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CIN I – 79' – 18+
A film derived from a scrap of an old and anonymous Pathé film with the well-known center perforations [of the 9.5mm format]. Constructed through multiple passes and optical set-ups using very few images from an anonymous stock shot to which brief, extraneous fragments have been added. In the middle of the perforation an unknown camera operator tries to somehow film part of a story (of what? of whom?) with some apparent success. Inexorably, the center perforation breaks into and disturbs the images of the camera operator, itself becoming the central protagonist, to the point, however, of becoming almost a screen or rather, actually a screen. A film dedicated to the perforation on fifty centimeters of film of a camera operator found and then perforated.
This film is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects. It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the "real" time which exists when the film was being shot, with the "real" time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.
The last word in ready-mades, Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love is a slightly slo-mo, optical reprint of an obviously ill-treated 70's porn movie in which the chemical rot that's already eaten away the edges of the image threaten to censor it entirely.
Sodom is viscerally graphic and disturbing through its hypnotic mirage of human fragment absorbed in mutilation. Based on the biblical story, Sodom recreates this destruction through an editing style that lends itself to a kind of organic image breakdown, creating a collage of moving image.
Imitations strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumiéres to the present day in order to find the future in our past.
The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also to the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself. Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shades. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shade.
Began with the AIDS related death of a close friend, Aus der Ferne is both eulogy and science fiction, closing hands with an indiscriminate contagion without succumbing to fatalism or despair. That site of desire should be so resolutely joined to death – or that the passage of death should follow the lines of love – these are the paradoxes beneath which Müller refashions the bodies of film and maker. While the film is shot throughout with the passing of a friend, it belongs finally to the filmmaker himself, who returns obsessively to his own body to gauge the possibility of going on.
Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a teenage girl describes the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film. CIN III – 63' – 14+
There are moments in cinematic art when the narrative of the film is subjectively implied and subsequently written by the viewer. While this is common to most structural and lyrical films in the experimental genre, none hits louder than T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G., an angry and demonic piece that simultaneously lulls you into awareness and hypnotizes you into an emotive overload.
First she cows, then she cows. Standing shot of a cowing cow which plays with the filmmaker and so with the audience.
A film whose subject is the place (a gymnasium), the time, (the 10 minutes the film runs), and the unconformity of the reality (the gymnasium), and the illusion (the representation of the gymnasium). All the components are strictly combined in an endless cycle, a Möbius stripe, an Escher's film in a Japanese tempo, from Slow to Fast, from Pianissimo to Fortissimo.
This tape was made from the balcony of the filmmaker's flat. It looks over a busy street of Rio de Janeiro, in which recycling is the way of living for some homeless. These persons are men of motion. To survive they carried on their working tools. It is the weight of life. In a similar manner, ants never stop carrying what they need to survive.
Worn out by the sea, the Sète fishing boats decide to spend a day in the country amongst the poppies surrounding Arles, Bédarrides and the Thouzon Grottos.
The ball of an exciting water polo match is followed here by the camera in a strange manner such that the whole environment of the stadium dances in chaotic motion while the ball, as an illuminated planet, continues to be, flickering, perhaps permanently, in the middle of the frame. During the ten minutes of the runtime, an aggregation of symbolic information, numbers, measurements, relations, signs is active on the surface of the screen and in the virtual field of the viewers mind.
This film was provoked by a trip on the overhead railway through the centre of Chicago in 1991. I filmed a twelve minute piece facing forwards in the direction we were driving. Three years later I came across the film material once more. The memory of it had faded, and its images were just as vague. So I worked on the material using a bleaching bath. The complex, cuboid-like architecture of the city came out in a test of the substantial and then sank back into the minority – dissolving to a lump of cosmic dust. I was first able to identify a projection of the experienced, within the undercurrent of disintegration.
CIN IV – 84' – 14+
....Remote....Remote.... was one of the films categorized by a considerable number of women as typifying despicable excesses and extreme violence. People frequently reacted to the film with horror, incomprehension and scolorn. In showing emotion, gentleness and sensitivity as female qualities, there was no place for aggression – cutting and violently opening were equated with male behaviour; having to penetrate in order to possess.
Secondary Currents is a film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language and has been the subject of a number of articles on the use of language in the arts. Percussion by Jim Meneses. "Prizbah ke no panz fatundo. Elmo cheshkadashi par lo biorn fatooshka! Como cinquema no delamyero sima disi, si cueja filidistro cuamchano mirichi-vasi komino sano dimensia!" – M'hidradane Vododook.
Operation Double Trouble is an antithetical version of the propaganda film Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter. By repeating each shot of the film twice, Sanborn pushes the strategic manipulations of the original, both in terms of montage and ideology. The echoing effect destabilizes the transparency of the narrative and provides insight into how we relate to audiovisual media.
I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social and remake those gestures into a dance that would front their conditioning, and as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the "facts" forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story-like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing.
The film works with a carefully chosen set of particular elements in order to explore the larger questions within the historical field. Stately and sinuous passages from a Beethoven string quartet create a complex argumentation around images and text. This music, both sympathetic and distanced, establishes rhythm and breadth in relation to a radio interview with Claude Levi-Strauss, and archival footage obtained from rephotographing Marcel Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity.
In this work, the artist reinterprets Chinese history by analyzing an early twentieth-century documentary photograph of a criminal execution in pre-modern China taken by a French soldier and made famous by the French thinker Georges Bataille. |
