RECENT HISTORY
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 5pm
London Film School

TRADITION IST DIE WEITERGABE DES FEUERS UND NICHT DIE ANBETUNG DER ASCHE
Gustav Deutsch, 1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
An elegy to nitrate film material. Image by Deutsch, sound by Fennesz.
“Some found footage – made of cellulose nitrate – the material
Fire – a threat to nitrate film – its theme
A quote – from Gustav Mahler – its message
The soundtrack – by Christian Fennesz – as the bridge” —Gustav Deutsch, 1999

LA SORTIE
Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 1999, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
Reduction into abstraction though the printing process. In memory of the Lumière Brothers and the workers leaving the factory.
“The first film of cinematographic history shows workers leaving a factory. The title of this work, which is 50 seconds long and bequeathed to us by the Lumière brothers, is La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine. There are three known versions of the work. In the hardware and software of the cinematographic ‘machine’ resides much of the specifically mechanical charm of the industrial age. In one sense it is a paradox that the Lumières began film history with workers leaving the factory instead of giving place of honour to them working on the production lines. Over a hundred years later Siegfried A. Fruhauf has made a fourth version of La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine. This remake gives short shrift to the unconscious irony of the Lumière films. Fruhauf needs six minutes to run through the current fate of industry. Fourteen workers are present here: five on the (optically) vertical axis, the rest cross the horizontal axis in the background. Their movements form a cross – a symbol of death as a ballet méchanique. The initial image is transformed into almost abstract black and white surfaces, harnessed Sisyphus-like to a lunatic dance of repetition. Fruhauf increases the acceleration of the striding workers in discrete steps until they are tearing along – the capacity of the film tested to its outer limits – until it can’t take any more. Maximum acceleration leads to stasis – after the acceleration throughout the film comes the logical consequence – the last frame – the freeze frame. Nothing more can happen. The model (literally) of progress collapses. And instead there is paralysis. A dead-end. The workers are motionless, and with them the factory. Rien ne va plus.” —Peter Tscherkassky)

MOVING PICTURE
Linda Christanell, 1995, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Variations on a view from the filmmaker’s window mysteriously merge with a photo-portrait of Barbara Stanwyck. Film loaded with introspection, ageless like a box by Cornell.
“My starting point is the astonishing experience of the changes in one and the same picture. The motive of the film is the view out of my studio window in Schönlaterngasse. I have observed the transition from street to sky over a longer period. Changes in the day, the seasons and my inner psychological state bring movement to the frozen frame. The inner changes are a particular point of emphasis in the film. The experience of the freeze frame view is overlapped by material corresponding to the psychic layers of consciousness. I imagine various motives in the street – for example, glittering water with flying white seagulls, a portrait of Barbara Stanwyck, a scene from Berlin and one from San Francisco.” —Linda Christanell

31/75 ASYL
Kurt Kren, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
A pastoral scene fractured by a complex series of masks. Real time is superimposed in filmic time / real landscape is reconfigured into an artificial panorama.
“It was the first time that I had lived in the countryside and I didn’t like it that much. I was always a city slicker. Maybe I went slightly bonkers. Maybe I wanted to tear the whole thing apart. Technically, I shot the film in 21 days. Every day I would run the whole film through the camera, but as I said only once a day. In front of the lens there was a cut out mask with five holes in it. Through these holes the film was exposed. The holes changed with every day. All the holes together, throughout the 21 days would open up the full frame. In some holes it rains, in others the sun is shining, in others it snows. It was done in Saarland, close to the French border.” —Kurt Kren, interviewed by Hans Scheugl

ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Kerstin Cmelka, 2000, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
A secret garden, composed of dreams.
“Et In Arcadia Ego is a ‘painterly’ film, and even its title reinforces this impression. This formula and its variations “conjure up a vision of unsurpassable happiness which is turned backwards toward the past”, wrote Erwin Panofsky in his essay Et In Arcadia Ego. Poussin und das Elegische (1936), which traces the long tradition and gradual change in the significance of the Arcadia motif in fine arts from memento mori to a symbol of “melancholy pregnant with memory”.” —Isabella Reicher

SEMIOTIC GHOSTS
Lisl Ponger, 1990, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
Footage collected on travels around the world is assembled as a powerful inquiry into photographic language. “In my films I have confronted the question of what a frame is, what movement and light signify. There is no story, the story is the pictures.”
“In one interview about Semiotic Ghosts, Ponger once made the following comparison: “The narrative feature film compared to the associative film is like the verbally speaking human being compared to the one who uses sign language to communicate.” As an inspiration for Semiotic Ghosts she named a 19th Century Swiss book on the pedagogy of how to educate the deaf. To function as an equal to the spoken word, sign language, besides basic and distinctive meanings, must to go through a process of conventionalisation to establish itself. Therefore the myth of the universal and the ‘naturally given’ does not exist. But there is no doubt, that sign language makes use of shape, size and movement. It expresses itself imitatively and is therefore universal. It therefore has also greater iconic potential than the verbal language. The second shot of the film shows the 1st Egyptian Blind Women’s Orchestra. Only in the third take, the one of the ‘grim reaper’, the sound comes in. By privileging the image over the sound, it establishes the hierarchy of the senses from the outset. But on a closer look we have to learn that this is not the case. First of all the sound follows exactly the image in which the seeing became precarious, awkward (through watching the blind girls) and secondly Ponger uses a soundtrack which is appropriate, like no other, to transmit the idea of the ‘polytonal’. To the end of the film we hear the sounds produced by the tuning of the instruments for the Blind Women’s Orchestra. Each of the different instruments sound for themselves, representing the richness, the reservoir, the paradigms, only at the end, a sense of unity evolves.” —Gabriele Jutz

DIAN, PAITO
Bernhard Schreiner, 2001, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
Personal notebook from a journey through Taiwan: the natural landscape and a visit with friends.
“Nomadic images, creatively free and influenced only by his own conventions, highlight the unusual effect of Bernhard Schreiner’s film. Schreiner records images and sounds of events of apparent secondary importance while he is travelling. In this way his films ‘describe’ the atmosphere. Often deserted spaces and squares are ‘registered’ in various ways: through brief, quick takes and successive alternating edits which lend the shots an almost tactile quality, Schreiner is able to pin down something that is impossible to describe in any other form, and this forms part of his artistic personality as well as the imaginative reality of the viewer. These moments of ephemeral beauty are perceived by Schreiner in a way that is both sensitive and cautious, filmed and edited in a way so they can turn back on the screen before the eyes of the viewer, intact and well-conserved. —Thomas Draschan

ÄGYPTEN
Kathrin Resetarits, 1996, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
At first a sensitive essay about communication between the deaf; the gestural actions of signing are intimated for the uninformed. But by equating sign language with film language, Resetarits forges a quiet demonstration of the power of cinema.
“Ägypten is a film which is almost silent. A film about deaf mutes, or rather about their sign language – a language which, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, links the symbolic terminology of words with the mimetic and analogous representations of graphic gestures. Sober black and white scenes show how ‘shark’, ‘widow’, ‘Marilyn Monroe’, a James Bond sequence, a Viennese song or the account of a treasure hunt undertaken by two holidaymakers looks in sign language. It is a very modest indication, an introduction to an unfamiliar way of experiencing the world, where one sees the sounds without hearing them.” —Drehli Robnik

TO THE HAPPY FEW
Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
The Splice is Right. A highly charged cosmic mandala, fusing found footage with Bollywood music.
“The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s (invisible woman) until the end of the 1980s.” —Thomas Draschan, 2003

OPUS 7
Alexander Curtis, 1993, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
Composition and perspective are broken down as the camera view is flattened into its geometric forms. A magic lantern trick for viewer and projector.
“Film – Perspective – Geometry. An ironic self-portrait and a sentimental look back at the early and prehistory of Cinema” —Alexander Curtis

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