Shayne

Ricky Shayne passed through the West German entertainment scene like a comet, in a brief period from 1967 to 1972. He was born in Cairo, grew up in Beirut, and in Rome he became a star of the booming beat scene. He was then imported to Germany, where the most money could be made. Shayne found himself in Berlin between the pop magazine BRAVO and ZDF television show Hit Parade, celebrated and exoticized. Stephan Geene, ten years old at the time, was changed forever by Shayne’s persona, and today he explores this fascination. Geene takes several very different approaches to his encounter with the nervous and edgy Ricky Shayne, a survivor of his own history as a star and in BRAVO (which had devoted two special star features to him). Geene meets Shayne’s sons Tarek and Imran, both now the same age as Ricky during his Berlin period and the spitting image of their father of that time; he makes a serial TV anti-portrait, framed by rehearsals for a gala, as an attempt to give a broken career a final push; an architect thinks out loud about photography and theatricality, and about the option of designing a gala as a ruin in order to do justice to the figure of Ricky Shayne and his discontinuity and ambiguity.

Program

Stephan Geene, Shayne, 2019, 120 min

Presented by Stephan Geene, followed by a conversation with Ana Hoffner

Stephan Geene, born in 1961 in Bonn, was a member of the minimal club group of artists and is a co-founder of the b_books collective, a bookstore and publisher in the fields of political theory, gender, and film theory. He has translated texts by Maurizio Lazzarato, Jacques Rancière, and Beatrice/Paul Preciado. He has made two feature films, AFTER EFFECT (2006) and umsonst (2014), which was premiered at the Expanded forum at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Ana Hoffner is an artist, researcher and writer. She* works within and about contemporary art, arts-based research and critical theory. She* has finished the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2014. Her book The Queerness of Memory was published 2018 by b_books Berlin. Currently she* is the recipient of the DOC fellowship (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and is working on "Desynchronization: Queer Voices." Hoffner lives and works in Vienna.