Manifesto: The Cinema Of The Unspecific

Art must find an answer to every crisis. The new German film's self-conception of man as a cultural being has reduced him to a subject who works to solve social questions. These stories of the cultural being have convinced man to be the same. Attention is focused on the psychological heritage of human social behavior that needs to be explored. Socio-economic and historically political constellations become the focus of a relationship between man and man, or man and environment, examined in terms of subject and object. But man is more than that.

He is an actant of a co-world full of actants, not full of objects. He is part of a larger organism, which he cannot see through, whose effective powers and peculiarities appear alienated to him. Consequently, he tries to escape them through aggression and distancing. The subject-object relationship between the socially interwoven cultural being man and the entity earth is used up. Technology serves this kind of demarcation and suggests superiority to man. We create instruments of distancing and information gain. We measure, record, calculate and categorize. The language of science and the idea of civilization pass over the subjective feeling of the human-earth relationship. The misunderstood is fought rather than recognized. People who pursue the suppressed forces of the human-earth relationship are accused of inconsistency in thinking and esotericism in acting by the prevailing theories. The void that is hidden behind the horizon of knowledge of our media, data sets and evaluations is not recognized as such. It is just another uncultivated field to be surveyed, categorized and understood. An outcome is inevitable; the acquisition of knowledge does not always proceed according to plan, but it is always planned. The rational acquisition of knowledge seems absolute as a method. Not concretizable means: not narratable. But what we know, we must first of all believe. And don't we feel, don't we feel the limits of our analytics anyway?

Cinema must not only want to understand man, it must first of all endure him. With all its unresolved questions and inconcreteness. To tell about him, in a ductus of nature to be described by regularities, his nature, is thus simply insufficient. Analyzing and psychologizing draws the boundaries. The cultural being alone is not man. In cinema, man can be portrayed differently. Cinema can capture the fever dreams, the excesses and longings, and the inner experience of memory. Cinema can outline speaking with places, the subjective experience of time, or even disappearing into the world. All of this actually takes place in life, but is difficult to grasp. Here, then, cinema must take the risk of making the non-concrete tangible.

How, if not thanks to art, can a new relationship towards the nature of our being and that of the planet be made tangible, instead of exclusively through the description of its laws? How do we want to live if we destroy life itself? How to dream, if we set fire to our dreamscape? How do we want to be human without access to a primordial substance from which we have grown? We need to take these connections seriously.

The cinema of the inconcrete shatters the sterile sarcophagus of systemic ontology, allowing fungi and parasites of wonder to proliferate their meshwork. The cinema of the inconcrete recognizes the ghostly walking of man and the spiritual in the walking of the planet. The cinema of the inconcrete practices silence. It practices in shouting. In listening and observing. It sees the swaying of the branches, the resting of the stones, the growth of the bushes.

The cinema of the inconcrete commits itself to perceive the primal human trauma of being exposed naked to the earth. The cinema of the unspecific commits itself to wringing a naturalness bursting with presence of mind from the artificiality of the new German film, until a new subject-subject relationship between man and earth shimmers through. The Kino des Unkonkreten dedicates its cinematic work to the experiences of being human in the world that cannot be concretely formulated and measured. It dedicates itself to the non-excludable paths of resolution between being and non-being.