{"id":1505,"date":"2009-10-25T16:00:50","date_gmt":"2009-10-25T16:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1505"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:53:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:53:45","slug":"film-ist-a-girl-a-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2009\/10\/25\/film-ist-a-girl-a-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"FILM IST. a girl & a gun"},"content":{"rendered":"

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FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
\nSunday 25 October 2009, at 4pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gustav Deutsch, FILM IST. a girl & a gun, Austria, 2009, 97 min
\n<\/strong>Taking its cue from DW Griffith via J-L Godard, the latest instalment of the FILM IST<\/em> series is a five-act drama in which reclaimed footage is interwoven with aphorisms from ancient Greek philosophy. Beginning with the birth of the universe, it develops into a meditation on the timeless themes of sex and death, exploring creation, desire and destruction by appropriating scenes from narrative features, war reportage, nature studies and pornography. The Earth takes shape from molten lava, and man and woman embark upon their erotic quest. For this mesmerising epic, Deutsch applies techniques of montage, sound and colour to resources drawn from both conventional film archives and specialist collections such as the Kinsey Institute and Imperial War Museum. Excavating cinema history to tease new meanings from diverse and forgotten film material, he proposes new perspectives on the cycle of humanity. The film\u2019s integral score by long-term collaborators Christian Fennesz, Burkhardt Stangl and Martin Siewert incorporates music by David Grubbs, Soap&Skin and others.<\/p>\n

Also Screening: Thursday 29 October 2009, at 4pm, NFT2<\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
\n<\/strong>Sunday 25 October 2009, at 4pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
\nGustav Deutsch, Austria, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 97 min
\n<\/strong>During the opening sequence of Gustav Deutsch\u2019s FILM IST. <\/em>a girl & a gun<\/em>, 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 \u2013 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\u2019s quote that all a film requires is a girl and a gun, Episode 13 of Deutsch\u2019s larger project, FILM IST<\/em>, grows into an elemental exploration of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

FILM IST. <\/em>a girl & a gun<\/em> follows the structure of a five act Greek drama, using classical texts by
\nSappho, Hesiod and Platon. \u2018I wasn\u2019t sure I would start with Genesis,\u2019 the filmmaker explained to me while visiting New York for the Tribeca premiere, \u2018but in the archives were these amazing volcanoes in Indonesia \u2026 exceptional footage.\u2019 He continued, \u2018I wanted to talk about the creation of the universe from the eyes of the goddess of creation, and then destruction. There\u2019s no creation without destruction.\u2019<\/p>\n

After seeing images in the Imperial War Museum from the First World War, Deutsch explained, \u2018It was amazing to see how millions of men were fighting in a kind of \u2026\u2019 and here he inserts a word from German that means self-forgetting and self-annihilation \u2018\u2026 that would never have been understandable. What belief system makes them act like this? I don\u2019t accept it. Human beings don\u2019t learn. Therefore, film is \u2018missionary\u2019.\u2019<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Four years in production, the first phase of FILM IST. <\/em>a girl & a gun<\/em> was to find material within the archives and to work on the 90-page script. \u2018I wanted to choose long excerpts,\u2019 he said, \u2018because I thought it was very important to get into the mood and sense it. To be shocked, aroused, to talk about it.\u2019 He started with list of ideas, sending \u2018keywords\u2019 to people in the archives. As with any filmmaker, another phase involved convincing the financial supporters to back the work.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018gateway\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

One important theme of the work, Deutsch stressed to me in our conversation, was the search within relationships between males and females \u2018for the other half\u2019. \u2018For example\u2019, he said, \u2018I 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.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

(Teri Tynes)<\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2009","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}