Aryan Kaganof

One does not learn the art of Blind Fiilmmaking, one lives and experiences it, for no science will give you the key to the mysteries of the soul. One cannot become a good Blind Filmmaker without turning oneself into an object of study, evincing daily interest in the complexity of one's own case. To be initiated into the mysteries of the other, you must first be initiated into your own.

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Decolonising Wits is filmmaker and author Aryan Kaganof’s feature-length film looking at the Wits University end of what has come to be called the #RhodesMustFall movement.

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If I sometimes film anything political, it is by necessity focused on the terror of normality which totally dominates all the channels which are supposed to contain free communication. The stagnation is absolute. Aryan Kaganof 2015

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"A film about musicologists who can’t dance, nonetheless dancing in, and (not) talking about, a landscape they cannot see, not because they are blind, but because they; like Neville Chamberlain – whose grimly baffling lack of insight they bring to mind: are entirely out of touch with both the ontology and epistemology of the harsh South African reality they waltz in and out of."

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Synopsis: a radikal re-mix by Aryan Kaganof of three Frans Zwartjes films commissioned by Frank Scheffer. Background: Kaganof was once a student of Frans Zwartjes. When Kaganof himself began lecturing himself, he began giving his students the following advice, "I always tell the classes what Frans said to me, go make your films, leave school now, stop listening to anyonbody insane enough to pretend to be able to teach you anything about film making. If they knew they would be making films themselves, not teaching."

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After the first time she swore it was the last time. She would never fuck again. Not ever.

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A reconstruction of the history of South Africa’s first opera company, Eoan, and an exercise in getting at the truth, not only showing what it meant to be "a colored" during the apartheid regime, but also evoking the painful memories of that time. Interviews with former members of Eoan, photos, newspaper clippings, sound recordings, archive footage of opera performances and street scenes featuring the residents of District 6 in Cape Town give an impression of the world in which these people lived. By paying attention to the way in which the documentary was made – to questions that were not asked and answers that were not officially given – the painful truth behind the images and faces is gradually revealed.

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Society Of The Spectacle (2013) is basically a remix of Kaganof's Guy Debord tribute Click Here to Unsubscribe (2008), albeit at about ten times the speed.

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This is a rare unreleased Aryan Kaganof short that has never been released in any form. It features scenes from Kaganof's early feature The Mozart Bird (1993), including scenes that were cut from the film. Sweetness was also inspired by the theories of Guy Debord.

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Venom And Eternity For Dummies (2012) is a tribute to letterist poet Isidore Isou (On Venom and Eternity). The film utilizes excerpts from Kaganof's own first feature Kyodai Makes the Big Time (1992).

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A devastating assault on conformity culture, neo-liberal politics, literary pretension and the all-around follies of the Western world. Using, ironically, anti-art strategies—appropriation, violation and collage—Kaganof splinters the division between the high and the low, revelling in the contradictions and absurdities that transpire in a life lived crossing borders. Filmed on location in The Hague September 1995 at the Crossing Border Festival.

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The hour-long documentary, entitled Die Ander Rebellie, delves into aspects of the recent labour unrest mostly hidden from view in daily media reports. Filmed on location in places like Hangberg, Smartietown, Cloetesville, Heuwelkroon, Boesmanskloof, Rondebosch Common and De Doorns, it features interviews with so-called activists and scenes of protest. The footage was shot right at the beginning of the trouble, before the large-scale closing down of the N2, and provides a thrilling if spine-chilling picture of how the protest started as well as the political and cultural motivations behind it. A large segment of the film focuses on the struggle music of the growingly coherent group of people who have now started to call themselves "Khoisan activists", which is nothing less than a form of brown nationalism.

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“Click Here to Unsubscribe”, Aryan Kaganof’s latest short film, commemorates the revolutionary values of May ’68, 40 years on. This outstanding film had its world premiere in Johannesburg on March 15th 2008, a few days after its author settled in Sweden. We were very proud to see our name in the acknowledgements at the end as we’ve always emphasised the cinematographic legacy of Guy Debord, one of this resurrection’s spiritual leaders, in Kaganof’s work. The film starts with a quotation from Debord dating back to 1956 about cinematographic cut-ups, which were also essential to our latest film. Kaganof has re-invented the cut-up technique for this film, transforming the “random” aspect of the editing into an area of reflection and synthesis

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Brooding pimp Sugar Man escorts his three ladies of the night (Sugars) to various clients on Christmas Eve in Johannesburg, South Africa. He takes out a hit on a supposed romantic rival, while the ladies deal with some of the pitfalls of the job. All are pursued by their own demons and regrets at this festive time of year.

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South African auteur Aryan Kaganof plunders George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961) AKA Last Year at Marienbad. On the Jozi side up there’s the mysterious cerebra of noise and relative Electronic conceits, The African Noise Foundation. Fused around the sound-design of muti-instrumentalist/multi-producer Joel Assaizky (Bunny Chow; Hard Copy) and meta-conducting of AK Thembeka, the Foundation is dedicated to re/locating and exploding Africa’s melodic distortion into song. Check out link “We promise nothing. We bring the Noise.”

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“A man thinks when he touches a woman’s body it is only her body he is touching. It really is her soul, her brain, her creative power.” Olive Schreiner.

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I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying. —Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

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Oedipus and Punishment (2005) is an adaptation of a pre-existent sketch in Aryan Kaganof's early masterpiece Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994), which the auteur made when he still went by his birth name 'Ian Kerkhof.' The film features a monologue from American serial killer Edmund Kemper who is noted for his imposing size and high intelligence, standing 6 ft 9 inches (2.06 m) and weighing over 300 pounds (140 kg), and having an IQ in the 140 range – attributes that left his victims with little chance to overcome him.

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Jaap Hoogstra: Geboorte Werd Hem Zijn Dood (2005) AKA Jaap Hoogstra - A Piece of Monologue is a portrait of the gay Dutch theatre actor Jaap Hoogstra (1915–1998), who is famous for bringing Samuel Beckett to the Lowlands. The portrait centers on Jaap discussing his life as a gay man and rehearsing Beckett's fifteen-minute 1980 play A Piece of Monologue. Featuring music by Willy Alberti. Hoogstra previously appeared in Kaganof's transgressive Georges Bataille adaptation The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man (1994). Jaap Hoogstra - A Piece of Monologue features excerpts from The Dead Man 2, including the infamous urophilia scene where a woman pisses on Hoogstra's face while she is standing on a bar table.

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Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (2002) is the fifth of seven films in Kaganof's The Suprematist Compositions. These compositions are concerned with the nature of deity and are Kaganof's own personal favorites of his voluminous work, clearly inspired by the work of Kandinsky and Malevich. Synopsis: A slowly evolving re-mix experiment that seeks to fuse sound and image so that the eye hears and the ear sees. Featuring music by: Kraftwerk, Air, Underground Resistance, Thomas Heckmann, Ryoji Ikeda

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A SACRIFICE (South Africa, 2003, 13min19sec, 16mm/DVcam) A re-mix of the experimental classic CORRIDOR (1970) by Standish Lawder, with music by Jaques Casteréde and Geez n Gosh. world premiere was at the National Arts festival in Grahamstown.

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The Murder Mystery (2004) is an adaptation of a pre-existent sketch in Aryan Kaganof's early masterpiece Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994), which the auteur made when he still went by his birth name 'Ian Kerkhof.' This time it is the voice of the film maker interpreting a new monologue – a member of the Mafia in prison tells us of his criminal activities over gentle music that acts as a counterbalance, thanks to the contrary alchemy of the grand master.

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Self-portrait with Nanny (2004) is a gem from last year. The faded images of Kaganof as a baby put to retro burlesque music are a reference to the silent films of long ago. Once again, Kaganof pays homage to popular cinema, for this film is a perfect essay on the durability of cinematic time, as well as on the auto referential and egocentric dimension of the work of many great artists.-Dionysos Andronis

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“Nique ta mère!” (2004) is a 'Radikal-Re:Mix' of Kaganof's own Georges Bataille adaptation The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man (1994) that incorporates new music and tons of new footage. The film was commissioned by the French industrial music outfit Tempsion. It premiered in Paris, March 2004, and was released as part of the RECTIFIER DVD/CD package in early 2005 on the Letrange Sonotheque label (MAL013).

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Distorted postvideo fragments featuring music by Berlin inconoclast Alec Empire set to frantically edited hypertextbombs. Text from the novel BLACKHEART by Lesego Rampolokeng who also supplies the vocals.

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I walk on the rim of the abyss, and I tremble. Two voices contend within me. The mind: “Why waste ourselves by pursuing the impossible? Within the holy enclosure of our five senses it is our duty to acknowledge the limitations of man.” But another voice within me – call it the Sixth Power, call it the heart – resists and shouts: “No! No! Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: Death does not exist.’” Nikos Kazantzakis

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein 1921

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This documentary explores kwaito music developed in South Africa in the late 1990s and includes interviews with musicians, DJ's and producers as well as music clips. It was made for Dutch television and later sold to the SABC for repeated broadcasts.

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(South Africa, 17 July 2003, 5min, DV) This short film is a collaboration of Aryan Kaganof and Nicola Deane (director of photography) and part of the VIRGINS series. Music of Beethoven played by Anatol Ugorski.

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Portraits of a Young Orphan Jewish Girl from Eastern-Europe (2003) is a very short film, a confirmation of the possibility of creating cinematic masterpieces with an non-existent budget. The charming portrait of this young girl is sublimated with incessant tender zooms in and out on her face and her discreet smile, to accordion music. It’s a portrait-film, a dream-like film that has no contemporary equivalent to its formal and symbolic content. It is not a declaration of love, but a brief moment of admiration for beauty and the noble side of human nature.

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“We cannot abstain from watching the revelation of a being that would be an object neither for herself nor for any other gaze and yet which would effect, in the mystery of her own invisibility, the condensation of all objectivity.” Aryan Kaganof plays with the contradiction and relationship between the vulnerable, private realm and the voyeuristic, objectified domain in a film about a young woman's sexual initiation.

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PRIMAL SCENE: in Freudian analysis the traumatic moment when the child sees its parents engaged in sexual intercourse for the first time. Short film by Aryan Kaganof.

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This is an ultra rare and unreleased 6 1/2 minute Aryan Kaganof short that was shot in Amsterdam in 1992 but not edited together until 2002 after the director moved back to South Africa. Kaganof merely projected the old 1992 16mm footage onto a screen and recorded it with a digital camera in 2002. For some reason, he opted to not use a tripod, so the camera constantly moves around throughout the short.

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Vertiginous documentary, shot in effective black-and-white, treats two painful histories. The first is a love story about a truck driver who, on his way from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Luderitz (Namibia), is haunted by thoughts of his girlfriend and their recently severed relationship. His memories are expressed in an often recurring scene, in which songs by Alec Empire, Macy Gray and Robert Schumann roughly tell the story. This small history is alternated with the tragic fate of the Namibian Heroro people, many thousands of whom died early last century in concentration camps that had been set up by the German colonisers near Luderitz. The depiction of this history is cruder and more poignant, with slanting frames, odd camera angles and a multi-layered sound sculpture. The dilapidated barracks and officers' quarters are the last remnants of the miscarried, so-called civilisation projects in Africa.

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The two sides of the end of culture–in all the aspects of knowledge as well as in all the aspects of perceptible representations exist in a unified manner in what used to be art in the most general sense. In the case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches of fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable because the approval of existing conditions must finally renounce knowledge of itself, confronts the theory of praxis which alone holds the truth of them all since it alone holds the secret of their use. In the case of representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s former common language confronts its artificial recomposition in the commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of the non-lived.

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While still living in Amsterdam under his birth name 'Ian Kerkhof,' Aryan Kaganof co-penned the script for his friends Victor Nieuwenhuijs and Maartje Seyferth's debut feature Venus in Furs (1995), which is undoubtedly the most faithful cinematic adaptation of the S&M-themed Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novella of the same name. A number of years later after moving back to his homeland of South Africa, Kaganof directed his own tribute to Sacher-Masoch's classic work.

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Brooding pimp Sugar Man escorts his three ladies of the night (Sugars) to various clients on Christmas Eve in Johannesburg, South Africa. He takes out a hit on a supposed romantic rival, while the ladies deal with some of the pitfalls of the job. All are pursued by their own demons and regrets at this festive time of year.

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This film was shot entirely in Rotterdam and shows the German couple David (Helmut Berger) and Tanya (Sheri Hagen) who are kept by Ludwig (Udo Kier), David's half-brother. Ludwig has some dubious business to do and so he is staying in the port for a while. David and Tanya have followed him and are staying in a hotel. They pass the time committing robberies. When David finds a photo of an attractive young man among the booty of a robbery, his life is turned upside down. He will have to close the door on a suffocating past.

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Based on the writings of: J.G. Ballard, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Rollins, Roberta Lannes, Edmund Emil Kemper, etc. The structure of this film is literally that of the title: ten monologues adapted from various fiction and documentary sources which combine to produce an unsettling work that does not pretend to analyse nor to understand the serial killers.

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Short film in which a group of children get to know the Enge Knijperman (the Grisly Pincher Man) who falls madly in love with the Onderstebovenvrouw (Upside-down Woman). However the 220-Volt-Witch and the Toilet Slave set out to spoil things. Experimental short by Aryan Kaganof, made under his birth name Ian Kerkhof.

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Brooding pimp Sugar Man escorts his three ladies of the night (Sugars) to various clients on Christmas Eve in Johannesburg, South Africa. He takes out a hit on a supposed romantic rival, while the ladies deal with some of the pitfalls of the job. All are pursued by their own demons and regrets at this festive time of year.

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In the urban intensity of Johannesburg, Jesus is a special woman. She has powers she herself doesn’t understand. After her friend Mary arrives at her doorstep having been beaten up, Jesus has to choose whether to stay and nurse Mary or take revenge on the deadly Giant.

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Fugitive Jack is doing everything in his power to evade both the police and gangsters. Assuming he’s in the clear, he moves in with Keiko, a pornstar whose early life in an abusive family still haunts her.

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Short documentary on Japanese noise artist Merzbow by South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof. Filmed on location at the Kamakura Temple, Japan, 1997.

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Documentary about and with the Japanese electronic composer and artist Merzbow.

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Twentysomething innocents Jacqui and Martijn move to Amsterdam and immerse themselves in the intense and drug-laden underground club scene. Life turns out to be far more complicated, difficult, and dangerous than they bargained for. Their relationship is tested - repeatedly.

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