Screening at Cinémathèque québécoise:
Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power)
Friday, November 15, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Image credit: Pablo Sigg, still from the film The Will to Power, 2012, HD video, 61 minutes.
Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power)
A film written, produced and directed by Pablo Sigg
SBC Gallery and Cinémathèque québécoise present a special screening of The Will to Power on November 15 at 6:30 pm, followed by a conversation between the artist and Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project, Bard College.
Pablo Sigg's first feature film Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) –a project which took almost four years to complete– was filmed entirely in Paraguay on the site where Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth established a German colony in the late 19th century, after an idea conceived of by Richard Wagner and put into action by the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster.
In February 1886, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, her husband Bernhard Förster and fourteen families of pure German stock abandoned their homeland to found the Aryan colony of Nueva Germania in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle. More than a century later, the only survivors of the Försters’ racial experiment are the Schweikhart brothers. From the time they were children, they led completely isolated lives on the remote property that Förster had originally sold to their family. Today, the Schweikharts, as the last remnants of the Nueva Germania dream, lead an almost Biblical existence in a territory whose topography seems to take form in the imaginary and the utopian.
Der Wille zur Macht is a film about these two brothers, whose lonely life is inextricably connected to the lives of the Nietzsche siblings, and to an unknown and dark episode of modern Western history.
Pablo Sigg is a Mexican artist (1974) who lives and works in Mexico City. He presented his work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2013), Musée dʼArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012) and ltd los angeles (2011).
Thomas Keenan teaches literature, media, and human rights at Bard College, where he directs the Human Rights Project. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility (Stanford UP, 1997), and with Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull (Sternberg, 2012). He is co-editor, with Wendy Chun, of New Media, Old Media (Routledge, 2006), and with Tirdad Zolghadr, of The Human Snapshot (Luma/Sternberg/CCS, 2013). He curated Antiphotojournalism, with Carles Guerra (Barcelona and Amsterdam, 2010–11), and Aid and Abet (Quebec, 2011). He has served on the boards of a number of human rights organizations and journals, including WITNESS, Scholars at Risk, the Crimes of War Project, the Journal of Human Rights, and Humanity.
Length: 61 minutes
Country of production: Mexico
Production date: 2012
Shooting format: HD video
Language: German and Guarani with English or French intertitles and subtitles
Color, B&W
SBC Gallery also presents: A workshop with Pablo Sigg and Thomas Keenan on November 16, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm
