Since 2023, I have hosted monthly Screening Salons across a variety of apartments in Berlin and around the world, presenting my work alongside other 16mm films from my collection. In doing so, something interesting happens. By relocating the film projector from the theater into the home, we subvert the proscenium arch of the typical cinematic environment, and a new underground emerges: one founded on questions of privacy, friendship and Medium Intimacy: the unique forms of attention that emerge when films are shared among small audiences, quietly, in the calm of a living room.
Perhaps because of this, over the past four years, portraiture has become a central concern in my filmmaking practice. As the site of a set of social relations negotiated between artist and sitter, image and audience, the filmed portrait questions how presence is held within the interval of the frame, and how the frame may simultaneously reveal that which is beyond what is pictured, as well as withhold the sitter’s presence, through gesture, duration and reciprocal acts of looking.
Motion picture filmmaking, in particular the amateur formats of 16mm and 8mm (Schmalfilm in German) is a resolutely sculptural art. The image cast by the projector transforms both the filmed images and the spaces in which they are seen, with the frame becoming a threshold that establishes intimacy while preserving distance, inviting participants to consider the conditions of filmic representation. Put simply, it is the matter of how the light received through the taking lens of the camera becomes light shared through the simple act of projection.
Tonight’s program of portrait films (by myself as well as others, filmed variously across Germany, England, the United States and Ukraine) create distance through the hanging of a frame. If that act may be seen as the creation of a barrier, these films ask what it means to install such a barrier within the lived continuity of another’s existence, and, beyond themselves, attempt to register the basic asymmetries produced by barriers both visible and invisible across everyday life.
With thanks to Ryan Daly, Keelan O’Sullivan and Margaret Veillon
PROGRAM
II (Above) - Grace Baggott, 2023, 4”
IN LIMBO - Daniel Romphf, 2025, 3”
DANIEL - Christian Flemm, 2024, 5”
A Study in Choreography for Camera - Maya Deren, 1945, 3”
LETTER FROM A COLOMBIAN SOLDIER - Christian Flemm & Max Parnell, 2026, 11”
EDDY - Christian Flemm & Max Parnell, 2026, 11”
Arnulf Rainer - Peter Kubelka, 1960, 7”
DOORWAY - Larry Gottheim, 1971, 8”
BIO
Christian Flemm is a personal filmmaker, curator, film restorer, and laboratory technician based in Berlin. Working primarily on 16mm film without a digital intermediate, he practices what he calls Medium Intimacy—a devotional approach to the moving image that resists the accelerations and disembodiments of the digital age. Through handmade, small-scale works typically screened in domestic settings, Flemm emphasizes the tactile, temporal, and relational properties of film, proposing that cinema can be a site of genuine encounter rather than distant consumption.
His works on paper are published by Eckstein, Berlin (EU), and Grotesk Press (USA).