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WRO 07 Reader

Constantly in Motion

Current Trends in Experimental Film and Video in Germany
(1994 – 2004)

The films and video works in the series “Constantly in Motion” are available on four DVDs and together with this brochure have been put together with the aim of presenting the most representative overview possible of developments in the last ten years as well as of current trends in experimental film work in Germany.
Included here are not only complex masterpieces of content and aesthetics but also works that focus on experimenting with various techniques and skills and on developing personal artistic styles.
The selection was limited to film and video works. Even though the field of media art continues to expand, media art projects that lack a linear structure or require interactivity as well as multi-channelled works could not be considered here. The large number of works available to choose from justifies this procedure in favour of having a better and clearer overview of the whole package. The film and video programme presented here continues the series of earlier film packages put together by the Goethe-Institut in which the development of German avant-garde and experimental filmmaking from the 20s to the middle of the 90s is documented.

Since the beginning of cinematography the history of experimental film has evolved as a subdivision of the history of the cinema. The works of experimental cinema have, however, made important contributions to the development of film as a separate art form and to the language of the cinema and to film aesthetics. The experimental nature of this formal and in terms of content and aesthetics very heterogeneous genre is characterised among other things by the fact that for the most part the films were made, and are still being made, independent of the commercial structures of the film and cinema market, as free, independent artistic and very personal works of art, and as a rule they constitute a form of expression that stands opposite to the mainstream. This is even truer of video art, which from the very beginning has belonged in the field of fine arts and shows a variety of connections to and interrelations with experimental films. Generally speaking, experimental works on film, video or even on immaterial storage media are created at film academies and art schools and in the milieu surrounding them, or rather by the students who graduate from them. In addition to non-commercial cinemas and a growing number of specialised festivals, the places where these works are being shown are the galleries, museums and exhibition halls of contemporary art, and also increasingly the Internet. Despite the variety of new media available today, the interest in experimental film and video works is great. This is especially evident at the great number of film and media colleges, particularly because the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking from the 20s to the present is being explored there. Moreover, innumerable industrial applications in advertising, graphic design, the Internet and the production of music videos and feature films are based on the great wealth and continuing development of experimental languages in cinematic art.

The way in which the works are presented is in a constant state of change and most certainly influences the criteria used by the artists in designing their works. If up to the middle of the 90s screenings at festivals and in clubs or local cinemas were still the predominant form of “evaluation”, in just the last few years many video works and even film productions have also been designed for the art market and for permanent showing in exhibition halls. In addition to artistic concerns, which are of primary importance, as installations these loops take into account this special situation of presenting works outside of the cinema or on television. A film or video shown in this way, in several exhibition cycles, can from time to time reach a wider audience than many cinema films.

As a result of the popularisation of digital technology and the growing media competence in society, working with experimentally created images and sounds has changed considerably in the last few decades. Stylistic devices of the avant-garde from an earlier period show up today in music videos, computer games or in the advertising used to promote consumer goods. The programme presented here, however, focuses on artistically independent works and shows how diverse the individual approaches are. The important trends or schools, like those we are familiar with from the history of experimental film, are hardly discernible. This scene is constantly changing, on the one hand, simply because of the advancing technical developments and the widest variety of artistic ways to approach the subject, and on the other, because of the diverse goals, life scripts and moral concepts of those involved.

What has been noted is that the frequently predominant and self-referential relationship to a particular medium, to the material constituting the medium, the structures immanent in the technology surrounding it and its visual language, which stem from the period of the 70s to the 90s, has shifted in favour of a critical treatment of the “content”, of narrative forms and of the relationships to society. It has also become clear that the diverse relations between the visual and sound levels are the primary concern of the artist. The digital media and the computer-aided means of production and presentation have expanded the creative possibilities of the artist tremendously. The emphasis here is on “possibilities”, because digital technology underlines the aspect of process, the simple modification of images down to the smallest detail, the pixel. The integration of various cultural data, whether they be music, texts, photographs, sound or films, is the distinguishing feature of the computer as a “cultural interface”. The uncomplicated “undo” feature, used to reverse the last steps in editing, facilitates experimental filmmaking when trying out different arrangements of scenes in the “production of a film”.

Determining and evaluating the quality of individual experimental films, however, is difficult. A sensible method would be to draw conclusions from the work about the intention of the film’s creator, in order to judge whether and how this has been achieved. In contrast to a feature film, whose purpose is to tell a story and entertain the viewers, which it achieves through the use of psychology, progressive levels of tension, suspense and plot, the number and variety of means available for designing experimental films and videos and developing their inherent artistic qualities is much greater, because they do not have to fulfil the expectations of a movie or television audience concerning a particular genre. This “unleashed” creativity, on the one hand, certainly results in an increasing complexity of creative trends and artistic approaches that quite often resist being canonised by the academic establishment. On the other hand—and this also becomes quite clear in the works of the DVD package being presented here—the films and videos can give rise to impulses of inspiration and renewal that not only take up trends in the fine arts but also have a possible effect on the “mainstream”, such as those very calm, ambient and “chilly” interpretations in the most recent works in this package, which stand out from the still predominant trend of fast editing, jump cuts and changes of pace found in popular advertising and in mainstream music videos.

The motivation and intentions of experimental films, however, are not always clearly evident. Of course, an experimental film or an artistic video can, comparable to a painted panel or a piece of music, convey meaning and reveal itself just through the impression it makes. It can set discursive processes in motion and strike an intellectual nerve or touch a political or aesthetic Zeitgeist, thus stimulating interest and sympathy, providing insight, winning approval and producing good entertainment. In the same way that with some background knowledge of the science and history of art the interested observer gains access to works of art, in dealing with experimental films it is helpful to have some previous knowledge of the history, subjects and working methods related to experimental films in order to enjoy and appreciate them. And achieving this goal is one of the main reasons for this brochure.

Programme 1, Images of the World – Worlds of Images

The programme opens with a cinematic journey to the so-called New World. In her film Just in Time, Kirsten Winter uses cinematographic experiments and abstractions to distort, inflate and analyse the classic first visual impression that someone has when arriving in New York City. She intensifies the neon lights and the tracking shots through the canyons of the streets by means of superimpositions and multiple exposures to form a patchwork for which the composer Simon Stockhausen has woven an appropriate acoustical carpet of sound. The vertical structures in the urban centres fade into the parallel rails of the railway tracks on which advances in technology and engineering were transported to the western territories of the New World. The film remains largely abstract, and it aestheticises such visual attractions as the filigree steel construction of a railway bridge. Black and white landscape shots along the railway line, which to some degree have a very contemplative quality about them, alternate with a staccato-like, colourfully collaged middle part consisting of fragments of images, speech and writing. The artist’s personal style is also revealed in the passages painted over with oil colours, which were done at the editing bench, and the use of the scratching technique.

The original footage of the film The Day Slows Down As It Progresses by Thomas Bartels was shot among those living and working in the streets of Bombay and Baroda in India. In contrast to the large cities in Western society here we still find a great number of highly skilled techniques used in the analogue production of pictures and images. An itinerant photographer making passport pictures works with a camera, fixer, contact sheets and scissors, just as if photography were still at the beginning of its development.
Painters of cinema and advertising hoardings still compose by hand images of India’s own Bollywood stars as well as the huge advertising signs for international electronics companies, which are gradually bringing globalisation to the country, and apply them to the sides of buildings. Thomas Bartels has used his cinematic techniques in a congenial way: Single-frame shooting, time lapse, slow motion, masking, enlargement of details at the editing bench and many others also show clearly here a mastery and a reduction to the essential elements of cinematic art, from which the experimental and artistic diversity in design and production is only now developing.

In Elsewhere by Egbert Mittelstädt the camera pans in a slowly flowing, steady circular motion through the interior of the Tokyo underground. At the stations we see the passengers coming and going, but the stopping and accelerating of the train has no effect on the gradual, continuous rotation of the camera. Even if the narrated time of the train ride is accelerated, fragmented and overlaid, within this there arises—almost like in a gyroscopic compass—a separate narrative time whose order is only subjected to its own independent rotary motion. It is a study about the relativity of time, space and velocity.

Wanderlost by Timothee Ingen-Housz is a two-dimensional film that works with visual humour, or as the director calls it, a “blue-box computer holiday film” featuring himself. It is all about creating artificial worlds, but in particular about the digital world of images and about the playful testing of digitally created visual effects. The film was made at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne under the direction of the British experimental film guru David Larcher.

The film In by Philipp Hirsch is based on a linear, conclusive story. The surreal worlds of images—embedded in and permeated by real film sequences—seem mysterious, though this depends less on them being deciphered by the viewer than on the resulting discussion as well as the various levels addressed by the film and the questions it poses.

In his film Full Moon, Casten Aschmann uses a very quiet, old piece of music by Eden Ahbez as an opportunity to create a montage of images that visualise fantasies, longings and feelings of happiness. There are some amazing picture motifs including muscle-animated tattoos and sunflowers with human contours. Texts appear on the screen that comment on and satirise the resulting moods.

As If by Christian Meyer relates a boy-meets-girl story in which real actors play their parts in constructed or painted scenery. Through the use of diverse techniques of film editing and the mixture of a real film, graphics and set design, the film conveys a feeling of virtual reality. A narrator continuously explains the film off camera and comments on it with a laconic tone of voice, creating the impression of a photo essay.


Programme 2, Ver-Ortungen / Dis-Location

In Das Schlafende Mädchen (A Maid Asleep) by Corinna Schnitt everything is initially calm. Only the toy model of an old cargo sailing ship is floating on the water in a well-tended, slightly hilly grass-covered landscape. A slow crane shot focuses our view on a multitude of similar-looking semi-detached and terraced houses built in the style of country cottages. The mass of lovely houses are laid out like a pattern plate—clean and ideally arranged, but completely deserted and eerie. Except for a light breeze, which a little boat is making use of, apparently nothing is stirring, no human being, no animal, no vehicle. Only the quiet chirping of a bird is heard. It isn’t until the end of the film that the charged atmosphere is interrupted by a voice coming from a answering machine. The film seems like a study on slowness and emptiness. Just as Vermeer’s paintings, it has been worked out to the finest detail, and yet with its mysteriousness and ambiguity it evokes a variety of interpretations.

Crofton Road SE 5, an older but prototypical work by Gerd Gockell, breaks down the views of a busy street corner in London into its separate photographic parts. In addition to its amazing special effects and the high artistic quality, the film also has the look of a parable about the entelechies of the cinematic illusion of motion. Individual photographic prints taken from 16mm film sequences are mounted onto a surface and by means of single-frame shooting are reanimated to create cinematic impressions. The frequency at which these processes are carried out determine that because of the inertia of the human eye starting with roughly 16 individual frames per second a cinematic impression is regained.

Nothing is happening at the beginning of Thomas Köner’s Banlieue du Vide—just some snow-covered streets, at night in the glow on the street lighting. Off camera we hear only a subdued roar and the sound of voices in the distance. However, for Thomas Köner it is precisely this emptiness and silence recorded round the clock by public surveillance cameras (found footage) that is the most important aspect. At closer inspection and against this background the film, with the subtle changes in the contents of its images and the sound composition, takes on a new aesthetic quality that can be compared with the early works of Andy Warhol.

Although No Damage by the filmmaker Caspar Stracke, who has been living in New York City since 1993, does not refer directly to the events that took place on 11 September 2001, a film made today about the skyscrapers in Manhattan can no longer avoid evoking this association. The central aspect of this video is the architecture of New York’s high-rise buildings, which more or less incidentally has been the subject or backdrop of numerous feature films, in particular those of a historical nature. From found footage some relevant shots and short sequences were isolated, edited, in the process partly distorted so as to make them unfamiliar, and reassembled together with various documentary scenes from the construction of the skyscrapers to form a kaleidoscope of vertical views of the city.

The shots for Beacon by Matthias Müller and Christoph Giradet were primarily filmed at the sea, namely at different locations throughout the world. The motifs in the film include waves, ships, lighthouses, aquariums, people strolling at the beach and again and again the horizon, but also a busy coastal road, vapour trails from aeroplanes and a wedding couple. These are very calm scenes with slow-motion effects, and what they have in common is that they offer viewers the opportunity to reflect. A woman’s voice in heard off camera slowing reading a melancholy text composed by the Canadian filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom. The reduced visual language with only a very few experimental imaging techniques creates a contemplative almost sentimental atmosphere. Matthias Müller and Christoph Giradet have been working together for several years on numerous film and art projects. Many of their works have won international awards.

The title Arktis – Zwischen Licht und Dunkel (Arctic – Between Light and Darkness) leads us to expect a documentary film. What Jürgen Reble in fact shows us is a montage of rather spectacular shots from the world of eternal ice in the style of a nature or animal documentary film, underlaid with sounds but without any commentary. The film is composed of found footage from a large number of different reports about the Arctic Ocean. These short pieces, however, were digitised and subjected to intensive post-processing (colour, shutter, time). The new material was edited in such a way that a dense composition of form, movement and colour was created that resembles an imaginary dreamscape. The contemplation of perception is supported by the subtle sound composition, which—technically just as complex—is primarily derived from original sounds.


Programme 3, Emotional Roller-coaster

In the opening sequence, taken from an old DEFA film, Corinna Schnitt first allows us in Living a Beautiful Life to take a short look back at the Garden of Eden, where little naked children and animal babies are peacefully romping about. This is followed by a young American couple alternately making statements in their stylish Los Angeles home about how perfectly happy, successful and satisfied they are in their jobs, their house, their street, their marriage, with their household staff, their children, etc. The polished surfaces of the building and its furnishings appear to blend seamlessly into the perfect world of the commodities and notions of its inhabitants, a world not clouded by any kind of irritations. It is an impressive film, which raises doubts about concepts of Western morality.

A sharp contrast to this is presented by Athanasios Karanikolas’ film S, which shows the destructive, sub-cultural side of Los Angeles. We accompany Supermarky, a bodybuilder who is somewhat past his prime, to a sparsely furnished suburban flat. Later we witness the all-body massage session of a cult body (Ron Athey) completely covered with tattoos. Even with the sequined dress that Supermarky helps “The Goddes Bunny” to slip on, no amount of glamour appears in this drab atmosphere. The silence that has existed so far is ultimately broken by a duet singing at the side of the road: Franz Schubert’s song of the path with no return. In the film’s basic tenor of hopelessness, loneliness and lack of prospects there are also moments of mutual happiness which emerge from the responsibility that the characters have for one another. The artistic director of the entire production was the Berlin filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim.

The film Achtung – Die Achtung (Attention – Respect) by Michael Brynntrup conveys a similar atmosphere. The focus here is also on experiences on the borderline, not only on the part of the performers but also of the viewers. The images of tattooed bodies may very well offer an aesthetic appeal, but the scenes of self-piercing and the extreme practices of self-stimulation directly violate visual taboos. Nonetheless, this film is justifiably a part of the programme, because it stands on the one hand for a “cinema against taboos” (Amos Vogel) and on the other for a large number of experimental cinematic works in the context of gay culture.

The third film in this series is Living Polaroids – Who the fuck is Morrisroe by Curtis Burz. Around 2,000 Polaroid photos and several Super-8 mm films were among the things left by Mark Morrisroe, a male prostitute, artist and AIDS victim, who grew up in a violence-ridden environment of prostitution. His short and intensive life is retold by Burz with the help of two actors.

The work The Oral Thing by Bjørn Melhus comes from the depths of melancholy. Just as a number of other well-known experimental filmmakers, Melhus also studied at the Brunswick College of Fine Arts under Prof. Gerhard Büttenbender and Prof. Birgit Hein. The primary focus there was on examining the entelechies of the medium of film and on exploring the development of a formal language of the art of cinema. In his film and video works Melhus developed a personal canon of themes: doppelgangers and twins, as well as criticism of the media and the critical treatment of the mainstream. He works with well-known quotations from film, music or texts, which he dissects and reassembles. As a rule, all performing roles are played by himself, and this results in him assuming a variety of identities. In many of his works he reflects the culture of American media. Thus, at the centre of The Oral Thing we find TV preachers and chat shows. He analyses the structure of these programmes and then combines a multitude of elements typical of this genre, such as a charismatic priest or a moderator, the embarrassing questions asked by studio guests on taboo subjects and personal misdeeds and transgressions, the confrontation and reconciliation of guests and the instrumentalisation of the studio audience as a moral authority. Recognised formal elements such as logo animations, light shows, abrupt playing of music and frequent commercial breaks complete the provocative performance of international media formats.

Ron & Leo, a film by Oliver Husain, introduces us to a set of twins: teenage idols who slowly want to grow out of their pink furry rabbit costumes and regain the favour of their youthful audience. This is the beginning of a painful process of self-discovery. Oliver Husain uses the possibilities of digital image editing with its candy-coated colours to focus attention on teenage pop culture and pre-evening TV series.

The double exposure in Mit Mir (With Me) by Kerstin Cmelka makes it possible to show one movement following another on one image level. Here the effect is used to create the impression that there are two women lying on a bed and engaging in sexual activity. Actually it is one woman, who is preoccupied with herself. This is an example of the doppelganger or twin motif, a form of visualising autoeroticism and narcissism.

The emotional roller-coaster of this section of the programme concludes with Selbstbildnis Studie Nr. 2 (Self-portrait Study No. 2) by Wolfgang Lehmann. Here, too, it becomes apparent that it is precisely the experimental film that offers possibilities of self-reflection. The filmmaker is often his own subject. In this case, however, sophisticated filming and editing techniques are used to turn self-portraits and nude depictions into a self-contained work of art, whose aesthetic quality goes far beyond the image itself and extends to the materiality aspect of the film and the time-related quality of the cinematic form.



Programme 4, Structure and Symbol

There is only one shot on Cornelius Kirfel’s Land Unter (Land Under). It’s a slow moving shot filmed from the roof of a car, at night through a quiet residential street in the city, past rows of houses with well-kept old buildings with parked vehicles in front of them. A musical composition with the roaring of the ocean and the screeching of gulls is heard off camera. Everything is peaceful. In accordance with the given situation, it is, in the opinion of the filmmaker, also supposed to remain this way. The film radiates a broad acceptance and the calmness of the nocturnal moment in a gently flowing unity of movement and image.

Numerous works of video art are in the tradition of what is referred to as structural film. Underlying them is a clearly structured idea, and filming and post-production are done in accordance with this idea. This is also true of Rack by Volker Schreiner. In this film happenings in a staircase were filmed with three cameras, from three standpoints and at three points of time. The editing of the film makes it possible to restructure the different images alternately like a zip-fastener. Different perspectives, spaces and times are interwoven.

According to the accustomed way of viewing films, the cut ends a shot and film editing or montage puts these shots into a certain order. This may be the rule, but not in the film Blümchen (Little Flower) by Sebastian Jochum. There is a chronological thread here in which a young man is sitting on the foot of the stairs, trying to lure a cat. On and in front of the stairs things begin happening later that cannot have taken place at the same time. Supposedly we are viewing only one shot, with no cuts and no montage. The same scene was filmed repeatedly at different points of time and seamlessly copied into each other. In addition, individual sections of the picture were put together in such a way that things taking place at different times seem to be happening simultaneously. This is made possible by a special kind of editing technique and the digital integration of the contents of images.

In The Source by Tim Coe we see at the beginning only a few people coming and going. On closer inspection, however, we notice that it is always the same person who is moving in the setting: identical clones or replicas, who are walking about in front or behind each other in increasing numbers without touching or disturbing one another. We initially feel a visual attraction that runs counter to our experience and our accustomed sense of perception, and which can only be created through animation and duplication using the computer. The discursive level of the work increasingly moves to the centre of focus, which ranges from its reflections on the practice of digital image editing in the everyday media and the mass duplications in the crowd scenes of Hollywood films to the reproduction of biological “mass-produced articles”.

Jivan “Up There” by Marc Comes contains images with spherical sounds added to them. The visual attraction of these images are a result of multiple exposures, spraying mists of water and the ritual-like actions of an androgynous adolescent, such as the meticulous folding of a large felt blanket. In its condensed aesthetisation the film depicts a transition and an initiation with strong similarities to prenatal memories.

The film Falcon by Karo Goldt reveals itself to the audience by way of its “cautious” shifts of colour and structural compositions. Behind the graphic structures appearing out of the orange-coloured mist is a computer-edited photograph of the cockpit window of an F-16 fighter plane (called Falcon).

In Persuaders by Peter Simon a young woman in a grey coat is standing in a dismal landscape and looking into the camera, focusing on the inside of it. This is followed by the insertion of a line of text: “You are here”. After this a second woman in a red sleeveless blouse is also looking into a camera lens, trying to discover something. Both women are accompanied by look-alikes, whose appearance is apparently not the result of multiple exposures, because the bodies do not penetrate each other visually. With a curiosity similar to that of the protagonists, the viewer endeavours to get to the bottom of the digital effects and the whole composition of the work.

In No Sunshine Bjørn Melhus also plays several persons at the same time. Repetitions and reflections are central motifs. His costumes are artificial, and thus he wears a wig and fingerless gloves that recall toy figures. At first glance many of his works are easy to grasp, and the sound conjures up memories. But this familiar feeling does not last, because the serial repetitions of images and sounds call into question that which is seen and heard, and forces the viewer to reflect upon this. This is also the case in No Sunshine. The video is based on an old song by Stevie Wonder, which is quoted in sentence fragments, as is the remake of it done by Michael Jackson. In the painful memory of the loss of their childhood and in reflecting on their process of self-discovery, the twin figures engage in a dialogue consisting of text modules and hackneyed phrases from the pop world and the daily media.

Schlag auf Schlag (One After Another) by Anna Anders is a small incisive attack on our accustomed ways of perceiving the world. Different objects smash the glass separating the cinematic really from the audience.

The double exposures and black and white images turned upside down that appear in Privat Physik (Private Physics) by Felix Höfler and Herwig Weiser take up the theories of the chaos researcher Prof. Otto E. Rössler, which focus on the question of whether the world is a machine or a dream. Or perhaps both, if the perception is correct that such a mathematically exact machine is only a part of a neatly constructed dream. The strong affinity of experimental filmmakers to science and philosophy shows up particularly when these fields present opportunities to think, so to speak, outside the box and expand the boundaries of perception.

Drama, Strings and Horns by Gunther Krüger is a one-minute film news document produced in 1968 by the East German television network on a police operation against demonstrators in West Germany, which is extrapolated in numerous repetitions. This rhythm is also taken up by the accompanying music, which develops a dramatising function by way of the stylistic device of the continuously extending loop.

Utrechter Hütte (Utrecht Hut) by Franz Höfner
The programme concludes with something tangible. A living room with period furniture is completely taken apart and reassembled on the spot in the form a small hut.

This not only provides for a practical disposal of unwanted furnishings, but it also clearly illustrates a basic principle of experimental film and video works in dealing deconstructively with the mainstream. The question is, however, whether the hut is stable and weatherproof, for art is a fragile cultural asset. Although it lays itself open to constant debate, it should not only be exposed to the free interplay of forces, but it also needs the often protective roof of complex structures that include opportunities for education and training, instruments for production and support as well as the social spaces for presentation and reception.

Jochen Coldewey, November 2004