched, philosophical works that treat the topics of art, power, radicalism, and science.

“DIRECTOR AND MEDIA ARTIST LUTZ DAMMBECK IN PORTLAND” has been organized by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has been supported by the DEFA Film Library, DEFA-Stiftung in Berlin, and the program Wunderbar Together, an initiative of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe-Institut, with the support of the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Special thanks to Hiltrud Schulz (DEFA Film Library).