East Man

East Man is a projectionist´s movie. It is assembled from a collection of 35mm leads and ends. Christian Neubacher shows us a world in which a projectionist touches film in its intimate parts, where it does not want to be seen, while experiencing the filmic image from an exclusive distance behind a pane of glass. A precise series of steps in the work process first allow for the familiar, direct experience of film, yet expand it to a before and after.
As a chosen art genre, cinema accompanied the era of mechanical disciplining and great ideologies. Now, the "East" exists only in retrospect; digital media let themselves be consumed without restraint. While East Man gathers role-models from the heroic American and Austrian film avant-garde since the 1960s, it filters them through memory. After the fact, it is no longer taboo to animate them sensually and emotionally. The heterogenic material with original soundtrack represents, in absentia, all that film can be, how cinema can be experienced. In the end, what remains from the projector´s metric flickering is heat lightning. (Max Limbeck-Lilienau) East Man is a found footage film that follows an arc from darkness to light and back again. The film draws its tension from the opposition between light and darkness, silence and loudness, stillness and motion. In stereo and wide-screen images, it lives through every stage of cinematic history, from simple shadow play to action films. (Production Note)