Page 47 - Studio International - November December 1975

view through doors and windows. Image units stand in
opposition to themselves, assimilate with each other or
dissolve in each other. Beside image pressures, broken
spaces and time flows stand unchanged views.
Attraction, melting and collision of the halves of the film
image, with the aim of forming a sensual topology, are the
main formal means of the chosen image language. One
image devours the other.'7 Dore 0 creates beautiful
images, which stand however in the tradition of the New
American Cinema. Thus the window motif with all its
possibilities of forming light has already been worked out
in the films of Gregory Markopoulos, from Twice a man to
Sorrows.
The last film by Klaus Wyborny to be shown in Germany
was The Birth of a Nation, which was also screened in
London at the avant-garde film festival of 1973. For
almost a year he has lived in the USA. Of all his films this is
the most important, because he unfolds his emotional
life with extreme rigour and partly invents really original
new images. Tony Rayns has intensively discussed
Wyborny's latest films in Sight and Sound, Winter
1973/74, and I want here to refer readers to his article.
Although Wyborny's work belongs in the end to the area
of the feature film because of his narrative interest ( The
Birth of a Nation is also a television production), he has
broken through the borders of traditional language so
violently that it is no longer possible to criticize his films
without extending the traditional codes to formal
categories. But the content is less progressive. His
representation of life, love and crime is of surprising
naivety, since the development of society is seen as a
natural process in which people exist only by the mercy
of fate.
Among the few young film-makers who do formal work
in Germany, only Heinz Emigholz is wholly convincing.
The influence of Werner Nekes is obvious : Emigholz
works with the dissection and reassembling of real Heinz Emigholz Arrowplane 1974
image material (landscapes). But in comparison with Shooting Plan of Part III
Nekes his films are cooler and less romantic. The real
images are the original material for an almost abstract structuralist American film. About Central Region
demonstration of a space and motion experience which Michael Snow writes : 'There are no other people but you
our normal vision cannot offer. In his film Schenec-Tady (the machinery?) and the extraordinary wilderness.
1973, where he displays a landscape in a 360° Alone. Like a lot of humans I feel horror at the thought of
perspective, he comes near to the work of Jan Dibbets, the humanizing of the entire planet. In this film I
who with his photoseries aims to overcome conventional recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and
linear perspective. In addition to this, the display of machinery to a wild place, but I didn't colonize it,
space in time and motion is substantial in the film. So far enslave it...'9 To be able to live according to this
each of his films is made in accordance with an ideology, you would have to exterminate 90% of the world
elaborately worked-out concept, where each camera population.
operation is exactly calculated. With this schematic way The progressive start inaugurated by Warhol's radical
of working he succeeds in distancing the original material break with the traditional aesthetic and by the fluxus
and makes it appear almost abstract. The danger of this movement, which similarly aimed at an anti-art,
method lies in the emptiness and boredom which has not found any further development in independent
develops when the visual material is not strong enough, American film.10 On the contrary this work was
especially when it seems to be exchangeable. In taken up in Europe, where artists worked on similar
Arrow plane 1974 he simulates pans with sequences of problems at the same time. An important role has been
single frames taken from fixed points in a radius of 180g. played here by the work of Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka.
These setting points (E) remain the same in each Their early films are the first examples of formal work with
movement, but each time they are combined very limited image material, where the formal structure
differently. 'The interlaced pan simulations thus become determines the content. From this basis a new rational
regularly displaced from one movement to the next until understanding of art and the artist developed. The
they become inserted into one another again at the 60th task of art is no longer seen as mystification but as
movement. Consequently we run the gamut of all clarifying reality. Accordingly the functioning and the
possible relationships of one pan with itself, that is, all En function of the medium has become the main subject and
frames are at least once combined with all En frames.'8 content of the work. The artistic consequence is seen in
The films described so far show in general similar the reduction of the image material, the exposition of
aesthetic concepts : beautiful and often unusual images formal structure and the renunciation of any meaning
are produced by complicated shooting techniques. The which is not conditioned by the structure of the film.
differences in each case lie in the system of construction, Film-makers who work in this direction in Germany
which is the actual invention of the film and only has and Austria are Kren, Schmidt, Scheugl, Weibel, Export
validity for a single work. Each film is closed in on itself and Hein." A significant new example is the film
and substantiated by itself : a cosmos. Despite the Structural Studies 1974 by W B Hein. It aims at an
difference in quality, the expression of the films is investigation of film technique as the technique of film
strikingly similar, and is caused by the recurrent motif of art; at disclosing this working process to the spectator in
solitary or completely deserted landscapes. This escape order to reveal the processes of creation and perception.
from civilization into a world which seems intact because The film builds on previous work. The main concern has
it is untouched, shows in the last analysis an irrational been to obtain consciousness and control over
and idealistic thinking which lets the formal structure the process of working. This has led step by step to a
of the films appear only as a schematic construction. In concentration on basic structures and single images.
this schizophrenia between irrational thinking and It also led to simple work on short films, in order to make
rational construction lies the parallel with contemporary them clear and understandable by themselves. To some
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