Albert Serra to shoot 200-hour film for Kassel’s dOCUMENTA

by Sergio Ríos Pérez

18/06/2012 - Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra is making a film a day as part of prominent visual art event dOCUMENTA, now celebrating its 13th edition in the German town of Kassel from June 6 to September 16. He has being doing this for 12 days now and will continue for another 88.

The whole film is titled The Three Little Pigs in ironic reference to three very relevant moments in the construction of Europe as incarnated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Each day, Serra will shoot a film in maximum four different locations in Kassel. He will edit the footage in the afternoon and screen it at night, together with extracts from the previous day, in the the German city’s Bali cinemas. At the end of the event, the whole film, expected to be about 200 hours long, will be screened non-stop, 24 hours a day, for eight days, from September 8 to 16.

According to the organisation, “the film was not conceived as a narrative, but as a continuous flow of words, with extracts from the book of conversations with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, transcripts of Adolf Hitler’s private conversations, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s comments in several interviews.”

Serra has said that his idea is to “make quite a Utopian film, staying loyal to the textual starting point, but without being superficial”.

The Three Little Pigs is a dOCUMENTA (13) production, made with the support of Acción Cultural Española and the Ramon Llull Institute for the promotion of Catalan culture.

(Translated from Spanish)