Valérie Knoll and Hans-Christian Dany have curated for Kino REX a film series about the dandy. Its starting point is their exhibition “No Dandy, No Fun” at the Kunsthalle Bern, which opened in October 2020 but which very few people saw because of the pandemic. Now it is being continued in filmic form. The two have put together a program comprising eleven forgotten and controversial feature films. In their introductory text, Knoll and Dany go in search of a figure that constantly eludes us.
This film programme brings together exceptional cinematographic experiences in order to penetrate the complex figure of the dandy. The main characters of these films are dandies in the broadest sense of the term. What almost all the films have in common is a story about the wanderings of a loner who cannot find their place in the present. A king who refuses to accept the thinking of his own time. An extra-terrestrial who will not recognise the history of the inhabitants of earth who oppress him. A speculator who dreams of destroying the false world in which he so successfully operates. A melancholic who no longer wants to be the happy-go-lucky character that others expect him to be. A woman who does not fit into her reality and discovers another through alcohol. These are films about estrangement and the desire to follow one’s own way, instead of simply going along with everyone else
