Bernd Behr’s 2006 LAFVA-funded film, House Without a Door, will be showing as the innaugral exhibition at e-raum, a new project space in Cologne, from 8 September to 13 October.

House Without a Door explores the relationship between film and architecture, linking a US military test structure with studio sets of 1920s German expressionist film. The film will be presented as a large-scale single-screen work accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack by Marcus Fjellström.

In 1943 the US military commissioned émigré modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn and Hollywood studio RKO to design and build a replica Berlin housing estate in the Utah desert to test incendiary bombs eventually deployed in the air raids on Dresden and Berlin. Behr’s interest lies in the performative nature of the building, embodied in its cultural/geographical displacement and its function of repeatedly performing its own destruction.

Borrowing its title from the early expressionist film Haus ohne Tür (1914), which has no surviving print, the work fictionalises the now inaccessible interior of this building through a set of references to 1920s Weimar films, including Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) and Dr. Mabuse (F. Lang, 1922). These references reflect Mendelsohn’s own relation to expressionist theatre, Weimar filmmakers and the proximity of the test site to an actual place in Utah called ‘Faust’.

House Without a Door was originally developed from a residency Behr held at The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah, and was first shown at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2006.

An internet publication accompanying the exhibition will be published on the e-raum website.