The film portrait Conversation with Albert Knoll (2023) by the artist Philipp Gufler can be found on the YouTube and Vimeo page of the Forum Queeres Archiv München.
In the short film we follow Albert Knoll to his workplaces as an archivist and historian. Albert Knoll has been an employee of the Concentration Camp Memorial Site in Dachau since 1997. He is a founding member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München (FQAM), that was established in 1999. He has been on the board ever since.
Philipp Gufler, artist and long-time active member of the FQAM, realized a filmic portrait of Albert Knoll’s decades of archival and research work with a focus on his self-initiated interviews with contemporary witnesses. The short film provides a very personal and deep insight into Knoll’s historical work as well as his commitment to the FQAM with a focus on oral and social history.
For some time now I wanted to shoot a filmic portrait about Albert Knoll’s tireless self-organized historical work and ask him why he has dedicated a large part of his life to commemorating the crimes against humanity committed during the Nazi dictatorship and what this archival work has done to him. A special focus is on oral history, as I am interested in how, as a conversational partner, one preserves their knowledge and experiences in a certain way after the death of the contemporary witnesses. After he has done so many contemporary witness interviews the last thirty years and was the one who asked the questions, I reversed the situation in the short film and interviewed him.
Philipp Gufler
