FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
Gustav Deutsch, Austria, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 97 min
During the opening sequence of Gustav Deutsch’s FILM IST. a girl & a gun, a film that received its North American premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, we see violet-tinted footage of the real-life cowgirl and sharpshooter Annie Oakley demonstrating her prowess with a gun. After the opening title cards, the film opens with deep red moving images that evoke the creation of the world – shooting flames, circles of fire, smouldering lava, a large-breasted woman, bubbling ooze. Many sequences made with found footage would follow – most all from the silent cinema, but remade, tinted, and ordered in bravura of original filmmaking. Taking off from D.W. Griffith’s quote that all a film requires is a girl and a gun, Episode 13 of Deutsch’s larger project, FILM IST, grows into an elemental exploration of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death.
In 1995, as many were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch began his multi-year project on the meaning of cinema, sketching out a list of quotes about the art form. Soon, the project became a meditation on the meaning of cinema itself, one that the filmmaker likens to a naturally occurring phenomenon. Like the camera obscura this architect-trained artist has built near his house in Greece, its foundations resting on a concrete foundation of a World War II era German battery, the cinema can serve as a place to contemplate a spectacle of wonders and to ponder universal themes.
FILM IST. a girl & a gun follows the structure of a five act Greek drama, using classical texts by
Sappho, Hesiod and Platon. ‘I wasn’t sure I would start with Genesis,’ the filmmaker explained to me while visiting New York for the Tribeca premiere, ‘but in the archives were these amazing volcanoes in Indonesia … exceptional footage.’ He continued, ‘I wanted to talk about the creation of the universe from the eyes of the goddess of creation, and then destruction. There’s no creation without destruction.’
After seeing images in the Imperial War Museum from the First World War, Deutsch explained, ‘It was amazing to see how millions of men were fighting in a kind of …’ and here he inserts a word from German that means self-forgetting and self-annihilation ‘… that would never have been understandable. What belief system makes them act like this? I don’t accept it. Human beings don’t learn. Therefore, film is ‘missionary’.’
Found footage filmmaking has its roots in experimental and avant-garde traditions. Joseph Cornell is often considered an important early pioneer of the art, Bruce Conner the king during his lifetime, and now Deutsch is considered the living master of this genre. His films are not just edited compilations of clips; rather, the elements become the artistic material in a painstakingly thought-out original artistic work. Much of the source images are orphan films, works that have been previously overlooked or neglected but are culturally significant. He seeks a range of materials, from science and education films to melodramas and slapstick comedies.
Four years in production, the first phase of FILM IST. a girl & a gun was to find material within the archives and to work on the 90-page script. ‘I wanted to choose long excerpts,’ he said, ‘because I thought it was very important to get into the mood and sense it. To be shocked, aroused, to talk about it.’ He started with list of ideas, sending ‘keywords’ to people in the archives. As with any filmmaker, another phase involved convincing the financial supporters to back the work.
He worked with ten archives in Europe, including a rich source in the Netherlands Filmmuseum, but he also wanted to draw upon material from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, the source of footage for explorations into sexuality. Because of the Institute’s mandates that the material must follow the strict guidelines of the founder, including serving the purpose of science, it took Deutsch a year to convince them that his use of footage would be appropriate. Arriving in Indiana, he looked through 120 films and selected 42 for viewing, but one-fifth of them were not suitable for playing on an editing table. He helped preserve some of the fragile material for use by the archive by transferring them to other formats.
Together with his long-time partner, artist Hanna Schimek, he estimates that he viewed a total of over 2,500 films in multiple archives, some features and many short subjects, all the while taking notes and sketches. Paring down the potentially useful material to twenty-five hours of footage, he scanned and digitized the clips for his film library. Rendering the clips to black and white, Deutsch applied a range of twelve colours to the appropriate clips, each standing for different emotions. The colours also adhere to traditions in the aesthetics of silent film. He looks for images that can provide a ‘gateway’, as he calls them, to lead from one idea to the next. Each captured frame is 1.8 to 2MB, with notes to identify them. After editing for a year, they went to the archives to order films for scanning and another process of editing. He worked in a similar way with the composers for the original score. After ordering the sequence, the work was then blown up to a 35mm print.
One important theme of the work, Deutsch stressed to me in our conversation, was the search within relationships between males and females ‘for the other half’. ‘For example’, he said, ‘I can shift my behaviour from male to female. The female part is not valued enough. We need to encourage all of us to work with the female side. The limitations of the existing material within the early era of cinema restricted my ability to visually show more of the female point of view.’ In addition, he chose not to use images from the contemporary era, he explained, because most of the issues involving sex and warfare were already established with the first sexual revolution and the First World War. Like a girl and a gun, creation and destruction had already found their way into the spaces of the earliest cinema.
(Teri Tynes)
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