A working-class family saga
Made in 1972 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder for the German television channel Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), “Acht Stunden sind kein Tag” is a five-episode television saga recounting the loves and everyday problems of a working-class family in West Germany.
An intense, visionary work
As the pandemic reshuffles all the cards, redefines social stakes and alters economic ties, this burningly topical mini-series interrogates our very humanity and questions our relationship with work, with oppression, and with the will to live and exist freely, without compromise.
“Acht Stunden sind kein Tag” is also a powerful feminist gesture rooted in thoroughgoing modernity. The central character of this family saga, the grandmother, challenges social frameworks and reference points, overturning every code in an attempt to set her own destiny and that of her family within a vast field of possibilities.
Experimental installation
After more than 20 years of work and productions in New York, “8 ≠ 1” is Doris Mirescu's first creation in Switzerland. Doris Mirescu/Dangerous Ground Productions (a company founded in New York in 2001) devotes itself to conceiving unique experimental installations whose original staging and innovative use of video and image have been praised by numerous American newspapers and magazines (Vice Magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice, nytheatre). Dangerous Ground's productions explore our collective memory and journey to the heart of the human, within a demanding and constantly renewed contemporary film repertoire. They have been seen in prestigious American theatres such as the Public Theater (as part of the Under the Radar Festival) and P.S.122.
Bringing Fassbinder's images back to life
Taking the risk of the other, going to the heart of space and time so that Fassbinder's images come alive again: such is the artistic project of Doris Mirescu, director and artistic director. Her meticulous work of dissecting a space, a film and a text shatters the codes of linear theatrical representation and explores the margins, thereby revealing the ultimate truth of the original work. “I want to look the human being in the face, let it live, let it scream, let it speak through me on this stage that I have been trying to undermine for many years now, by removing the distance and separation that reassure (…)”, says Doris Mirescu.
A factory as a multimedia screen
An ultimate correspondence between the substance and form of Fassbinder's work and an absolute experience of place, the performance takes place in a disused former watch factory in Vaulion, whose reinvented space has been transformed into a film studio for the shoot. A truly multidisciplinary experience, “8 ≠ 1” brings together some twenty actors and non-actors, musicians, visual artists, video artists and filmmakers/camera operators. Three camera operators film “8 ≠ 1” in a single continuous take. The “feeds” from these three cameras are projected “live” onto the walls of a small room in the factory converted into a cinema.
This immersive set-up, essential to the “live cinema” experience, is neither illustration nor décor, but rather an attempt to “show” life in its present and its continuous flow. An intimate relationship thus forms between the camera, the camera operators and the “actor”, plunging the spectator into the heart of the experience. In this spirit of resonance, access to the performance itself is multiplied: it is offered to spectators gathered in the factory's small cinema, and via live streaming on Vimeo.