Film

Without Learning,  Life is but an Image of Death

USA, 2022, 16 minutes

is an essayistic road movie through California, Nevada, and Arizona—from the Pacific coast across the Sierra Nevada into the deserts of the American Southwest. It interweaves landscape footage with quotations and reflections by Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and C. G. Jung.

Rather than following a conventional plot, the film moves associatively, feeling its way through spaces and ideas. Nature, literature, and psychology enter into an open dialogue. The result is a visual diary on transience, memory, and the search for inner movement in the outer world.

Portrait: Whitney Davis

2024, 16:9, 5 :30 minutes

The short film portrays Whitney Davis, professor at UC Berkeley and Distinguished Scholar of the Nomis Foundation, whose work spans art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and image theory. At its centre is his research into historical visual perception—how seeing changes, is shaped by culture, and influences our thinking.

The interview is complemented by an associative montage of seminal images from human history. This visual layer dialogues with Davis’s ideas, revealing the image as both a tool of oppression and a medium of liberation. The film attempts to make his thinking visible.

Direction  Max Knoop
Camera  Pauline Pyras
Sound mastering  Sinah Rosenzweig
Production  raum103 / Gropperfilm