THE ESSENTIAL FRAME: RECENT HISTORY
4 June—9 July 2003
The Essential Frame UK Tour: Programme 2

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

PARTY
Dietmar Brehm, 1995, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“Sometimes I film so that the actors seem to belong to the undead. The construction of the Found-Footage-Party shows Russian, Japanese, American and my own material which is hallucinated into a matrix in which functioning and non-functioning body parts appear as optical lubricant shadow labyrinth whilst simultaneously we hear someone shaving.” —Dietmar Brehm

PARALLEL SPACE: INTER-VIEW
Peter Tscherkassky, 1992, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
The ‘physics of seeing’ and the ‘physics of memory’ in a flickering condensation of space and time.
“Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo 24 x 36mm is exactly the size of two film frames. Originally, I had a strict, formal concept. The visual space of the Renaissance locked in the optics of the film and still camera. In front of our eyes the landscapes of the film spread out and allow themselves be conquered; a constellation which is then subverted by letting the hardware and the software slip minimally. If I take a photograph with a strict central perspective (the vanishing point in the middle), it gets smashed when projected. The spatial lines plunge towards the lower edge of one frame, to be ripped apart at the top of the next. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces that have a correspondence with each other. Soon these spatial constructions were not enough. I began to interpret the content of both spatial halves – to lead the spectator’s separation from the surrounding reality into another sequence of binary opposites: listener-speaker; viewer-viewed; public-private; man-woman; sensuality (emotion)-reason; sexuality-taboo, and so on. In addition, I took the psychoanalytic setting and drew a comparison with the cinema setting. In both cases there is a narrator who does not see or know his listener. Filmmakers, in common with the analysists, produce a very intimate flow of pictures which are met with highly concentrated attention but still fall into the anonymity of the audience…” —Peter Tscherkassky

ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY
Martin Arnold, 1998, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
“In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which, together with pièce touchée and passage à l’acte, forms a sort of trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold’s campaign of deconstruction of classic Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The process links in with the other two films. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these ‘single cells’ and a new rhythm – a kind of cloning procedure – Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous doppelgänger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles. In Alone… the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates to sheer lust. Since passage à l’acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the soundtrack along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone…is the eerie, rasping “silence” of sound film, pregnant with suppressed tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full, living present is seemingly at its strongest – in the screen presence of Judy Garland singing – one senses the machine, and, implicitly, death, at work.” —Dirk Schaefer

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

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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