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- Footage from The Entity (1982) is edited into an abstract nightmare.
- Film ist. consists almost entirely of excerpts from various scientific films. This footage shows the flight of pigeons, intelligence test performed on apes, upside-down worlds and stereoscopic vision, hurricanes and effect of shock waves. How glass breaks, how small children walk and a Mercedes crashing into a brick wall in slow motion.
- An avant-garde sonic and visual reediting of a short clip from the classic 1962 film "To Kill a Mockingbird."
- A landscape in which everything moves is afflicted with a figure which is in itself static, but which moves - a kind of mechanic man? In Mécanomagie both the borders of perception and (natural) laws are infringed so that something new may emerge: nature as a boundless state of ecstasy! (Peter Illetschko)
- Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland perform a hellish courtship in a nightmare of the American dream, created by manipulating old film.
- The heroine of the title grows up. Slights, dance school, a cinema of glances, of tender moments, of trivial pop songs. A cinema which takes time, makes observations and which continuously finds or invents opposite picture sequences for loneliness and breaking free. (Christian Cargnelli)
- Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions (Artforum, Nov. 1980)
- The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.
- Hands vigorously pull scraps of paper from an antiquated printing press, while their owner remains invisible. Then Mimi Minus and a razor blade - the incident is still shocking. The shrouded head, wrapped in muslin, reappears, and black paint is daubed over the top ... no image retains its integrity, for each is crossed through, painted, double-exposed, spilt, soiled. (Stephan Settele)
- The Austrian artist Maria Lassnig tells us the story of her life in 14 verses, beginning with her birth and ending with her life as it is today. Simultaneously - in the background - we see the story as animated drawings, full of irony, humor and wisdom.
- A found footage film about oral rituals, about festive occasions and about a married couple who understood how to enrich and enliven their cosy togetherness. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting cakes, making toast. Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing woman freezes. It is a deeply ambiguous moment that, from the expression on her face, allows one to think of something close to despair. On something like a modern, alienated, baroque vanity motive, which is still present in the Austrian tradition, and whose abrasion with the sensual certainty of the moment of drinking an egg liqueur gives Happy End a wider meaning.
- A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production. (Peter Tscherkassky)
- Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" (Umberto Eco), is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only. (M.M.)
- In NavelFable Mara Mattuschka subjects herself to a second birth through endless pairs of tights. Her body struggles so hard and in such a deformed manner from out of the layers of nylon that the sheer struggle for survival becomes visible. (Peter Tscherkassky)
- Interesting encounters and conversations take place at an international animation film festival on various societal levels. Diverse films, ideas, nationalities and personal relationships communicate the typical atmosphere between the celebrations, introductory and thank you speeches, accompanied by thundering applause.
- Sunset Boulevard is the attempt to simultaneously picture the two big, contradictory myths of U.S. America: the myth of unlimited individualism ("lonesome rider"), and the myth of the "melting pot". All kinds of people are all in the same way, mostly alone, caught in their cars, which also remind us of similar box-like containers such as houses, offices, factories, etc.
- A woman is lying on a bed. Her double is stretched out next to her, and she slowly turns to caress it, to kiss and lick it before the two cuddle up to each other and the scene darkens. A straightforward etude. A simple setup, though with a false bottom: The woman is played by the filmmaker, who has cloned her ghostly actors by means of multiple exposures. With Me, shot in 16mm and silent, resembles early cinematic works and their phantoms, and not only because of this special effect. Taken together, the old-fashioned interior and the faded colors, the jerky movements, the slightly exaggerated gestures and the almost transparent bodies create a somewhat eerie and somnambulistic atmosphere. And the doppelänger motif, which is closely linked to supernatural experiences, also contributes to this feel. At the same time, these images also possess a sense of absence. The overlapping time periods on the strip of film, a result of the production method, literally show through. The space is a fixed quantity and therefore has a dual presence. The action leaves fleeting traces, like a daydream in which the familiar secretly returns. (Isabella Reicher)
- A young woman and a little girl are playing football. When the ball flies into the air the black and white sequence transmutes into the red of the evening sky. High up in the air a bird is flying. The bird belongs to a dream. The beginning is programmatic. The various events flow seamlessly into one another and tell of the imponderability of growing up dreams and expectations, work, frustration and the music which allows one to dance above it all. Rhythm of the heart... Two young women live with little Angie somewhere on the edge of the city. What do they expect from life? The film is a filigreed weave of the commonplace gesture and small acts of flight. Ildiko dreams of hot-blooded pirates. She wants to leave. Uschi stares up at the sky. She will stay. "In 200 years people will be living on Mars, or perhaps they won't." Everything is possible. Lost in space... Maybe there is even a paradise for Angie's dead guinea pig. Expectations remain in the balance, but why shouldn't it possible to have a stroke of luck... just for you...
- The Back Room by Regina Höllbacher is a black and white film with a vocabulary of quiet pictures of rooms, fragmentary views of the world and failed attempts to exchange glances with someone sitting opposite. A very personal film, a farewell full of longing. (Klaus Telscher)
- In our vision of the future, everyone has received a neuronal interface, also called a brainchip. This chip enables direct mental interaction with external computers. A legal pathway into cyberspace is paralleled by illicit forms of virtual reality. The main character in this film is a "terminal addict", a cyber junkie in the grip of this electronic drug. In the course of the story, the borders between the real and the virtual are obliterated.
- The earlier films of Valie Export, one feels, were motivated by the author's desire and need to investigate her own subjectivity, with the audience as a necessary part of the transference and the polemic. Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)
- She is a phone operator, he is a cab driver. In the evening they meet again in their shared apartment to read comics and have sex. He watches football on TV, she has a bath. Indecisively they try out other possibilities, gestures, stylings. The preparations for breakfast are a routine of well-coordinated motions. In just 18 minutes the film takes a lot of time to show the course of events in their duration and repetition. Everything is always the same--yet different. This is a film one should see at least twice in a row: then the expectation of a narrative development and/or a point won't even arise and one can concentrate on the subtle details that sketch and deconstruct a 'good' relationship (and the 'relationship film'). The film doesn't operate towards the exterior like Speak Easy, rather it implodes in small, exact gestures and escapes. The largest part of love life is set neither in the 'seventh heaven' nor in a 'relationship hell', but rather in the extensive in-between where conventional narrative cinema rarely strays. The young couple, whose love life Mirjam Unger sketches accurately in More or Less, shares its most tender moments while reading comics together in bed. And there is no need to have a big fight to torture each other; the everyday heedlessness and rejections are enough. In between there are a few irrelevant little escapades: indecisive approaches in other people's bedrooms or kisses that want to be forgotten the next day.
- The bum Gas and the junky Sebastian comb through the garbage cans for useful things after the Christmas holidays and end up finding a dead baby. In order to honor the death of the baby, they leave the city to bury it in the countryside.
- Sometimes the camera films of its own volition. Macumba shows an optical tangle in 13 scenes. As a start signal one hears a double hammer blow arising from a black screen, a sound like the nailing shut of a coffin. Macumba develops slowly out of the black. A black porno couple on the telephone in London. Then they meet on a snake in a park and are, together with Kalahari Bushmen mixed to a film matrix which is as incomprehensible as real life. Throughout Macumba the sound of rain can be heard. (Dietmar Brehm)
- A fisherwoman wades through the river and briefly stops to lift up her apron to urinate, and then again, to lift onto her shoulders the body of someone who has drowned, caught between the stones, then everything becomes clear: this woman is capable of doing anything...
- 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 the is paralysis. A dead end. The workers are motionless, and with them the factory. Rien ne va plus. (Peter Tscherkassky)
- Lisl Pongers peaceful, hovering pictures from traveling and daily life, assembled associatively instead of narratively, develop here into a reflection on photography itself, to an examination of unknown alphabets: Geometric forms develop out of the world's chaos.
- Titania, a clumsy adolescent, sits in the tub, on the top of the plug-hole, the entrance to a murky world full of filth, bugs and hazards, which connects her to all the ass-holes in the world. Elements of this world now hover like Ghosts on the surrounding tiles, while Mimi Minus ruminates on the impossibility of love. (Peter Tscherkassky) "Nobody understands love better than a woman, who enjoys it for the last time." (Mara Mattuschka)
- Lotte Schreiber and Norbert Pfaffenbichler's 36 is a rigidly mathematical and graphic composition based on the number in its title. All of this video's elements, including its length, are variables of this figure. three apparently independent fields of perception are linked to Stefan Németh's synchronized soundtrack. In the left field, thirty-six vertical and horizontal white lines run through various patterns of movement according to a binary digital system (0 vertical, 1 = horizontal). They eventually unite in six squares with amorphous animated miniatures. The right section of the screen contains a palette with patches of color reminiscent of Gerhard Richter. The colors combine and recombine in ever-changing mixtures as if they were controlled by an electric relay. At the bottom of the picture are two overlapping squares which portray the video's temporal axis. They provide the underlying rhythm in a manner similar to a metronome, though they move in a linear direction toward the visible end. 36 refers to both aesthetic traditions of abstract painting and the structural approaches of early geometric films (such as those of Walther Ruttmann and Hans Richter).
- This three-minute film was far more akin to the American-style "happening" in that the content was not particularly extreme. It was built up from items such as broken bicycle parts, a nude model, pieces of furniture, and these elements were then obscured or transformed by having a layer of paint thrown on them.
- Overfart is a disembodied passage through a landscape which is inaccessible to humans, a landscape which is not a part of nature but an intellectual construct: In its artificiality, this work refers to Early-Romantic landscape paintingespecially that of C.D. Friedrichand its immanent religiosity. Though temko by general magic is virtually the sole element of the soundtrack, this work was not intended to be a music video. The abstract spatiality of the music, which was apparently set in contrast to the images, and their cycles complement one another to produce the same intangibility. (Ben Pointeker)
- Two shots: The first abruptly zooms in on a talking, animated, and closely attentive subject pointing the technological apparatus of medical science at a small piece of meat. The second, in a long and occasionally jerky zoom which is so slow that as to be hardly noticeable, shows a red object, presumably the same piece of meat. The surgeon with severely slicked-back hair, who talks into an intercom and then to himself in Swedish before dissecting the meat, creates a somewhat odd impression, in particular due to the curve of the 'fake' wide-screen image. But the unusual object being fiddled with (or maybe not) by this sleek mad scientist reminiscent of B movies, Cronenberg and the Kingdom clinic is even more enigmatic. As a result, its visibility is at the same time legible, decipherable, for example as a jiggling, affective red which would overmodulate any video monitor filling out the structure of the meat's tissue. Or as a red galaxy fading into the microscopic detail of a foreign body. Seen, heard and read in a synthetic sense, the zoom into the amorphous body corresponds to the pathway taken by Bernhard Fleischmann's chords and percussion through an inconstant blubbering, crackling, creaking and splashing. The regular contours of the music seem to take their pointed warmth from intimate contact with the meat (the open heart).
- 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 whilst simultaneously we hear someone shaving. (Dietmar Brehm)
- Experimental documentary about nationalism, militarism and about coming to terms with the past. Material, exposed exactly 50 years after Hitler's presence on the 'Heldenplatz' - the place of heroes, during a demonstration against Mister Waldheim.
- An ominous chord ends as the lights of a big city, towers of glass and a slender silhouette rise into view. Sophia is on a dangerous mission. In her cat-suit and fashionably styled red hair, and with an apparently endless arsenal of burglar tools, she nimbly climbs a façade. Sophia's Sofa doesn't bother with long explanations: It's night, there's no time to lose, and dangers abound. The rhythm is set by the high-hat; a lascivious bass line accompanies Sophia as if she were the heroine in a movie scored by Lalo Schifrin. As mysterious as Irma Vep and tough as Trinity in The Matrix, she makes her way through a labyrinth of oblique angles and treacherous laser traps. Her goal is in the strong room; the object of her desire waits under a glass cover. Suddenly, there are quiet steps behind her. A flash of white announces the presence of a rival: Sophia is not the only burglar here tonight. Sophia¹s Sofa is a light-footed homage to comic-book heroines: cosmopolitan criminals able to run up walls and jump several meters in a single bound who still find time to do their hair. In less than three minutes, AUGE tells a story which has been reduced to the bare minimum, in expressive tableaus, split screens and to the rhythm of its eclectic soundtrack. The video winds down in a happy ending and an easy-going bossa nova groove. (Michael Loebenstein)
- Daily routine in an empty restaurant car on a long-distance train. Deserted tables, a slow-moving staff. The waiter leans at the window, unhurriedly cleaning his fingernails. The cook and the waitress bide their time patiently. Gestures of waiting. Communication no longer seems necessary, as the well-coordinated routine functions smoothly without it. Only the train's clattering is audible, a monotonous and soothing sound. This monotony is echoed in the forced lethargy of the restaurant-car staff. It seems to be a ghost train, a train without passengers. Then the tableau comes alive as if wakened by an inaudible signal. The three figures begin to sweep and wipe: The car must be cleaned thoroughly before it reaches the terminus. "Space is being destroyed by the train, and only time remains." This statement made by Heinrich Heine could be used as a summary of Josef Dabernig's film. While the countryside flies past the window, the train never stops. The surroundings disappear behind it. At the same time, the atmosphere of languor in the restaurant car is tangible. Boredom dominates the inactivity and is not completely dispelled by the sudden start of cleaning. The protagonists never really practice their professions: They neither cook nor do they serve food. Precisely framed black-and-white images laconically depict the restaurant car's Formica charm as a moving microcosm: A service job as scheduled monotony. This is an entertaining study of movement and inertia. (Andrea Pollach)
- The future is radioactive: Television, as fantasized in low-budget science fiction, and the images it presents become omnipresent, forcing their way into private homes, cars, sports, work and play. A young couple spends a day which will be considered typical in the near future, from breakfast in their sterile home to bedtime, the entire time never unaccompanied by television and tele-transmissions which supply the sound and picture for the consumer's kick-on and chill-out.
- The Empty Secret A tearing, a breaking, a smashing. The rumbling of heavily tumbling rocks. Sounds, loud sounds which, in combination with the images, evoke the spirit of the machine and extract the computer's soul. But not, as was so often the case before, for the purpose of dissecting the spirit, exorcising it in a clumsy way, to say nothing of raping it in euphemistic esotericism. We are permitted to see the soul, but are not allowed to touch it. What had only been announced will now be made real. The tearing, the breaking into the image. And truly a breaking into the image, not some other presumed new space. No veiled escape from the world of images, this is the ultimate hack: a break-in, the break-in of the millennium. And with this long-essential procedure, art is practically torn away from the self-proclaimed creative heads, making their arrogance and presumptuousness clear to them. The presumed secret of the mimics has been revealed: It does not exist, it is empty. Sounds, loud sounds which herald new secrets, true secrets. And we realize within these elusive truths, because the secrets here are nothing less: LOUD is sometimes not LOUD ENOUGH.
- An intensely colored catalogue of Mexican holiday snapshots, animated to a meteoric dance and re-worked over with painting.
- A collection of countless holiday films filled with clichés. The material dates from the fifties and sixties when holiday filming was more common than now. Gustav Deutsch's approach was simple and effective: He ordered the clichés systematically, and edited them into a small series. (Rotterdam Film Festival - Catalogue 1994)
- The Sixth Sense. If two letters in the original German title of Dietmar Brehm's new film were changed, it could be translated as Glances. The result would be coordinates of a mode of vision in which subject and object oscillate: A glance triggers flashes of lightening in the brain; synaptic activity during a dream replaces the glance. A man opens his eyes. He sees a cozy room with a burning fireplace; he sees an elderly person lying in the bed and then turning to ring for a servant; he sees a woman taking a shower, and a younger one in bed asleep. Suddenly, all order is reversed. It may be that the woman is merely dreaming of a voyeur; she may be entering REM sleep. She might be dreaming herself into an altered version of Psycho. The feeling of discomfort caused by Bolts of Lightening is made possible by the relevance Brehm adds to his found footage: He permits the telling of a story which is turned completely around and, as in a dream, the story is nothing more than a subsequent synthesis of images which appear suddenly; beauty and transience are not just subjects, they are also a quality of the film's images.
- The film tries to retain the memory, the compulsion and the nostalgia of a text by Marguerite Duras. Space remains abstract - bare surface dominates. With this minimalist approach a sensuality develops which concentrates entirely on the voices, gestures, looks and movements of the performers... (Christian Frosch)
- Summer on Schafberg mountain near Vienna. Sunshine and children playing outdoors. Handicapped children. Sonnenland, which was made in the summer of 1998 during my ten month I worked with the Kinderfreunden (Friends of the Children), is more properly a film made with them rather than a film about them. What becomes tangible in the course of my (the camera's) contact with the children is a feeling of distance and intimacy, mistrust and curiosity and joy in equal portions. The subject of "handicaps" is taken beyond the usual attempts to arouse pity, and the question of their depiction (which has been instrumentalized by society) is dealt with. Rather than pretty pictures, Sonnenland shows unusual images. Images depicting moments on a summer afternoon, brief moments in the lives of children. (Paul Divjak) Paul Divjak's Sonnenland is a garden of encounters. Each shot documents a posture assumed by a handicapped child when confronted by the camera. The camera is an unobtrusive intruder which follows the figures and defines a space. On the other hand, the children themselves make the final decisions concerning distance: They approach the camera, examine it, wink at it, talk to it, and sometimes even reach out to it. The spatial relationship provides evidence for a social relationship; the looks create a space in which communication is possible. The camera's eye invites the viewer to participate in a dialog (Divjak himself appears in one shot) and puts on a little show at the same time: Each child poses and moves in a different way while trying out various modes of expression. Thanks to the intimacy of these encounters and the resulting dialog, the children's difference is never reduced to mere depiction, as it is much more an active component of the dialog: The first thing is to imagine use your imagination, not in a rush, but on a summer afternoon while sitting in the shade. (Dominik Kamalzadeh)
- Superimposed horizontal and vertical patterns in rich, dark colours flow across the screen at pleasantly slow tempos. In contrast to the video's meditative effect, these abstractly floating visual sensations were created with footage showing speed. Krzeczek obtained the effect of blurriness caused by movement by shooting everything from moving subway trains. As a result, the digital video camera's eye was not able to produce sharp images. In Unterwerk, Paul Virilio's "nihilism of speed" is stylized into a formal and aesthetic event. Abstraction is achieved by intentionally exceeding the limits of what can be filmed (or perceived). While the many-layered combinations of screens and superimpositions constantly produce new visual patterns, the soundtrack is a monotone loop. This noise an unaltered sample of the rhythmic sound produced by a ventilation system takes on musical qualities through constant repetition. After being forced to listen to this "acoustic waste material" more closely, one seems to notice minimal variations. However, they are not on the tape and result solely from the situation in which they are heard. Set pieces from the real urban environment are transformed into a clearly structured abstract scenario which, in addition to its convincing aesthetic quality, offers a striking reflection on everyday patterns of perception. (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)
- The most conspicuous remnant of a war is the damage to a city's buildings, squares and infrastructure. Material destruction can be repaired, according to the most common assumption, but what happens when the damage reaches much deeper than pockmarks in a building's façade, affecting more than just its skeleton? Can a city's cosmopolitan spirit be damaged in such a way that repair is no longer conceivable? In his opinion, says Bogdan Bogdanovic at the beginning of the film, Sarajevo was a city from 1001 Nights. Later, he claims that the highest form of urbanity is the development of a philosophy which is specific to an individual city. But: Sarajevo's spiritual and intellectual treasures suffered the most damage during the war. The result is a hopeless situation, a tragedy. What Bogdanovic determines in the name of the past is reflected in the camera's searching movements and the commentary on Sarajevo's present provided by a few residents. Life has become mere survival, many good people are gone, as are many good ideas and a great deal of money. Three years after the war's end, trains still do not pass through Sarajevo's station. In other words the bridges have been burned: those to the past, those between its residents, and those to Europe. All of them have been destroyed in the same way as the Old Bridge in Mostar, for which Bogdanovic wrote an obituary in 1993: "The first and last words were wrested from the city born under the sign of the bridge, and its death, I fear, is irrevocable." (Vrääth Öhner)
- Marie Kreutzer's film avoids stereotypes of teenagers. Instead of proceeding from the assumption that having problems is simply part of being 14, the protagonists are shown in the context of their everyday lives. The camera follows Theres, remaining close to her body, her gestures and the objects of her attention. (Maya McKechneay)
- An ordinary day in the city: 11 young people engaged in their ordinary activities. Talking on the phone; talking as they always do about nothing special--about boredom, being together (or not), ambition or the lack of it, sex, insecurity and the desire to have fun. Through the commonplace and the trivial they reveal what they normally only show one another.
- One can say that cinema is also only an artificial organism - human life in another form. In "Sugo" a vinyl sample roars and rustles. white noise deep in the cellar. The moving images which later make their appearance come from two different worlds. Master of ceremonies Hannes Langeder runs them parallel to each other. Black and white pulsating branches in tissue which appear to have blood pumping through them as in an X-ray film. Parallel to this two people are doing something strange with spaghetti in a flickering light and animated by pixelation to intense twitching. This opens up the semantic field to which the title of the piece also belongs - fun with food. It hangs from one person^Ìs mouth to be flung through the air towards the other. A silent orgy in a bare room lit by flashbulb-like light. An ecstatic secret game, the rules of which are not (yet) accessible. The staccato flow of image and sound last just under three minutes and then the roaring loses its intensity, the film tears, dies. life in another form. One can say, in the end and in spite of minimal production values, "Sugo" looks like science fiction, like artificial intelligence and fresh meat.
- Since 1996, parallel to all the other paintings and film work I made hundreds of pictures each with the title 'Organics', and each on the same size of paper - 61 x 43.5 cm. It is from this drawing phase that the film Organics (1998) developed. I already had the perfect found-footage lead whom I named 'Hey Joe'. Round 'Hey Joe', who appears repeatedly as an observer, I constructed a matrix of body details which are broken up by a number of explosions. Organics begins with the observation of a Zorro mask and a distorted / veiled woman's face. A shot of Notre-dame Cathedral in Paris develops into a women's foot scene which leads to a longer kiss scene punctuated by an explosion, falling leaves, a tank, touching hands, a hand in a plaster cast, bunches of grass and a dark cellar door. After observation of a skeleton detail, the found footage actors become involved in slowly feeling each others body. A man swings a necklace back and forth like a pendulum, a head being bandaged, attempts at face make-up, details of operations.... in a flickering, pumping screen light until, in the end, 'Hey Joe' centres the picture briefly with his penis. After the hand movements which follow, the veiled face of a woman appears again, longer this time, to be observed by 'Hey Joe' until the film floodlight is turned off. The Organics sound track is paired down to a few slow note combinations. (Dietmar Brehm)
- Images and sounds of Anpass in Tyrol, shot between 1970 and 1973.