• Illustration of red-headed person leaning back on elbows in grass. They are wearing a orange jacket.

    iwtww00a.jpeg

    Journal cover. octopus notes 11 (2024).

  • Book spread with table of contents on the left page and a photograph of a young person sitting on a sofa and holding a dog on the right page. The background is white, and the text and photograph appear in black.

    iwtww0b.jpeg

    Table of contents. octopus notes 11 (2024).

  • A feminine-presenting person holds a baby and faces the camera. To the left, a masculine-presenting person, wearing sunglasses, looks away.

    iwtwwl02.jpg

    Photograph of Kurt Kren (left) and Birgit Hein (right) with Hein’s daughter Nina, n.d. Silver gelatin print on paper; 8.9 x 13 cm. Unknown photographer.

  • Book spread. On the left page, a photograph shows a feminine-presenting person holding a baby and facing the camera. To the left, a masculine-presenting person, wearing sunglasses, looks away. On the right page, the first page of the article

    iwtww01.jpeg

    Megan Hoetger, “‘It Was the Way We Lived’: On Underground Cinema, Reproductive Labor, and Curating”, octopus notes 11 (2024).

  • Collage made from a newspaper page. Half of the page is occupied by a photograph depicting a group of people standing in front of a storefront. At the bottom half, there's an article with a photo and a missing chunk, on top of which there's a cut out from a different page, which only partially occupies the missing space.

    iwtwwl03.jpg

    Collage with cut out article “Krach beim Fest der Streifen-Macher” (BILD, March 8, 1969); 29.5 x 19 cm.

  • A group of three masculine-presenting people stand by the open door of a small Volkswagen bus, facing the inside.

    iwtwwl04.jpg

    The XSCREEN VW bus tour, c. 1969. Silver gelatin print on paper; 12.6 x 17.7 cm. Unknown photographer.

  • Section of a poster. It shows a black and while photograph with two people dressed in black, standing against a white background. On top of the photo, in red, there is a drawing of a clown and some handwritten notes. The event name appears above the photo.

    iwtwwl05.jpg

    Poster detail for expanded cinema show by Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, 1980. B&W photocopy on paper with hand drawing by Nina Hein; 29.7 x 21 cm.

  • mhoetger_it-was-the-way-we-lived_octopus-notes-11-2024.pdf [pdf, 9.47 MB] 

  • more info on XSCREEN 

  • more info on Birgit Hein 

  • Octopus Notes, No. 11 

“‘It Was the Way We Lived’ is a little history about underground cinema, which intervenes into curatorial and exhibition histories. It is about the politics of distribution and display, or, to put it in Marxist terms, technologies of organization. It is about state film infrastructures and kinship structures and the roles of the latter in reproaching the former. It understands cinema not as a series of film texts to be read discretely, but as a set of processes—of producing, organizing, gathering, and living together.”

A text that is conceived as a family photo album for Birgit Hein and the group of filmmakers associated with the XSCREEN: Studio for Independent Film (Cologne, c. 1968–1973). In it, Hoetger poses questions on how to historiographically navigate impasses between reading on-the-ground praxis and ideologically politicized lines of identification. In its form, the piece proposes to do so through a feminist trajectory of analysis of power, with all of the matters of social reproduction embedded therein.

Produced on invitation of Alice Pialoux for octopus notes 11⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠.

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