Ganz im Sinne Jack Smiths muss man „Hélio Oiticica“ einen flammenden Film nennen. Die Found-Footage-Montage von Cesar Oiticica Filho, Neffe des brasilianischen Künstlers Hélio Oiticica, ist eine rauschhafte Erzählung aus Bildern, Bewegungen und Texturen, aus Farben, Rhythmen und Tönen, die Oiticicas Grenzgängertum – zwischen Kunst und Film, zwischen Malerei, Skulptur und körperlicher Erfahrung – zu ihrem zentralen Gestaltungsprinzip macht. Unterschiedliche, teils heterogene Medien und Materialien treffen aufeinander und werden organisch miteinander verwoben, von Film- und Tonarchivaufnahmen über Fotografien bis hin zu Skizzen und Zeichnungen, vom groben Korn des Filmbildes mit seinen Kratzern und seinem wilden Geflackere bis hin zu den glatten Oberflächen digitaler Bildmedien. „Hélio Oiticica“ ist ein musikalischer Film und nicht nur, weil in ihm wunderschöne Musik zu hören ist: er ist bestimmt von Rhythmen und Tempowechseln, mal fließt er dahin, dann wieder produziert er einen kaum zu bändigenden Überschuss; so werden rasante Schnittfrequenzen aus Standbildern mit fluiden Kamerafahrten durch Räume und Installationen des Künstlers abgewechselt. Der schillernde Erzähler des Films ist dabei Hélio Oiticica selbst. Ebenso wie der Künstler die Malerei in den Raum erweiterte und Körper in Skulpturen verwandelte, geht auch seine Erzählung über die Grenzen einer Künstlerbiographie weit hinaus. Die Slums von Rio de Janeiro, die Tropicália-Bewegung als Gegenentwurf zur repressiven Politik der Militärdiktatur, künstlerische Produktivität in London und die Kunst des Müßiggangs in New York: Oiticica streift das urbane Leben ebenso wie die brasilianische Musik- und Filmszene und den New Yorker Underground. Und er berichtet mitunter geradezu entfesselt von seinen vielfältigen Interessen, Einflüssen und Begegnungen, von der Schönheit und Gefahr der Straße – eine „sexuelle Initiation“ – , von Samba, Kokain, Jimi Hendrix’ intensiver Beziehung zu seiner E-Gitarre, von Karnevalsumzügen, den labyrinthischen Architekturen der Favelas, dem Navigationssinn der Ameisen. „Hélio Oiticica“ ist anti-akademische (Kunst)geschichtsschreibung und eine Absage an freudlose kuratorische Verwaltungsarbeit. Seiner kreativen Praxis gab der Künstler zuletzt den Namen „Delirium Ambulatório“. Was immer das bedeuten mag: „Hélio Oiticica“ ist eine Einladung, sich davon infizieren zu lassen.

The Caligari Film Prize, presented by the German Association of Municipal and Cultural Cinemas in cooperation with the German magazine FILM-DIENST, will be awarded for the 28^th time in 2013.

The Caligari Film Prize is conferred annually to a stylistically and thematically innovative film screened at the Berlinale Forum. The award likewise acknowledges the special significance that this section of the Berlin International Film Festival has for cultural cinema.

Sponsored by the Municipal and Cultural Cinemas and FILM-DIENST, the Caligari Film Prize includes a €4,000 endowment, half of which is given to the award recipient while the other half is used to fund the distribution of the winning film in Germany.

Since 2011, the Trikoton company has joined us as a sponsor of a unique ancillary prize: the young and innovative Berlin fashion label awards a blanket from their “Voice Knitting Collection” in which excerpts from Guiseppe Becce’s score to the expressionist silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari are knitted into the design.

Hélio Oiticica”,

Cesar Oiticica Filho, Brazil 2012

Jury Statement:

Very much in the spirit of Jack Smith, “Hélio Oiticica” really has to be called a flaming film. The found-footage cinematic mosaic by Cesar Oiticica Filho, the nephew of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticia, is a frenzied narrative of images, movements and textures, colors, rhythms and sounds. The film uses Oiticica’s position as a crossover artist – as one working between art and film, between painting, sculpture and physical experience – as its central formal principle. Different, in part heterogeneous materials and media collide with one another and organically intertwine – from film and sound archive material to photographs, from sketches and drawings to scratchy and wildly flickering grainy frames of film and the smooth surfaces of digital visuals. “Hélio Oiticica” is a musical film, and not just because beautiful music is to be heard in it: the film itself is determined by rhythms and tempo changes. The film sometimes just flows along only to revert once again into a barely controllable overabundance as fluid tracking shots through rooms and installations by the artist alternate with rapidly cut sequences of still images.

The lustrous narrator of the film is Hélio Oiticica himself. In the same way that the artist extends the painterly into the environment and transmutes the corporal into the sculptural, his narratives go far beyond the boundaries of an artist’s biography. The slums of Rio de Janeiro, the Tropicália Movement as an alternative to the repressive politics of the military dictatorship, artistic productivity in London, and the art of idleness in New York: Oiticica roams through urban life as well as the Brazilian music and film scene and the New York underground. And now and again he shares with literal abandon his multifarious interests, influences and encounters, telling of the beauty and dangers of the streets – a “sexual initiation” – and of samba, cocaine, Jimi Hendrix’s intensive relationship with his electric guitar, carnival processions, the labyrinthine architecture of the favela, and of the navigational abilities of ants. “Hélio Oiticica” is an anti-academic (art) historiography and a refutation of joyless curatorial administrative labor. Most recently, the artist has dubbed his creative method as “Delirium Ambulatório” – whatever that might mean, “Hélio Oiticica” itself is an invitation to get infected by it.