What is Lyssa humana?

Here's the official description I just translated a few minutes ago:



Lyssa humana is an independent art group that works with film, writing, object art and sound. From the beginning on it was also active as an organizer. Many of the performances were presented together with Delir Noir. Hand-made mini series are disguised as audio media, but are conceived as gesamtkunstwerk. Content and packaging are melded to a unity. (record made of hard plaster)

Lyssa humana initially emerged out of the 'Nachtkino' (night cinema). In the mid 1980s Nachtkino was a small group within the local film club AKF that organized the cinema in the city gallery, Kino im Leeren Beutel, now called Filmgalerie. This night cinema was a special program showing b-pictures, underground movies, music clips, genre movies, etc. The program became extremely successful with the audience and soon found many regulars who didn't want to miss an evening. Tilo Ettl, the recently deceased Walter Harteis and William Kretschmer were responsible for the Nachtkino.
During this time they also published a little periodical and named it: 'Lyssa humana. Magazine for the cultural rearmament'. The topics of the magazine went beyond the concern for cinema and its history and absorbed all realms of creative culture. Edmund Bachmeier and Walter Heilmeier contributed to the magazine and also made suggestions for the program at the cinema.

The film club had allowed Nachtkino to exist for a limited span of time only, but its success made it possible to go on now using the name Lyssa humana.

By then the group had already decided to operate culturally beyond the mere projection of movies, and a founding manifest was signed which defined Lyssa humana as a loose organisation without any binding rules. In the years thereafter a multitude of publications were produced, most often pamphlets, flyers with no advertising intentions. And from 1989 to 2000 there were at least 90 special movie events.

In August 1988 Lyssa humana performed for the first time as a musical group at the cinema event called 'Dada For Now', later it performed quite often in tandem with Delir Noir. Many of the impressive print and object mini-series were produced for these occasions. The movie events, however, were always at the core of all activity and later moved from the city gallery's cinema to the privately owned Stali cinema until the year 2000.

Lyssa humana's well-founded knowledge of art history and subculture made it possible to meld diverse styles and techniques which they called 'apocalypse culture'. 1989 they held a 10-part seminar at the city's adult education center VHS and added 4 movie events at the cinema to accompany the course.

Lyssa humana was less a loose group with strict rules, but rather a close-knit community with a decidedly open perception of what culture is about. Disappointed and downright appalled by the petit-bourgeois mentality even within the left-wing scene Lyssa humana was first of all a protestion against the censorship from the bourgeois established culture authorities and against the self-censorship of the autonomous opinion leaders. The intention was to revisit, renew and rethink the initial impetus of the early modern, especially Dada, therefore using the term 'cultural rearmament'. Such culture is 'apocalyptic', since it had to fight off the hostility of contemporary culture coming from all sides. Lyssa humana is musically 'industrial', since it's the intersection where Luigi Russolo's futurist noise manifest, John Cage's aesthetics of aleatoric sound production, Kraftwerk's electronic pop music and the punk rebellion's D.I.Y. principles meet together.