Lutz Mommartz

Biography

For over five decades, experimental filmmaker Lutz Mommartz shaped the German film and art scene with a radically different understanding of film. Since the 1960s, he was active in Düsseldorf as a filmmaker and artist, and his work raised key questions about the authenticity of film and its relationship with the audience. He achieved his international breakthrough in 1967 at the Knokke Festival, when his film "Self-Shots" won an award. Parallel to his work as a municipal official, he was a motivator in the Düsseldorf art scene, for example, as co-founder of the legendary artists' bar Creamcheese, and was represented in numerous exhibitions such as documenta 4 (with his "Zweileinwandkino" (two-screen cinema) in 1968) and STRATEGY: GET ARTS (Edinburgh, 1970). He received the Silver Federal Film Prize in 1977 for "As if by Beckett" and in 1978 for "The Garden of Eden" Mommartz stood for "the other cinema," beyond the mainstream, with the goal of establishing film as a means of artistic expression. In the 1970s, as part of the Düsseldorf Film Group, he campaigned for the institutional recognition of film in art. In 1975, he was appointed the first professor of film at the University of Fine Arts Münster (then an outpost of the Düsseldorf Art Academy) and headed the film class until 1999. In 2020, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf dedicated a retrospective to Mommartz's work. His works were most recently exhibited at the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Julia Stoschek Foundation. Lutz Mommartz is remembered as a pioneer of artistic film—uncomfortable, experimental, and ahead of his time.