“Since 2023, I have been hosting and programming monthly Screening Salons in Berlin, activating programs of 16mm films from my collection as well as inviting artist-filmmakers to exhibit work in a domestic setting. Through these screenings, which attempt to subvert the proscenium arch of the typical cinematic environment, a new underground emerges - one founded on questions of privacy, friendship and intimacy.

In cinema, the possibility of intimacy is premised on the barrier constructed by the presence of the camera, its proximity to the filmed subject, and the subject’s tenuous relationship to its viewing public. Through moving images, this public becomes the recipient of an intimacy that is without familiarity; and today, more than ever before, this intimacy comes at the cost of privacy. 

I am interested in compressing cinematic experience to the space of a small, familiar room populated by friends, fellow travelers, the projector and the window-space it opens onto the new region of the world called personal filmmaking. Put another way, I am interested in the movie projector’s capacity to render light received as light shared.

Medium Intimacy is cinema of interior architecture, rooted in the alienation produced by the motion picture filmmaking apparatus. It is a cinema of intention and commitment. It is the refounding of cinematic intimacy upon distance, privacy, economy and mystery. It is composition, line and color without Mannerism. It is a cinema of portraiture, made in parlors, best played on kitchen walls.”

- Christian Flemm 

BIO

Christian Flemm is a personal filmmaker, curator and laboratory technician from Kentucky who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He practices Medium Intimacy, a devotional approach to motion pictures that resists the accelerations of digital through narrow-gauge images made for bedroom walls.