<\/p>\n
RECENT HISTORY
\n<\/strong>Sunday 1 June 2003, at 5pm
\nLondon Film School<\/p>\nTRADITION IST DIE WEITERGABE DES FEUERS UND NICHT DIE ANBETUNG DER ASCHE<\/strong>
\nGustav Deutsch, 1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
\n<\/strong>An elegy to nitrate film material. Image by Deutsch, sound by Fennesz.
\n\u201cSome found footage \u2013 made of cellulose nitrate \u2013 the material
\nFire \u2013 a threat to nitrate film \u2013 its theme
\nA quote \u2013 from Gustav Mahler \u2013 its message
\nThe soundtrack \u2013 by Christian Fennesz \u2013 as the bridge\u201d \u2014Gustav Deutsch, 1999<\/p>\nLA SORTIE
\nSiegfried A. Fruhauf, 1999, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 6 min
\n<\/strong>Reduction into abstraction though the printing process. In memory of the Lumi\u00e8re Brothers and the workers leaving the factory.
\n\u201cThe 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 Lumi\u00e8re brothers, is La Sortie des Ouvriers de l\u2019Usine<\/em>. There are three known versions of the work. In the hardware and software of the cinematographic \u2018machine\u2019 resides much of the specifically mechanical charm of the industrial age. In one sense it is a paradox that the Lumi\u00e8res 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\u2019Usine<\/em>. This remake gives short shrift to the unconscious irony of the Lumi\u00e8re 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 \u2013 a symbol of death as a ballet m\u00e9chanique. 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 \u2013 the capacity of the film tested to its outer limits \u2013 until it can\u2019t take any more. Maximum acceleration leads to stasis \u2013 after the acceleration throughout the film comes the logical consequence \u2013 the last frame \u2013 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.\u201d \u2014Peter Tscherkassky)<\/p>\nMOVING PICTURE
\nLinda Christanell, 1995, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min<\/strong>
\nVariations on a view from the filmmaker\u2019s window mysteriously merge with a photo-portrait of Barbara Stanwyck. Film loaded with introspection, ageless like a box by Cornell.
\n\u201cMy 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 Sch\u00f6nlaterngasse. 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 \u2013 for example, glittering water with flying white seagulls, a portrait of Barbara Stanwyck, a scene from Berlin and one from San Francisco.\u201d \u2014Linda Christanell<\/p>\n31\/75 ASYL
\nKurt Kren, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min<\/strong>
\nA pastoral scene fractured by a complex series of masks. Real time is superimposed in filmic time \/ real landscape is reconfigured into an artificial panorama.
\n\u201cIt was the first time that I had lived in the countryside and I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d \u2014Kurt Kren, interviewed by Hans Scheugl<\/p>\nET IN ARCADIA EGO
\nKerstin Cmelka, 2000, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
\n<\/strong>A secret garden, composed of dreams.
\n\u201cEt In Arcadia Ego<\/em> is a \u2018painterly\u2019 film, and even its title reinforces this impression. This formula and its variations \u201cconjure up a vision of unsurpassable happiness which is turned backwards toward the past\u201d, 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 \u201cmelancholy pregnant with memory\u201d.\u201d \u2014Isabella Reicher<\/p>\nSEMIOTIC GHOSTS
\nLisl Ponger, 1990, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
\n<\/strong>Footage collected on travels around the world is assembled as a powerful inquiry into photographic language. \u201cIn 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.\u201d
\n\u201cIn one interview about Semiotic Ghosts<\/em>, Ponger once made the following comparison: \u201cThe 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.\u201d As an inspiration for Semiotic Ghosts<\/em> 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 \u2018naturally given\u2019 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\u2019s Orchestra. Only in the third take, the one of the \u2018grim reaper\u2019, 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 \u2018polytonal\u2019. To the end of the film we hear the sounds produced by the tuning of the instruments for the Blind Women\u2019s 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.\u201d \u2014Gabriele Jutz<\/p>\nDIAN, PAITO
\nBernhard Schreiner, 2001, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 6 min
\n<\/strong>Personal notebook from a journey through Taiwan: the natural landscape and a visit with friends.
\n\u201cNomadic images, creatively free and influenced only by his own conventions, highlight the unusual effect of Bernhard Schreiner\u2019s film. Schreiner records images and sounds of events of apparent secondary importance while he is travelling. In this way his films \u2018describe\u2019 the atmosphere. Often deserted spaces and squares are \u2018registered\u2019 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. \u2014Thomas Draschan<\/p>\n\u00c4GYPTEN
\nKathrin Resetarits, 1996, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>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.
\n\u201c\u00c4gypten<\/em> is a film which is almost silent. A film about deaf mutes, or rather about their sign language \u2013 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 \u2018shark\u2019, \u2018widow\u2019, \u2018Marilyn Monroe\u2019, 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.\u201d \u2014Drehli Robnik<\/p>\nTO THE HAPPY FEW
\nThomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>The Splice is Right. A highly charged cosmic mandala, fusing found footage with Bollywood music.
\n\u201cThe 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.\u201d \u2014Thomas Draschan, 2003<\/p>\nOPUS 7
\nAlexander Curtis, 1993, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
\n<\/strong>Composition and perspective are broken down as the camera view is flattened into its geometric forms. A magic lantern trick for viewer and projector.
\n\u201cFilm \u2013 Perspective \u2013 Geometry. An ironic self-portrait and a sentimental look back at the early and prehistory of Cinema\u201d \u2014Alexander Curtis<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RECENT HISTORY Sunday 1 June 2003, at 5pm London Film School A selection of recent work demonstrating a more poetic and contemplative cinema. Through their awareness of the past and an engagement with the pioneering work of the 1950s and 1960s, these contemporary artists have developed original and dynamic approaches to the medium. Gustav Deutsch, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essential-frame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3730","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=3730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}