Thu Feb 5, 2026, 7 pm – 9 pm
Lutz Dammbeck
Das Meisterspiel, 1998
Deutschland
106 Min.
Buch und Regie: Lutz Dammbeck
German Language
On Thursday, February 5, at 7 pm, in cooperation with Filmclub 813, Lutz Dammbeck’s Das Meisterspiel will be shown. The artist will be present. Following the film, Valérie Knoll (director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein) and Lutz Dammbeck will hold a short discussion.
In 1994, 27 paintings by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer were painted over with black paint by unknown vandals at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. On one painting, the perpetrators wrote the words UND DA BESCHLOSS ER AKTIONIST ZU SEIN (And so he decided to be an actionist), a paraphrase of a quote by Adolf Hitler. At the same time, a series of bomb attacks shook Austria, leaving people injured and dead. A group calling itself the “Bavarian Liberation Army” (BBA) claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying it sees Austria’s German identity under threat. The attacks are staged as a fictional historical role-playing game that reenacts the liberation of Vienna from the Turkish armies. So are the attacks coming from the right? Is there a connection between the attack on the Vienna Academy and the BBA bombs, as Arnulf Rainer and his circle initially suspect? Or is it all just a hallucination and a confused dream, provoked by Vienna, the “laboratory for the end of the world”?
Lutz Dammbeck (*1948 in Leipzig) initially worked as a painter and graphic artist before focusing on the production of animated and experimental films and media collages in the late 1970s. He later also produced essay and documentary films as well as installations and participated in numerous international exhibitions.
Admission is granted upon donation to Filmclub 813. Registration is not required.
