Stephen Dwoskin: Hindered (Behindert)

Hindered (Behindert), Stephen Dwoskin, 94’, FRG / UK, ZDF 11.6.1974, Original German version

The American film essayist Stephen Dwoskin frequently experi- mented with the motif of the cinematic diary, in which the port- able 16mm camera became his means of artistic expression. In Hindered, the filmmaker, who suffered from polio at the age of nine, tells with radical subjectivity and in haunting images of his relationship with the actress Carola Regnier. “Dwoskin gives the camera its own biography, a (sexual) identity, which draws us closer to the medium of film in a disquieting way,” it says in the Arsenal programme, which screened his films under the title Cinema of Intimacy. The Golden Bear award for Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not in 2018 shows how far ahead of his time Dwoskin was, not only cinematically but also socio-politically.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) was an American film essayist, who shot his first films in the New York underground scene before moving to London and founding the famous London Film- Makers’ Coop in 1967. In many of his experimental film works, he addressed his limited mobility due to polio as a child. Dwoskin lived and worked in Germany from time to time. His films have been screened and awarded prizes at festivals around the world, including Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam and Oberhausen. For Das kleine Fernsehspiel, he made Hindered (1974), The Silent Cry (1977) and Outside In (1981). Central Bazaar (1976) and Ascolta! (2009) featured in the Berlinale Forum.