Starting
in the late 1970s, Austrian filmmaker, photographer, and architect Gustav
Deutsch began appropriating and recontextualizing found footage to create
nearly a hundred works in the tradition of such artists as Joseph Cornell and
Bruce Conner. In 2013, his filmography took a surprising turn when, working
with his partner, the artist Hanna Schimek, he directed Shirley: Visions of
Reality, a fictional feature that vividly recreates thirteen paintings by
Edward Hopper to tell the story of an American actress from the 1930s through
the early ’60s. This past weekend, following a brief and sudden illness,
Deutsch passed away at the age of sixty-seven.
There’s
hardly an artistic discipline that Deutsch didn’t at least dabble in after
graduating from the Vienna University of Technology. He staged actionist
performances, worked with music and sound, presented research projects and
installations with Schimek in Morocco, cofounded the Aegina Academy with her in
Athens, and as part of the group of artists known as Der blaue Kompressor,
designed a park in Luxembourg. But Deutsch will be remembered for his films,
and in particular for the Film ist. trilogy. As scholar Tom Gunning has pointed
out, these films can be seen as a reply to the question posed by the title of
the collection of essays by André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Gunning recalls that
he “initially read Deutsch’s title as an act of predication: ‘Film is . . .’
followed by a succession of possible, non-exclusive, definitions: an
instrument; material; magic; conquest, etc. However, he pointed out to me the
power of the period following the ‘ist.’ The title is not an incomplete
definition, but a complete reflexive statement: ‘Film is.’”
Gunning
revisited the trilogy in an essay published in Gustav Deutsch, a collection
published in 2009 on the occasion of a retrospective at the Austrian Film
Museum. In Film ist. 1–6 (1998), an assembly incorporating material from
science and education films, Deutsch “stripped these films of the explanations
of physiology or psychology that originally accompanied them,” writes Gunning.
“Without these reassuring explanations, much of the footage seems strange,
dream-like, horrifying or amusing, grotesque. Instead of being processed for
the information they hold, these images confront us in all their oddness.”
Film
ist. 7–12 (2002) focuses on the first three decades of cinema, exploring the
new medium and art form less as a technological innovation and more as a
spectacle. Writing for the Village Voice in 2003, Ed Halter noted that this
second installment “sets decaying, hand-tinted images of ancient modernity
against droning, staticky electronic soundscapes by Christian Fennesz and
Martin Siewert. The result is a hypnotic drift of relentless disjunctions:
lions invade the sitting room of mauve decade aristocrats; a decapitated,
haloed saint recovers her severed head; a black-cloaked apparition rises from a
time-scratched sea.”
The
title of Film ist. a Girl & a Gun (2009) references a quote attributed to
D. W. Griffith and famously revived by Jean-Luc Godard: “All you need to make a
movie . . .” Tackling nothing less than the story of all creation, Deutsch’s
film is comprised of five movements: Genesis, Paradise, Eros, Thanatos, and
Symposium. “Deutsch recombines shards of archival footage—vintage nature docs,
silent melodramas, old newsreels, and ancient porn—to explosive effect,” wrote
J. Hoberman in the Voice in 2009. “By the end, sex and violence, love and
death, are virtually interchangeable. Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun is not
subtle, but its literalism—which refines the avant-primitivism of older
Viennese artists—is its strength. Deutsch has a sense of motion pictures as a
form of sex magic.”
In 2004,
on the occasion of a film series curated by Todd Haynes for the Tate Modern,
Observer critic Philip French wrote about the love affair between cinema and
Edward Hopper. French spotted Hopper’s influence in the work of directors as
diverse as Alfred Hitchcock and Wim Wenders, but no homage is nearly as literal
as Shirley: Visions of Reality. The film was met with mixed reviews but also
with Austrian Film Awards for cinematography (Jerzy Palacz), costume design
(Julia Cepp), and production design (Deutsch and Schimek). “In my previous
work,” Deutsch told Karin Schiefer in an interview, “I established a connection
between the images of diverse films. Through montage, I managed to create
meaning contexts by attempting to unearth something that was not the original
intention of the filmmakers.” With Shirley, he “intended to narrate thirty
years of American history, the same time period that coincides with the
creation of the pictures . . . The tableau vivant is a precursor of cinematography.
It was a popular social pastime to re-enact famous paintings, and film in its
early stages also assumed this form of entertainment. My main idea was to
‘vivify’ the pictures.”
At the
time of his death, Deutsch was working with Schimek and the Austrian Film
Museum on a research project, on the margins: the city, which brings screenings
and exhibitions to various neighborhoods in Vienna. The next program will
proceed as planned from November 14 through 22. Over the weekend, Schimek and
the Museum released a statement noting that Gustav Deutsch “believed that
aesthetic excellence could be combined with an uncompromising commitment to the
social impact of art, but above all that, he was a gracious and generous
person.”
Gustav
Deutsch : Film Ist. By David Hudson. Criterion , November 4, 2019.
Film Ist 11 Gefuehl und Leidenschaft
Er sagte
lieber zwei Sätze zu wenig als einen zu viel, aber sein hintergründiges Lächeln
signalisierte stets Wertschätzung, die Herzlichkeit, mit der er seinem Umfeld
begegnete. Man mag die gelassene, eher wortkarge Erscheinung des Künstlers
Gustav Deutsch auch als Merkmal seiner Arbeit nehmen: Die Wirkungsmacht seiner
Operationen am bewegten Bild ergab sich nicht nur aus dem sicheren Wissen,
seine Forschungsfelder in aller Ruhe und Genauigkeit ausgelotet zu haben,
sondern auch aus dem Wunsch, sich selbst und die Welt, die sich in seinen
Werken eröffnete, nicht ernster zu nehmen als unbedingt nötig.
Gustav
Deutsch, geboren 1952 und initiiert im politisierten Umfeld der Wiener
Medienwerkstatt um 1980, gehörte seit den 1990er-Jahren zu den Größen der
internationalen Found-Footage-Szene. Indem er Filmfundstücke auf unerwartete
Weise gegeneinander setzte, sie neu komponierte und rekontextualisierte, konnte
er demonstrieren, wie weit die Strahl- und Schlagkraft eines Mediums reichte,
das sich im Geschichtenerzählen und bloßen Dokumentieren nicht erschöpfte: Er
konfrontierte Szenen aus wissenschaftlichen Filmen mit handverlesenen Splittern
aus Amateur- und Spielfilmen, förderte aus den Archiven nie gesehene Bilder aus
den ersten Jahrzehnten des Kinos zutage; er feierte die sinnliche Attraktion
fotografischer Verfallszustände, indem er zerkratzte, bekritzelte Kader,
schadhafte Kopien und schmelzende Filmbilder zeigte.
Als Arbeiter
am Kino war Deutsch ein Reisender zwischen den Zeiten: Er bildete, um ihre
Schönheit für die Zukunft zu bewahren, die Gegenwartszustände seiner von der
Vergangenheit zeugenden Bildobjekte ab. Die lebenden Toten der Filmgeschichte,
die fragilen Lichtgestalten des frühen Kinos, die anonymen Urlaubsfilmhelden
und Zufallspassanten faszinierten ihn. Das Ideologische seines Mediums verlor
er dabei nicht aus den Augen. Denn die Laufbilder vermitteln vor allem eines:
Weltanschauung. Filmemachen ist eine Frage des Blicks.
Der
Found-footage-Jongleur war indes nur eine seiner vielen Identitäten: Gustav
Deutsch arbeitete auch als Architekt, Konzept- und Installationskünstler, seine
Projektpalette umfasste Foto- und Videoarbeiten, Vortragsserien, Performances
und Ausstellungen für den musealen Raum, multimediale Migrationsstudien und
interkulturelle Kunstvermittlungsunternehmungen. Aber das Kino war der
Knotenpunkt seines Schaffens. Seine entscheidenden Fragen lauteten: Was hat uns
das Kino mitzuteilen, wenn man es aus seinen alten Funktionszusammenhängen
reißt? Was signalisieren die Zeit- und Gebrauchsspuren in seinen Oberflächen?
Welche geheimen Botschaften sind in den Filmfragmenten gespeichert?
Mit der
seriellen Urlaubsfilmmontage „Adria“ fand er 1990 zu seinem Zentralthema. Von
den Dokumentarkonventionen seiner frühen Filme emanzipierte er sich damit
nachhaltig. „Adria“ versammelt Amateuraufnahmen vom Strandurlaub. Dabei legte
Deutsch eine kollektive Ästhetik des Hobbyfilms bloß. Danach begann er,
gemeinsam mit seiner Partnerin Hanna Schimek, in Archiven, Kinematheken und
Filmsammlungen nach verschütteten Bildern für seine Kino-Assemblagen zu
fahnden. Es gehe ihm darum, „unbeachtete und ungeliebte Filme vor dem Vergessen
zu retten“, erläuterte er trocken. Aber Kino-Archäologie allein genügte ihm
nicht. Er zielte aufs Wesentliche.
In der
zwischen 1998 und 2009 veröffentlichten „Film ist.“-Serie untersuchte er sein
Medium spielerisch-systematisch. Das Mathematische und das Magische, zwei
Grundbedingungen des Kinos, bildeten in seiner Filmarbeit nicht einfach deren
Pole, sondern den Mittelpunkt seines Schaffens. Naturgewalten, Sonnenlichtspiele,
Mondphasen, Gewitter und Sternenfunkeln betrachtete er als vorfilmische
Phänomene, er sprach vom „Projektionsraum Himmel“.
Gustav Deutsch
wusste, dass die Mysterien der zwischen Evidenz und Phantasma changierenden
Bewegtbildkunst nicht endgültig zu klären waren. So bemühte er sich – Antworten
zwangsläufig schuldig bleibend – um die Präzisierung seiner Fragen, um
lustvolle künstlerische Zuspitzung der tausend Finten eines Mediums, dem wir
uns sehlüstern und gutgläubig immer wieder anvertrauen. Deutsch schloss in
seiner Arbeit nichts aus, keine Bildersorte hatte bei ihm Vorrang – und alles,
auch das scheinbar „Wertlose“, Anspruch auf kritische Durchleuchtung: zufällig
Gefundenes und selbst Inszeniertes, laienhafte und professionelle
Darstellungen, early cinema und spätes Filmtheater, Fernsehen und Kino, „Kunst“
und „Kitsch“.
Für sein
Spielfilmexperiment „Shirley – Visionen der Realität“ (2013) erkundete er die
stilisierten Bildräume des Malers Edward Hopper. Die Idee, 13 der berühmten
Ölgemälde des Amerikaners im Studio aufwändig nachzubauen, mit einem
Schauspielteam (angeführt von der Tänzerin und Performance-Künstlerin Stephanie
Cumming) zu besetzen und zu einer Art Erzählung zu verketten, mutete im
Zeitalter der digitalen Abkürzungen ausgesprochen altmodisch an. Auch deshalb
führte er Ungeahntes, Denkwürdiges vor. „Shirley“ sei ein Film, den nur ein
Architekt, eine Tänzerin und eine Malerin machen konnten, sagt Deutsch damals –
denn es brauchte, um die Arbeit zu konzipieren, nicht nur jenes Verständnis für
Räume und Gebäude, das der Architekt Deutsch mitbrachte, sondern eben auch das
Zutun einer choreografisch versierten Darstellerin und die Hilfe einer für die
Hintergrundmalerei zuständigen Künstlerin, die mit Hanna Schimek zur Verfügung
stand. Sein Film sei „auch der Studiogeschichte Hollywoods verhaftet“, erklärte
Deutsch, „schon deshalb wollte ich diese Räume bauen, den Reiz der Materialität
spüren. Und genau wie das klassische Kino, das seine Künstlichkeit ja auch
stets ausgestellt hat, weiß Hopper zu berühren, obwohl man sehen kann, wie konstruiert,
wie falsch das alles gebaut ist.“
Mit seinem
letzten großen Film „So leben wir. Botschaften an die Familie“ (2017) drang er
sich noch einmal in das utopische Universum alter Amateurfilme ein, in denen
die Menschen das Positive ihres jeweiligen Lebensentwurfs für die ferne Rest-
und Nachwelt festzuhalten suchten. Um das Leben in der Fremde ging es da, um
Filme als Notizbücher, als visuelle Postkarten: eine letzte jener alternativen
Geschichten des Kinos according to Gustav Deutsch. Bis zuletzt war er in alter
Leidenschaft kreativ: Vor wenigen Wochen noch arbeitete er, wie gewohnt an der
Seite Hanna Schimeks und in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Österreichischen Filmmuseum,
an einem Projekt zur Darstellung Wiens in Hobby- und Amateurfilmen bis hin zu
Handyvideos. Das Unternehmen kann er nun nicht mehr selbst vollenden. Am 2.
November erlag Gustav Deutsch 67-jährig seiner Krebserkrankung.
Gustav
Deutsch: Jäger der verlorenen Schätze. Von Stefan Grissemann. Profil , November 5, 2019.
More on
the film : 'Shirley: Visions of Reality"
Film
Director Gustav Deutsch Brings the World of Edward Hopper to Life. By Eric David. Yatzer, May 15, 2016.
In the
course of the European Cultural Project Light/Image/Reality, a camera obscura
was built on the Greek Island of Aegina in 2003. Those responsible were Gustav
Deutsch (idea/concept), Franz Berzl (architecture) and Gavrilos Michalis
(realization). It is a cylindrical building with twelve small openings evenly
allocated on its perimeter. When they are opened, the light from the
surroundings is reflected in the building onto twelve screens, which are
suspended from the ceiling in a circle. These natural projections result in a
twelve-part panoramic view of the surroundings, mirror-inverted and upside
down. The building was erected on the foundation of a German anti-aircraft gun
emplacement from World War II and is a steel construction with wooden paneling.
It is the first camera obscura building in Greece and the first in the world to
project a panoramic view. Matthias Boeckl writes: "The upside-down world,
as well as the ritual entrance through a chute or gateway from the outside
world, gives you the feeling of 'another' world, which is actually still our
own."
The
"other" world, which is actually still our own, also finds its way
into the cinema. What is seen there has, however, passed through more than one
dark room. We may consider the camera obscura a lost utopia of the medium of
film; a room that is simultaneously a camera, a laboratory and a cinema; a room
where filming, development, printing and projection take place
simultaneously—at the speed of light. On the other hand (and inspired by
Bazin), we may also consider the film medium the historically last and most
advanced of those recording or representational systems, which are still linked
with reality through physical contact, such as the camera obscura—real gateways
to the outside world. That is, systems of representation, in which reality
doesn't just appear in quotation marks.
The work
of the artist, filmmaker and camera obscura designer Gustav Deutsch deals with
such systems and gateways; the zones of contact between two "worlds"
or realities, which should by no means be played against each other or separated
entirely from one another. "Our" world takes a deep interest in the
"other" and vice versa; each of them is a part of the other.
Deutsch's preferred term for the "other" world (which is nevertheless
still ours) is film. In the titles of three of his works, he uses the
formulation Film is. and puts a dot in place of the numerous historical,
contemporary or future definitions (or "reductions") of the medium of
film. The dot, or the period, comprises several meanings or movements in one
small space. Firstly, a full stop, or the decision that film exists—independent
of the individual definitions and uses that humanity makes of it. "There
is 'another' world." Secondly, a valuation, which lies in the reverent
brevity of the formulation, the pathos of evidence: "It is a wonderful
world." Thirdly, an explosive opening up in all directions, the
paradoxical counterpart to the first movement. The dot is infinite. It provides
its own gateway, a resistance to be overcome, to be flooded by all the experiences,
expectations and potential that the word "film" (and the fact of the
actual, extra-linguistic existence of film) has released. "Film is
infinite, and infinitely meaningful. Film speaks many languages. Film is more
than film."
It is
that "more than" which suggests some of Gustav Deutsch's major
interests, as well as the characteristic convergence of scholarly and artistic
processes in his work; scholarly work that is conscious of its aesthetic and poetic
elements, and art that strives to be seen as explanatory, enlightening and
clarifying.
The
"more than" is, for example, that of the psychoanalyst or poet, who
recombines the fragmentary material available to him or her in a new manner, or
discovers a new rhythm and sound in it. Deutsch's found footage films are all
related to such activities. Images, which seemingly have nothing or little to
do with each other (in terms of origin), or "don't belong together,"
are compared, interlaced and considered related. There are often external
correlations, formal correspondences, or hidden connections, which lead to such
sequencing. Only then is a third (or sixth) sense recognizable, like in a dream
or a rebus. For example in the night verses of Film ist. 2.2, which are
accompanied by a barking dog: shadow figures made by hands; the moon behind the
passing clouds; a spotlight illuminating a storm-stricken town; a full-frame
shot of the moon; moths in a light; space—the final frontier; a lunar eclipse;
a human eye—the pupil responding to light and dark; and finally, a circular
accumulation of bacteria around a pool of light. All of life, inside and
outside of the cinema, is based on "phototactic behavior."
Gustav
Deutsch's "more than" is also the primary motivation behind a certain
tendency in cultural studies, investigating historical artifacts in order to
decipher the forces, potentials, and power relations at work in a given
society—and make them useful for the present. A further example from Film ist.
illustrates how larger structures can be recognized in small, seemingly
arbitrary finds of film footage. The dirty, trashy piece of film, which appears
in chapter 4 of Film ist., was acquired by Deutsch at a flea market in Brazil.
A test strip damaged by cleaning agents, it contains two frames each from all
scenes of a movie or TV melodrama. At some later point in time, a cleaning lady
had used this old film strip to clean floors with, as a practical means of
recycling materials. Here a psychoanalytical perspective goes hand in hand with
the sociological reading. The test strip still carries within itself the
narrative neurosis and ideological preoccupations of the dominant film
industry, but it also exemplifies an opposing force. In artistic terms, it is
an experimental film, which—as each scene is reduced to two frames—ridicules
the ideological essence of its origin and gives birth to a different, dynamic
beauty. And it is an "experimental film" in practical terms,
which—due to the specific material properties of the emulsion coating—brings to
light its own surprising cleansing effect in the hands of a cleaning person.
This naturally also ruined it. The fact that the cleaning lady, who used it,
was also—potentially—part of the mass audience that watched the original soap
opera, makes the whole story even more scintillating.
"Macht
kaputt, was Euch kaputt macht" ("Destroy whatever is destroying
you") was the title of a rebellious 1969 song by the German band Ton
Steine Scherben. If one assumes (like many people did in 1969) that film and TV
melodramas are "destroying" their audiences by turning them into
"passive victims" of the dominant ideology, then the Brazilian
cleaning lady represents the concept of an emancipatory counterstrike. Even if
one believes (as do many contemporary scholars of film and cultural studies)
that the audiences of such soap operas have access to various strategies of
subversion and revaluation, and should not only be seen as victims, the film as
a cleaning article represents a nice allegory of such a revaluation strategy.
This proves more difficult, however, when we speculate about the results of the
cleaning process in question. Is the floor perfectly clean, does the home
sparkle when the owner comes back from her daily shopping spree? Her gem of a
cleaning lady has bettered her own record. At the very least, she deserves an
extra tip, or at friendly pat on the shoulder. Did the filmstrip, therefore,
serve to stabilize the social system for a second time around? Did the cleaning
lady outdo herself with the help of the strip, or did she do herself in—in the
belief she could do better work? First, when she dreamt of "another
world" while watching the original film on the screen, and then when she
used the material residue of that film to improve her own work, maintaining the
master and servant relationship in the process? Or could it be a lot less
sophisticated? Didn’t the filmstrip simply contribute to helping a person with
high professional standards master a particularly difficult task—giving herself
a real degree of satisfaction?
It's not
a coincidence that at the end of such a chain of thoughts, more questions have
come to light than answers. The clarifying and enlightening aspects of Gustav
Deutsch's artistic practice should not be confused with solutions, answers or
conclusions. What his work results in are insights into the multi-faceted
relationship between "our" and the "other" world. History
is engraved into the reality of the images and objects that surround us, just
like in the case of the camera obscura on Aegina, built on the foundation of an
old German anti-aircraft gun emplacement. "Our history" and "our
lives" are also depicted in film images, and inscribed on the filmstrip
itself, but in order to illuminate all of their contradictions and social
dimensions (no matter whether it be for an artistic or a scholarly purpose),
working methods are required other than the currently widespread surfing,
downloading and revamping of the supposedly "unlimited" reservoir of
images available in the digital world. What is needed, for example, is a premeditated
approach that slows down the work, makes it more arduous and limits its
scope—in order to create situations, where the "resistance of
objects" (Helmut Lethen) manifests itself and the objects themselves
become articulate.
Deutsch's
"visits to the archives"—since the beginning of his work on Film
ist.—not only serve to reclaim hundreds and thousands of stored filmstrips and
images from earlier times, but also to recapture these kinds of situations. His
repeated trips from film archive to film archive, his communication with the
archivists about their potential and actual holdings, his long viewing sessions
at the editing tables on site, his vast notes or visual transcriptions of these
viewing sessions (mostly in the form of sketches made together with Hanna
Schimek) and the retranslation of those notes into a first draft of the
film—all these activities are attempts to measure and experience the
"inherent weight" of the original film footage, in order not to make
things simpler (for himself) than they are in the context of their genesis and
their meaning. Corresponding working methods can be traced way back to Deutsch
and Schimek's artistic biography, at least until the 1980s: performative
research in the desert; the five-year project of "Planning a public garden
in keeping with artistic and usability criteria;" projects entitled The
Art of Traveling, etc.
The dual
evidence of film lies in its function as a vehicle for the photographic images
captured in it, as well as its inherent function as a "material
witness," which carries with it the history of its use. At first it would
appear completely logical that this dual function can be better recognized and
studied in an archive (on the editing table, in one's hands or under a
magnifying glass) than in a museum (in an exhibition, in the cinema, during
projection). According to this logic, Deutsch's visits to the archives are a
mark of progress, e.g. in contrast to the well-known notion of the artist, who
goes to a museum exhibition to find inspiration in the masterpieces of the
past. Such an artist will mainly adhere to the surface of these images, their
perception and their aesthetic traditions. In an archive, assisted by the
restorers, researchers and cataloguers, he or she would find out much more
about the material and contextual history (the "verso side") of the
works in question. In addition, museums usually exhibit "museum
pieces," meaning a relatively narrow, "outstanding" part of the
complete inventory—that which correlates with the aesthetic and art-historical
premises which are prevalent at a given time. In the archives, on the other
hand, there is always more—"more than" the canon, more than can be
found hanging on the walls or than is regularly screened in cinemas or film
museums. This is also where the proverbial "revenge of the archive"
comes in—not only in that trivial sense, in which a journalist sometimes
exposes someone's lies or schemes to the public by confronting them with
contradictory or incriminating images or statements from the archives. The
return of long-forgotten, cobweb-ridden, non-canonical artifacts can also be
characterized in a more positive sense—as the potency of artifacts to be
uncovered as alternatives. Their "different" or "foreign"
shape, which derives from their former, now historical—or
"outdated"—normalcy, naturally contradicts the current
"normalcy" and thus also the custom of passing off the current state
of a society as inevitable and unalterable, as a natural state.
In order
to actually set free the potency of the artifacts, to enable them to reappear
as alternatives, it is advisable to follow up the arduous archival work with
another "step of progress"—the step towards a genuine re-presentation
of the recaptured images, offering a new view of them on the basis of the
experiences made in the archives, on the editing table. It is a step back into
the public sphere, to a new work of art, or simply to an exhibition, to the
cinema or the museum—with the difference that the "double-sidedness,"
the dual evidence of the film now tends to be exhibited, too. In addition to
the generally accepted connection with reality that the filmic or photographic
images have, the "hidden" weight of the original film footage will
now also become evident, the unique history of the materials used and the
historicity of the medium as a whole.
Gustav
Deutsch's works, particularly those beginning with the phrase Film ist., take
such a step with ease and confidence—even in places where they create new
clusters of meaning (with the help of newly composed music, for instance). They
can neither be reduced to closed narratives, nor to the function of
"historical proof" (a common practice whenever archival material is
being used on TV). As demonstrated by the structure of Deutsch's film Welt
Spiegel Kino, there is always another or more-than-one other image behind each
image, and this will also never be the definitive or final one. Chapter 9 of
Film ist., for instance, reaches beyond the sort of dry evidence that its
subtitle—Conquest—would seem to promise at first glance. It offers a cultural
and social-historical outline of the expansionist ideas which characterize
Western bourgeois society in the late 19th and early 20th century, and
demonstrates how film accompanied, reflected and supported these ideas—from
claiming territory by various new means of visual and material transport
(train, cinema, airplane) to the more or less "peaceful"
incorporation, measuring and exhibition of what is deemed "savage,"
and the violent conquest of land through war. In decisive moments, however,
these passages invite a different reading. When lions suddenly leap out of
fireplaces into middle-class living rooms, or a python snakes out of a night
table, one can sense the fear of the bourgeois that the savages might invade
the innermost hearth of civilization. From the perspective of the latter, of
course, this means the colonial system is finally beginning to tip. The
European peoples' arrogance and lack of humanity have become obvious during the
passages which show how indigenous peoples were measured and
"documented"’ by means of medicine and cinematography. But in
Deutsch’s utopian selection of images, the counter-attack of the ‘savages’ is
even stronger: They are sending us their full register of animalistic revenge,
via our fireplaces and night tables, into the bedrooms of our bad conscience.
At the end of the sequence, the python creeps over a magnificently ornamented
carpet that is going up in flames.
The
proverbial "cussedness of things" would be a good metaphor for this
and many other examples from the Film ist. series. With innumerable archival
finds, and with his sparse and gentle manipulations of the footage (slow
motion, reverse motion), Deutsch demonstrates how strong the
"alternative" potential of cinematic artifacts is. It only takes a
nudge and the ideas and objects recorded on film begin to work against their
apparent purpose—including the filmstrip itself, as the example of the
Brazilian cleaning lady has shown. Chapter 7.1 celebrates a whole series of
"cussed objects" (doors, ladders, bicycles, hoses); 7.4 proposes the
reversal of time, of sexual difference, and of all the destruction wrought by
man and woman; and chapter 8 (Magic) is entirely devoted to the suspension of
everyday logic—most beautifully in the case of 8.2, with its
"resurrections" and its invitation to roam freely between life and
death or Heaven and Earth.
In the
Film ist. project, Deutsch never makes a secret of the various inscriptions the
archival footage carries, that is the extremely varying textures, the grades of
color or black and white, and the degree of damage accumulated on the film. On
the contrary, he exhibits them—and encourages the viewer to ponder this
"hidden weight" of the film artifacts. It is a sort of counter weight
to all the representational capacities of film, to the "real world"
references that we’ve come to expect from film images. Whoever exhibits these
inscriptions, opens the floodgate for one of the most beautiful dreams of film,
which is usually suppressed: the dream of someday being able to tell its own
story, not just the stories of the people depicted. The dream sequence in
chapter 8.3 of Film ist. refers to this very set of circumstances. A sleeping
woman is tossing around in her dreams. A paper-mâché cave appears to her and to
us, in the middle of which the image threatens to disappear. At the time when
the original piece of nitrate film was preserved in the archive, the footage
had obviously already disintegrated to a good degree—exactly at this spot. The
flickering damage in the frames worsens from second to second, and the damage
itself takes on the place of the image. It is an exciting image that wasn't
premeditated, an image the film footage produced "by itself" in the
course of its history, that is to say blindly. Some film archivists call these
images the "flowers of evil." At the climax of the shot, and at the
center of the image where the damage is now in full bloom, the paper-mâché cave
turns into the horrifying maw of the devil—as if both aspects of the medium,
its recto and its verso side so to speak, were now communicating with each
other, as if the images captured one hundred years ago and the damage
accumulating over one hundred years were aware of each other's most intimate
secrets. The floodgate enabling these two worlds to be in contact with each
other would seem both allegorical and tangible, right in front of our eyes. And
in-between, we keep on watching the sleeping woman, whose dream—assisted by
more devil's maws, superimpositions and ghostly apparitions—turns into a
fantasy of flying and (sexual) escape; a contradictory narrative of (self-)
empowerment through forcible interventions by a "dream savage." He
tears the woman out of her bourgeois existence and flings her upwards, into
space, where she experiences the wonder and the glory of floating free. At this
point in Gustav Deutsch's production, the woman is playing the role of the
film.
"The
rest is history," is what we usually say when everything that matters
seems to have been said. However, it has never all been said, and the rest is
not only infinite and never-ending—"to be continued," as indicated in
the endings of several films by Gustav Deutsch—but also another (hi)story. It
is that, which has not yet been entirely illuminated and exposed or
"demystified" by scholarly practices. It doesn't yet have a name. It
will only be exhibited in the museums of the future—or may already be found in
the utopian, poetical, polemical "museums" of some contemporary artists.
As
cultural techniques, which stem in almost equal parts from scholarly work (the
need for demystification and knowledge) and showmanship (the need for
entertainment and remystification), the media of film and the museum can be
considered closely related. Both of them are simultaneously sites of research
and cabinets of curiosities; systems for storing images of the world, and
systems in which these images are displayed, promoted and interpreted. Both
employ forms of mise-en-scène through which the public can experience history.
And since they both came into being in a capitalist society, they both tend
towards a "proprietary" view of the collected evidence of the past.
The utopian, poetical, polemical "museums" created by some filmmakers
may be seen as an alternative model. Amongst them—that is alongside the
multi-faceted work of Chris Marker, the short films by Bruce Conner, Dziga
Vertov's "laboratory" of cinema, the Histoire(s) du cinéma by
Jean-Luc Godard, the unique television programs produced by Alexander Kluge, or
Peter Kubelka's practice which includes filmmaking, teaching and the creation
of an actual museum—the films and film-related works by Gustav Deutsch have
increasingly secured their own special place. The individual "Cinemas of
History" built by these artists are greatly varying constructions, and are
sometimes even critically opposed to each other. The archives they make use of,
and the manner in which they do so in order to create their own collections,
vary just as greatly. They often invoke similar philosophies of history, yet
also quite different ones, in part. They sometimes do so explicitly and
sometimes only implicitly. Sometimes they investigate what remains of the great
names, but many of them tend towards the rest, to that which has been excluded,
since "verses are fostered by waste" (Anna Akhmatova), and not in showcases.
All of their "museums" are processes of transcription in the public
eye. They are neither blind mirrors (as archives tend to be), nor are they too
highly polished ones (the way museums often function). They are "living
mirrors of a new world," as Tom Gunning wrote in reference to Deutsch's
Welt Spiegel Kino, “revealing the cinema as a play of reflections that stretch
across modern life.”
Some of
them, such as Godard, produce obituaries for the cinema or describe how film
came to be at fault in the face of real historical challenges. For example, how
it became clear in 1945 that the cinema of the spectacle had failed, whereas
"the poor cinema of newsreels" now "has to wash clean of all
suspicion / the blood and tears / just as the pavement is swept / when it’s
already too late / and the army has opened fire on the crowd." Others,
like Gustav Deutsch, show that the "poor" cinema of newsreels, home
movies, educational films, and half-disintegrated "prehistoric" films
is just as helpless and at fault, as its wealthy counterpart which lays claim
to the name of "film history." And that, vice versa, the poor
relatives are certainly as suited for revitalization as their canonical cousins
are; that is, for a "reverse-engineering" of history to the point
where the things and ideas that have ‘survived’ in our minds are joined by
those that have not.
Walter
Benjamin writes: "It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless
than that of the renowned. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory
of the nameless." This may also be applied to the textual construction at
hand. It is tempting, because it is easier, to deal with famous works and
names. Yet since then, partially as a result of Benjamin's continued presence,
we have seen far more artistic and scholarly projects taking the "arduous
path" than he would have anticipated when writing these last words in the
year 1940.
In Film
ist. 12—Memory and Document, there is a single shot by which an anonymous man
immortalized himself in a fashion reminding us of the famous ones. The goal of
this textual construction is to honor him—and to also honor the man, Gustav
Deutsch, who was the first to pay tribute to him in Film ist. by means of
painstaking work in archives, museums and art. The anonymous man is standing
with a camera and a tripod in the center aisle of a moving train car. He is
filming. No one else is filming him, so the only reason why we can see him at
all is that he's filming the large mirror in front of himself on the door to
the next train car. The landscape flies by in the left-hand window—the
"mobilized gaze" from the train, which is today considered an
important forerunner of the "cinematic gaze." But the world outside
is much too bright. We cannot make out any details in the pictures framed by the
train window, all the more so because the filmmaker then swings the camera
around to the center, directing it at himself in the mirror. In the course of
this pan, he captures a third and forth type of image in his film. To the right
of the door, beside the mirror, there are two gauges, instruments for the
purpose of recording reality, the characteristics of which—temperature, air
humidity or speed—are being translated into the movements of indicators and
into the figures they indicate, that is, into geometrical, abstract and
scientifically based "moving images." To the left of the door, beside
the mirror, there is an easily recognizable landscape painting, which takes the
place of the real landscape rolling past the train window. Due to the light
conditions in the car, the "real image" is "overexposed"
and can only be perceived indirectly—as flickering reflections of light on the
"artificial" surface of the painting: on the screen.
As a
whole, it is a perfect and completely open film image of film—a sort of
allegorical self-portrait of the medium. It is also the self-portrait of an
individual, and while it does not attribute a name to the anonymous man, it
gives him a continued existence and a concrete place in time. His is the
smallest and one of the most beautiful of all "museums" that
filmmakers have yet created.
Originally
published as "Cinéma(s) de l'histoire: Dark Rooms, Speaking Objects, More
than Film: Gustav Deutsch as a Museum Maker" (2009). Translated from the
German by Renée von Paschen. The essay was first published in the book Gustav
Deutsch, edited by Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg and Michael Loebenstein,
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Vienna 2009.
Dark
Rooms, Speaking Objects, More than Film: Gustav Deutsch as a Museum Maker. By Alexander Horwath. Mubi , November 6, 2019.
Austrian
film director Gustav Deutsch introduced the audience to the secrets of his sui
generis cinema in an open discussion which took place on Monday, March 4th 2019
at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, as part of the 21st Thessaloniki
Documentary Festival, and in the presence of the Thessaloniki International
Film Festival Artistic Director, Mr Orestis Andreadakis. This year’s TDF
edition pays tribute to Gustav Deutsch’s work by screening seven of his
signature films.
Gustav
Deutsch, a restless and wild spirit, switched from architecture to cinema at
the late 1980s, adopting a unique filmmaking style which defies the rules and
transforms archival material into fascinating cinematic reality. The artist was
introduced by Mr Andreadakis, who noted among other things that “his presence
here is a great honour for the TDF”.
In the
course of the discussion, moderated by TIFF’s head of international program
Yorgos Krassakopoulos, Gustav Deutsch talked about what he considers to be true
magic in cinema, made comments on technological developments in cinema and
revealed the secrets of his art.
Austrian
director denied that he forms part of the so-called experimental cinema. “I
personally feel that I’m just making cinema. I possibly deviate from the
typical definition of cinema, since as a filmmaker I’m tiptoeing to the edge of
genres, but the truth is I cannot find differences between fiction and
documentary”. As he said, the element of surprise is crucial for the audience
to connect with his work, and with cinema in the wider sense. Every artist has
to move in a different way each time. “If an artist does not pursue constant
restlessness and movement, I believe the whole thing becomes unimportant. I
started as an architect, but went to Bauhaus School, where all arts were
brought together. As an artist, I have to say that architecture is a great
starting point for any form of artistic creation. I am impressed, of course, by
the fact that many cinematographers have started from architecture. Its
relationship with cinema is close. In both arts you have to think about the
steps you will make, and you have plenty of time, about 3-4 years, to complete
your next project. At the same time, you have to collaborate with many people,
so team spirit is necessary. You also have to encourage your crew members,
cooperate closely with them and inspire trust in every step of the creative
process”.
As to
his target audience, the director noted: “I want my audience to be curious and
willing to detect something in the films like I do. In fact, if they see
something completely different than what I detected, I get even more satisfied.
As a viewer and at the same time as an artist, Gustav Deutsch repeated his
opinion that surprise must be cinema’s main ingredient: “For me, every film
must contain that element. Every director must believe that their work speaks
for itself, and know that it won’t be perceived the same way by all audiences.
So they have to be open to various alternative readings, and certainly not try
to be didactic”.
As to
his films’ ingredients, which more often than not are archival material, Gustav
Deutsch replied that cinema was not born in one day and has two structural
bases: the investigative-informative, and the entertaining. “Especially for my
Film Ist. Project, I looked for footings dating back to the early days of
cinema. Later, I started to collect cinematographers’ quotings on what cinema
is, in order to understand them. The film shows that cinema has enormous
potential. Films move through time, light, darkness. They present to us people
on the move”, he said.
Gustav
Deutsch called his short films “pocket films” and explained his way of thinking
during filming: “I place the camera in a crossroad, press the “On” button and a
little while later I see what was recorded. This process always contains
surprises, often by people passing by and stopping to take a peek at what’s
happening. So first I observe the image and then what I call microdrama,
meaning the thing that is happening. During observation, I notice what the image’s
subject is”.
As a
film director, though, he focuses on cooperation, which is critical for making
a film: “Cooperation is necessary, so it’s necessary to trust your partners,
even if they are file clerks. Partners are the ones who will help you find what
you’re looking, with their visual memory. Take for example my wife, Hanna
Simek, who has seen hundreds of films and helps me each time in my research”.
Gustav Deutsch noted that cinema does not lose its magic even if you watch
films all the time. On the contrary, through constant research, one can change
their perception of things. As he said: “It’s not easy to watch films all the
time. You always have to be concentrated and careful. However, each time there
is a scene, a moment, which appears before you in a different way, in a way
that you have never seen before”.
Asked
about the future of cinema, the film director said that cinema has not changed
in fact, but has to be innovative and daring. However, the film industry tries
to intervene in order to wipe out these elements. “For me, cinema is an art,
not an industry”, the director noted, adding that he focuses more not on
technical means, but on education and aesthetics: “Our work has the power to
influence. I feel that it’s tragic to have knowledge of so many technical
issues, but not caring at all about the power of image”.
Gustav
Deutsch said he never makes the distinction between fiction and documentary. As
he said, “As you know, there are film directors even in documentaries. So, it’s
rather a pseudo-distinction”. In his opinion, every image can be considered interesting,
each one in its own way: “I don’t believe there are boring films. You can look
and find something interesting inside, even if there was no such intention by
its director”.
The
Austrian filmmaker is particularly interested in home movies: “I’m not
interested in them as a glimpse on people’s private life, but as a piece of
History as it is composed by many personal stories. In previous times we did
not give special attention to such material; this changed in the last few
years, since this kind of footage is much more original than the professional”.
Mr Deutsch also stressed out that constant research for amateur audiovisual
material teaches cinematographers a lot. “When someone shoots something, they
automatically adopt a particular view on things. In home movies there are no
professional rules, such as the ones learnt in film schools. Every shot is
particularly important for the one who takes it. Of course, technology and
access to photography and video-producing devices is impressive nowadays. However,
this results in decreasing quality”, the director said. And added: “In previous
times you had a film and had to honor it. Nowadays, we have plenty of recording
devices, but we lost quality. People take so many pictures, more than they have
ever taken in all previous stages in the history of photography. I think that
in the future, the current situation will be described as middle ages”.
Open
discussion with Gustav Deutsch. Thessaloniki Documentary Festival , March 5, 2019.
For the
last 25 years, Gustav Deutsch has been one of the most prominent artists in an
Austrian moving image scene characterized by an exploration of the physical
properties of film, and an interest in recontextualising a century of footage.
His best-known work remains his 180-minute epic Film Ist (Film Is…), parts 1-6
of which were completed in 1998, parts 7-12 in 2002. Composed entirely from
archival material and divided into themes such as ‘Magic’ and ‘Movement and
Time’, it is a potted history and wry commentary on the evolution of cinema’s
visual language, with familiar tropes (melodramatic heroines swooning at their
male lovers, for example, or the white filmmaker’s gaze at an exoticized
colonial subject) reiterated to the point of absurdity. Spanning from the 1890s
to the 1930s, when sound became ubiquitous in cinema, the film positions itself
between documentary and the avant-garde. Deutsch’s rigorous editing and use of
music by Austrian experimental composers such as Fennesz and Burkhard Stangl
set Film Ist apart from conventional works about the provenance of film, and
even Jean-Luc Godard’s oblique Histoire(s) du cinema (Histories of Cinema,
1988-98), which retained voice-over as a tool of audience instruction.
Last
month, Index – the DVD wing of Sixpack, co-founded by Peter Tscherkassky to
distribute films by Austrian (and other central European) artists – released
several of Deutsch’s less well-known works as Not Home: Picturing the Foreign,
in order to chart the development of his signature style and display his
talents as a cinematographer and archivist. The collection places several of
his earliest 16mm works alongside the 31 ‘pocket films’ shot on digital video
between 2005 (when his feature-length Welt Spiegel Kino came out) and 2015,
offering a rare glimpse of footage that Deutsch shot himself, rather than
material that he has collated and edited.
The
opening film, Adria – Holiday Films 1954-68 (School of Seeing II) dates from
1990, and is made up of Super-8 footage shot when such casual documentation as
home movie-making became economically feasible. Deutsch sourced the reels from
friends and flea markets, and by placing a newspaper advert, editing it
together and blowing it up to 16mm. Like Film Ist, this is split into parts,
although these are untitled and their boundaries feel porous. What unites the
images of waves, boats, beaches, street signs, children and families is the way
that their amateur captors have imbibed the idioms of ‘professional’
photography and film-making – for example, the vast majority of the tracking
shots from moving vehicles go from left to right. This formal language makes it
easier for Deutsch to arrange the parts by theme, and find some humour,
particularly when he compiles footage of children, such as the boy who chases a
crab with a tennis racket, unaware or unconcerned that the creature could hurt
him. Deutsch never sneers at these tourists: rather the uncritical presentation
of their footage recaptures some of the wonder they may have felt as they
pioneered both home movie-making and mass international travel – a sense now
reinforced by the nostalgic feel of Super-8 as a medium.
The
silence of Super-8 makes it harder to locate the people filmed, leaving the
question of who or what is ‘foreign’ unresolved. The lack of any soundtrack
makes Adria feel a little slow, or perhaps slightly too long, but even if it
does not match the dynamism of his later works, it is skilfully cut, with
Deutsch’s montage shifting sharply from black and white to colour, and swiftly
back again, to striking effect. Poetry and social commentary merge: as we watch
the post-war generation step into strange new places, we understand that most
of the buildings will have survived, but not all of the nation-states – the
Yugoslav flag that appears early on feels particularly foreboding – and, of
course, the people themselves are transitory.
The
second film, Eyewitnesses in Foreign Countries (1993) was made with Moroccan
director Mostafa Tabbou, according to Oulipo-style formal constraints. It
consists of 600 shots lasting three seconds each, split into groups of 10 or 20
per motif, with scenes lasting from 30 to 60 seconds. 300 of those shots were
taken by Deutsch in Figuig, Morocco, and 300 by Tabbou in Vienna. This this
might make the film sound disjointed, but the regularity of its form and the
symmetry of its content mean that it soon settles into a surprisingly steady
rhythm. Although Deutsch was, by then, a ‘professional’ filmmaker working with
an amateur (Tabbou only released one other work, again with Deutsch, the
five-minute short White Marriage in 1996), there is real rigour to both the
composition and juxtaposition of their material. Many aspects of life in
Morocco have parallels in Vienna, with Deutsch capturing the way in which the
North African climate influences the pace of life without descending into
Orientalist cliché, and Tabbou giving an intriguing insight into how Austria
looks to him: ordered, bureaucratic and cold, both emotionally and physically.
The
centrepiece is Deutsch’s most recent major work, Notes and Sketches I
(2005-15), a series of ‘pocket films’ made across Europe with a Canon camera
and a mobile phone, lasting one hour in total. Deutsch uses digital technology
to revisit the methods of the 19th century cinematic pioneers, especially the
Lumière brothers, who would take single shots of something of interest and
present them as documentaries. Unlike their works, with their duration set by
the reel of film, Deutsch’s Notes and Sketches are of various lengths, tending
to focus on the minutiae of 21st-century life. Only rarely do they feel too
long – a scene in Venice where workmen cut down trees struggles to justify its
eight minutes – and the series works best when it delivers a joke or some wry
social comment, for example, where the slow movement of tourists through an
airport is billed as a ‘mini-drama’.
Immediate,
accessible, characterized by their gentleness, these pieces reminded me of Guy
Sherwin’s ‘Short Film Series' (which I reviewed for frieze last year). But
unlike Sherwin, Deutsch adds layers of signs for those who share his obsession
with the history of cinema. A shot of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, nods to Derek
Jarman’s Super-8 films, notably A Journey To Avebury (1971), filmed nearby; the
‘panorama’ in a segment entitled ‘Vip Harbor Seafood Restaurant, Los Angeles,
3.4.2010’ reveals the diners to be Deutsch, Tom Gunning, Erkki Huhtamo, Ernie
Gehr and Ken Jacobs – all scholars involved with the early history of cinema,
or important filmmakers from the post-war US underground.
Unlike
fellow Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, who remains dedicated to 35mm
film, Deutsch embraces digital media and finds amusement in its ubiquity. The
moment where gallery visitors capture Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) on
their camera phones works on several levels: the reification of the image first
onto their screens, using technology that is frequently blamed for inducing the
levels of loneliness depicted in Hopper’s painting, and then Deutsch’s; and the
reference to his own feature film Shirley – Visions of Reality (2013), in which
Deutsch reconstructed classic Hopper artworks and used them to explain several
decades of American history.
Film Ist
remains the best place to start with Gustav Deutsch, being such an intelligent
study of the language of cinema, but this collection demonstrates his
understanding of the way that language imparts itself on its viewers, and moves
into the vernacular of everyday life. The positioning of his early works with
his most recent makes it clear that this will be a constant process, that
evolves with technology: whatever the format, and whichever possibilities it
raises, filmmakers and viewers will continue to inform each other, and erode
the boundaries between creator and consumer until they become obsolete.
Not Home.
By Juliet Jacques. Frieze, July 29, 2016.
Between
montage and movement, overlapping views and resurgences, Gustav Deutsch's
monumental project, Film ist., attempts to write the history of cinema through
its own material, at the intersection of early cinema, avant-garde films of the
1920s, and contemporary experimental cinema. In his book Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon
Gustav Deutsch (Film ist. Visual thinking according to Gustav Deutsch), Livio Belloï seeks to
better understand the magnum opus of an artist who defies categorisation.
While
Gustav Deutsch caused a sensation at the 2013 Berlinale with his film Shirley,
which transposes Edward Hopper's
paintings to film, he was also attracting attention in the realm of film theory
as the subject of a new book by Livio Belloï, Film ist. La pensée visuelle
selon Gustav Deutsch(1). Gustav Deutsch has already been the subject of other,
mostly generalist books. However Livio Belloï's book is the first to focus on
Film ist., or rather one part of it. Deutsch's original cinematic oeuvre is composed
of 13 chapters (1-6, 7-12, 13), and lasts 4 hours in total. Livio Belloï’s
300-page book focuses only on the central part (7-12). According to the
researcher, the reason is simple: “it appears fairly obvious that the central
part is the most relevant to Deutsch’s creation of a hypothetical definition of
cinema itself; this is where his visual thinking reaches its pinnacle, where
his artistry in harvesting film extracts and piecing them together crystallises
into veritable analytical proposals."
In homage
to Deutsch's film, Livio Belloï's book has the same structure and each chapter
focuses on a series of questions about what we are watching. Seeing: this is
one of the main themes of Deutsch's work. In this sense, Chapter 7 (and the
first chapter of the film), is one of the most evocative: in segment 7.2, a man
leans down to look through a keyhole, and the film shows us "the other
side" through alternating countershots. Deutsch's choice is not
insignificant: the lock shaped a series of early films in many ways,
establishing a logic of continuity in the infancy of what would become
cinematographic language. One example is Par le trou de la serrure, a 1901
Pathé production that serves as an archetype of
how early cinema tried to represent subjective vision. In the film, a
room attendant observes, not-so-subtly, the eccentric behaviour of clients in
their rooms. It’s a form of experimentation, of course, but it represents above
all the scopic drive, this need to see what we can't normally see. The
discourse is well known, but it nevertheless rings true: cinema is the art of
voyeurism. This is exactly what Deutsch wants to point out: the filmmaker puts
the viewer is the same position as the voyeur while playing on our perception
of the world (and cinematographic language) by breaking the sacrosanct rule of
continuity: images of a boat at sea, a North African landscape, the portrait of
a young Asian woman, and a frightened actress being attacked by a snake succeed
one another in no logical order, and with nothing in common other than their
critical status as "objects of our gaze", "just" images.
In his
work on the history of the gaze, Carl Havelange describes an "ancient
order" and a "new order", with the latter based on a "third
element" which mediates between the naked eye and the world. For more than
a hundred years, the cinematograph has been such a mediator, this "third
element": the images filmed by the Lumière brothers served no other
purpose than to capture the essence of the world and offer it up for our
entertainment. The beauty of found footage lies precisely in its ability to
divert the logic of the gaze, as Livio Belloï reminds us: "the
particularity of found footage is that it produces a film that is the sum of
the gazes produced by others. Film ist. is not so much a film as an optical
device." Much like the first filmmakers the Lumière brothers, Deutsch
offers the viewer images of the world. He does this by eschewing oral
commentary and verbal remarks, as he is not trying to describe "his"
history of cinema (as did Jean-Luc Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma) nor even a
"history of silent film, but rather a silent history of cinema", as
Livio Belloï explains at the end of his book.
As
filmmaker Samuel Fuller once said, film is “in one word, emotions!"
Fuller’s definition is well known among cinephiles, and Livio Belloï believes
that it reaches its fullest expression in Film ist. Throughout his film,
Deutsch questions images, brings the reader along in his reflection without
ignoring emotional impact: curiosity, strangeness, outrage, but also humour and
tenderness, etc. The artist is on a veritable quest for visual expression, much
like the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s. At certain times, as when he
plays with variations in the speed of the image, Deutsch seems to follow in the
footsteps of those early filmmakers. Deutsch's relationship with these
avant-gardists vacillates between homage and continued reflection. However, there is an ironic element: the
researcher mentions Chapter 10.1, a surprising segment in which intertitles
succeed each other in the complete absence of any image. In René Clair and
Germaine Dulac's vision of "pure cinema", film should eschew any form
of writing to focus solely on images, visual composition, and rhythm: a film
without words. Deutsch, somewhat derisively, took the opposing view and made a
film that could be considered "impure": a series of texts in the
absence of a diegetic world; in short, a film without images. A bit of clever
humour that is actually quite pertinent.
Given
that it is structured in chapters that correspond to those in the film, Livio
Belloï's book cannot be summarised in just a few words given how many themes
and ideas are covered. As with Deutsch's film, each paragraph addresses a main
topic that is the subject of a lengthy and thorough analysis, all while
creating connections to other chapters. This is also the case with the
relationship between Film ist. and contemporary experimental cinema, as connections
are scattered throughout the book, offering a relatively broad overview of this
'other' cinema. Let us simply point out that Deutsch, who was born in Vienna in
1952, is part of a generation of Austrian experimental filmmakers who treated
the image as both a historic and aesthetic subject. Martin Arnold is one
example, but Livio Belloï focuses on Peter Tscherkassky, analysing how he and
Deutsch address the question of dreams in cinema. For example, in Dream work
(2001), Tscherkassky utilises endogenesis, or more simply an internal
construction: in Tscherkassky's work, dreams are represented as multiple layers
within the same image, since the filmmaker manipulates the original filmic
material. Deutsch, in contrast, uses exogenesis: dreams exist only in the shot
of young woman sleeping, and serve as a rallying point to connect various
images. This is just one of the many comparisons Livio Belloï makes between
Deutsch and other experimental filmmakers, whether Austrian (Tscherkassky) or
not (Bill Morrisson, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi). Deutsch and
those artists share the same belief in the image as a narrative tool, and have
the same need to shape it in a different direction, using a principle of
exploration and montage that goes beyond the concept of the image as a singular
object. For Deutsch, the image is above all one cell in the larger body of the
film.
Visual
Thinking according to Gustav Deutsch ends with a summary table and like Film
ist., provides us with an opening: in seeking to create a history of cinema
using its own images, Gustav Deutsch has perhaps come close to the Mnemosyne
Atlas that Aby Warburg worked on until his death, in which he attempted to
create a comprehensive figurative grammar of art history. In Deutsch’s work, we
begin to question chase films, ethnographic films, and the development of
cinematographic language thanks to a clever montage that is designed to go
beyond simple questions of definition and encourage us to question our own
gaze. Deutsch, who admire Warburg, may have brought an unsuspected
encyclopaedic dimension to cinema, the impact of which will only become
apparent once the project (Film ist.) is finished. As the work of a lifetime,
driven by the intelligence and humour of an extraordinary artist, Film ist. may
be one of the most evocative histories of cinema to date.
The
visual thinking of Gustav Deutsch according to Livio Belloï. By Bastien Martin.
Reflexions, University of Liège,
December 28, 2013.
Film/speaks/many/languages
(1995), an early one-minute piece by Gustav Deutsch made from bits of a
Bollywood musical, might at first seem to merely advertise a multicultural
message typical to its era: that cinema has always been a global phenomenon.
But its construction says more. Deutsch embeds the words of the title as
near-subliminal flashes, and the original footage has been reprinted to display
not only the entire frame, with dust and scratches intact, but the optical
sound track and sprocket holes as well, reminiscent of George Landow’s
structural loop Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt
Particles, Etc. (1965–66). The physical material of the celluloid itself,
Deutsch suggests, bears its own levels of significance, even as this
sixty-second fragment evokes other narratives: not just the sugary love story
that must have surrounded it but the low-budget industry implied by its very
existence, as well as the place and time of its production, now visible as
inadvertently documentary aspects of the image.
Working
exclusively with appropriated footage for over a decade, Deutsch has become one
of the major living practitioners of a tradition in avant-garde cinema
stretching back to the works of Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell. A major
retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum properly situates Deutsch in the
materialist vein of fellow Viennese filmmakers like Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren,
and Peter Tscherkassky. What distinguishes Deutsch from his forebears is his
historical place at the tail end of celluloid’s reign: His practice thereby
intersects with the increased role of archives in greater film culture, both
conceptually and practically. This investigative aspect is most overtly
allegorized in World Mirror Cinema (2005), which analyzes actualities shot
outside of movie houses in early twentieth-century Austria, Indonesia, and
Portugal, digitally zooming in on faces in each crowd, then linking them with
fanciful doppelgängers discovered elsewhere in the archives. The cinema,
Deutsch suggests, constitutes an uncannily preserved looking glass of the past,
resiliently tangible yet inevitably slipping into the unreal.
Deutsch’s
opus Film ist. 1–12, a symphonic meditation on the medium, was similarly
produced out of footage acquired from a range of international archives. The
first section, parts 1–6 (1998), looks at cinema as a scientific medium,
reworking films from the technology’s beginnings to the 1970s, sussing out an
unexpected poetry from various optical means of epistemological inquiry. In
contrast, Film ist. 7–12 (2002) focuses exclusively on cinema’s first three
decades, offering color-tinted sequences from ethnographic films and parlor
fantasies chosen for their dreamlike, irrational qualities and set to staticky
minimalist scores by Christian Fennesz, Martin Siewert, and others. His latest
installment of the series, Film ist. a girl & a gun (2009), takes its title
from a D. W. Griffith maxim (famously revived by Godard), stating that all a
director needs are these two elements. Deutsch uses the concept as a
jumping-off point for an exploration of Thanatos and Eros, infusing narrative,
medical, and pornographic sources with mythic symbolism. As Deutsch reveals
metonymic visual links between the genres—joining, for example, images of
copulation, dancing, and knife fights—the boundaries between fiction and
documentary grow both indiscernible and irrelevant.
Footage
Fetish. By Ed Halter. Art Forum , February 19, 2009.
Gustav
Deutsch : February 19 to 26, 2009
Gustav
Deutsch, born in Vienna in 1952, is a leading figure of international
found-footage cinema. In his extravagant "remixes" of film history,
every genre imaginable has its place: fiction and document, magic fables and
newsreels, amateur and scientific films. Although his works are highly playful
and often humorous, he is not concerned with ironic effects when choosing and
editing his found materials. Essentially, Deutsch’s filmmaking looks for a
“sensual comprehension” of the medium, and for an understanding of the ways in
which cinema, history and individual lives are intertwined. The title of one of
his major works sums up this perspective: Welt Spiegel Kino (World Mirror
Cinema).
In
Deutsch’s case, however, the multiply fragmented "mirror" that stands
between "world" and "cinema" becomes a veritable hall of
mirrors. The Retrospective devoted to his oeuvre is meant to lead audiences to
precisely this place. It opens with the première of Gustav Deutsch’s most
recent endeavour, Film ist. a girl & a gun, which mixes images of warfare,
pornography and the cinema of romance. Some of the original materials used in
the making of this film will be presented afterwards, as the visual element in
a live “film concert” performed by regular Deutsch collaborators Christian
Fennesz, Martin Siewert and Burkhard Stangl.
Deutsch began
working with moving images around 1980, when he became associated with the
Vienna Media Workshop Medienwerkstatt. During the 80s, he gradually moved from
documentary video works into conceptual filmmaking and found his central theme
and methods with Adria (1990), a quirky and mock-scientific collage of 1950s
and 60s home movies. With few exceptions (such as the magnificent “experiment
in ethnography”, Augenzeugen der Fremde, 1993), he has explored the mode of
found-footage film ever since. Together with Hanna Schimek, his partner in work
and life, he combs film archives throughout the world for neglected or
forgotten material and creates intricate and poetic “re-readings” of these
archival treasures. What began in 1995/96 with several 1-minute masterpieces
such as Film Speaks Many Languages soon grew into a monumental work in
progress: In his ongoing series Film Is. Deutsch investigates the endless
wealth, unfoldings, and functional mechanisms of the medium. Cinema’s two
“birthplaces”, the scientific laboratory and the fairground, are of special
interest to him.
The
‘juggler of found footage’ is only one of several artistic roles which Gustav
Deutsch has taken on during the past three decades. He is an architect by
training and a visual artist (his recent installation is currently on show at
the Vienna Kunsthalle, in the exhibition Western Motel); his palette comprises
photographic works and multimedia projects, lecture series and performances.
Most of these facets will also be on view in the Film Museum programme; there
will be a lecture by him and Hanna Schimek on the elements of literature in his
new work, and a rare opportunity to witness Deutsch’s "interactive
performance" Taschenkino (1995). Nevertheless, film remains at the core of
his creative output. Deutsch asks: What does cinema tell us when it is removed
from all its functional contexts? What secret messages are stored in film
fragments? What if we see them more as traces of time, social use and ideology
rather than as contained fictions? By tirelessly to reanimate and
recontextualize the cinematic heritage, Gustav Deutsch works towards nothing
less than the future of film.
Coinciding
with this Retrospective, a new Film Museum publication will be released. Gustav
Deutsch, edited by Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg and Michael Loebenstein, is the
first comprehensive (and abundantly illustrated) book on the artist; it
includes essays by Nico de Klerk, Stefan Grissemann, Tom Gunning, Beate
Hofstadler, Alexander Horwath, Wolfgang Kos, Scott MacDonald, and Burkhard
Stangl, as well as visual contributions by Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek.
Film Ist Ein Augenblick (fragment)
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