Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger: Rainbow’s Gravity

2014, video, 33′

Rainbow’s Gravity is a cinematic exploration of the history of colour film, especially the history written by Agfa Wolfen, the producer of colour film stock Agfacolor-Neu in the era of Nazi Germany. Rainbow’s Gravity not only unveils the genealogy of the Agfacolor-Neu colour film as an exploitative industrial and propagandist Nazi tool, but also problematizes the role of black-and-white (moving) images in the construction of history, especially the history of Nazism and fascism. While the black-and-white medium has been – through its political appropriation – constructed to connote historical remoteness, colour has been used to suggest proximity. Rainbow’s Gravity turns to the social phenomena that were blurred and disguised from the present by the black-and-white construction of historical distance.

Cast: Berit Ehmke, Hanna Bergfors, Mayan Printz, Michał Głazik, Tanja Kämper; screenplay, direction, production and editing: Mareike Bernien, Kerstin Schroedinger; director of photography: Smina Bluth; light design: Wassan Ali; costume design, make-up: Wibke Tiarks; sound recording: Birte Gerstenkorn; sound recording assistant: Olivia Oyama; soundtrack: Wibke Tiarks; sound mastering: Miles Whittaker; colour correction: Sebastian Bodirsky; catering: Mitch Andrade.

In her collage Toxic Polish (2019-2020), presented in the Corneous Stories publication, Mareike Bernien points to the material common to celluloid film, car paint and nail polish: the synthetic nitrocellulose. Historically, the three products based on nitrocellulose also shared the circuit of their popularisation: while in the East, the train brought moving images of the (October) revolution to the people, film in the West promoted car mobility and cosmetics.