Gideon Bachmann: Film Art on Air

Film history without pictures: Gideon Bachmann’s interviews with cinema personalities were broadcast on New York radio between 1955 and 1964. During his »Film Forum« and »The Film Art« broadcasts, Bachmann presented film personalities, many of whom are world-famous today but were not yet discovered back then.

»Film Art on Air« presents a selection of 44 of the approximately 500 interviews that Bachmann conducted: documentary filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Leni Riefenstahl, representatives of experimental film such as Maya Deren and Hans Richter, greats of new European films such as Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini and actors such as Jean Seberg and Rod Steiger can be heard.

In his half-hour interviews, conducted solely in English, Bachmann did not delve into the technical details, gossip or success and failure of films. Instead, he posed the simple question: »Why do you do that?«

Bachmann (1927–2016) lived in Heilbronn until 1936, before settling in Palestine, the USA, Italy and England. Since 1996, he was living in Karlsruhe. Bachmann considered his extensive audio archive, collected from all over the world, as part of his »Vox Humana« project, an archive of human voices, the medium for which is radio.

Video Documentary:
ZKM | Institute for Visual Media

Camera: Arianna Spyrou, Viviane Schreiber
Editing: Arianna Spyrou