The group dogfilm existed from 1991-1999 and consisted of the five members Bettina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann, Merle Kröger, Ed van Megen and Philip Scheffner. We have completed training in various areas such as visual communication, fine arts, psychology, film studies and journalism.
From 1990 to 1995, all members of dogfilm worked in parallel in the interdisciplinary association Embassy eV in Berlin-Mitte, where numerous events in all cultural fields and joint projects were realized.
As a group of authors dogfilm, we regularly work on joint video and television productions. During two years of regular work for the magazine “Z” for politics, satire and art (Channel 4), we developed our own style in monthly contributions, which moved on the line between video art and documentary film, compilation and production. In a strongly associative post-processing, essays without comment were created from own and archive materials, in which, for example, interviews and experimental sequences were interwoven in terms of film and content.
During the work on “Z” we worked together with the other participants on the themes that dealt with certain political or socio-cultural events and conditions in Germany, so that the work was not topical, but was nevertheless linked to current affairs surrounding us . In two years, about 25 short videos between one and seven minutes long were created.
Out of the desire to make longer videos, we said goodbye to the magazine work for the time being in 1995 and produced longer videos for various editorial offices such as ZDF (Das kleine Fernsehspiel), Kanal 4 (documentation) and ARTE (theme evening), as well as independent productions that were not made for broadcast on television. We transferred and expanded the experiences we had gained in the field of short films in the resulting videos between 25 and 60 minutes. The own position or point of view was again consistently designed without comment, but through its own visual language, which is expressed both in the recording and in the editing. Within a year, the videos “Legal Bodies” (Heitmann/ Scheffner), “Try to Survive till 2005” (Ellerkamp), “The Making of… Internet” (van Megen/Zeyfang) and “Out of Body” (Ellerkamp/Kröger).
At the invitation of the editors of ZDF (Das kleine Fernsehspiel)/ARTE, we were able to realize an idea in 1996/97 that had already begun to take shape in 1994 with the short video “Soap”. A theme evening for ARTE was created with the title “Soap or Life is a Soap Opera”, a more than three-hour program in which we traced the phenomenon of the “soap opera” in its cultural, but also political and social significance on different content and formal strands to have. In the numerous individual videos of the evening, we were able to link our various previous working methods and add new possibilities.
In 1998/99 another work was created for the ZDF editorial team, The Little TV Game by Tina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitmann entitled “killer.berlin.doc”. A documentary film about a fictionalized situation: 10 people play a game in Berlin for two weeks in which they themselves become the persecuted and persecuted. “killer.berlin.doc” was produced on video and then transferred to 35mm film – the first dogfilm production that also met with international resonance as a cinema film.
In 1998/1999, again in cooperation with ZDF/ARTE, we developed the concept for the theme evening “No one is illegal”/ “papiers pour tous”. The aim was to create a fictitious, utopian place on television for four and a half hours, in which Europeans with and without valid residence status could have their say on an equal footing. In this context, the two documentaries “Planeta Alemania” and “With foreign help” by Merle Kröger, Ed van Megen and Philip Scheffner were realized.
Finally, as the conclusion of our joint dogfilm productions, we developed the pilot episode of a media magazine entitled “workstation” for the television workshop “quantum”/ 3Sat. Five documentary-experimental episodes are linked by a fictional background story: on January 1, 2000, a group of people meet around a campfire in the middle of the city to tell stories “from everyday electronic life”.
On December 31, 1999, after more than eight years of working together, we closed the “dogfilm” chapter in order to turn to new fields of work, constellations and structures…