[a small file video essay of only 4MB size – made for the Small File Media Festival 2024] The poor images are also porous – open to be a more true archive of film history. We buy the remastered editions of our favorite films. Yet what we love so much is not there. The pristine … A Cinema to Remember weiterlesen

Mysterious particles are showering down on me. They pierce my eyes, they traverse my body. They emanate not from the outer space, but from the screen I sit in front of. What is not supposed to be part of a film becomes the material of my fascination. A much more radical science fiction story is … unidentified objects weiterlesen

What happens when we scale things? 
Increasing or reduzing size may seem an innocuous practice which only changes the measurements of an object. But in fact, scaling provokes brutal breaks and uncanny tipping points where things become radically and irrevocably different.

What would be the result if I cut out all the things this film is supposedly about, I wondered. Cut out it’s story, cut out its people, cut out all dialogue, and, most of all, cut out the phantom of which the movie title speaks.

An attempt to remake a film by destroying it. To make it even more frightening than it ever dared to be, by letting the film attack my own viewing and editing machines. And have my viewing practices attack the film.

When watching this moment Ulrike Ottinger’s FREAK ORLANDO (1981) I always felt to be part of it and wished I could literally enter the film. Now I did.

Just one image to work on. No cuts. No explanatory words. Just gestures.
It felt right when working on the very first image from HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. An image that I keep touching upon without ever being able to grasp it.

a videographic montage experiment. Made in a seminar on montage theory in Fall 2023 at the Lucerne School of Art and Design.  Inspired by Lev Manovich’s „The Language of New Media“ this investigation of Человек с киноаппаратом (Man With a Movie Camera) from 1929 by Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Kaufman, and Yelizaveta Svilova turned into a … kinoapparatom remade weiterlesen

In digital video, keyframes are those images which serve as anchoring points for all the other images. By removing them the video becomes unstable. A digital automaton working against cinema’s obsession. The film’s images which have turned female body into fetish shall no longer hold. A video essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO, inspired by the … Key / Frame weiterlesen

Sirk, the artificial, and watching film history as augmented reality Playing around with an augmented reality, researching film viewing practices, and my obsession with the question of artificiality in the films of Douglas Sirk – all this coincided in this video essay in for me surprising and disturbing ways. It showed me how by obscuring … Web weiterlesen

This is the result of a live performance at the International Conference on Videographic Criticism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Sept. 22-23, 2022 https://blogs.umass.edu/videoessay/ Taking Jacques Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator and the fascinatingly awkward performance of Jerry Lewis as NUTTY PROFESSOR as inspiration, I tried to turn a lecture into a communal … Auditorium weiterlesen

WARNING: this video is concerned among other things with death and mortality and may not be suitable for everyone /// Alain Resnais film PROVIDENCE from 1977 – the same year I was born – is a film of twos folded into one:
 A film about writing and about dying; about memory and decay; an American film … Versions (on Providence) weiterlesen

Testing self-destruction. Archival images of an atom bomb test in 1955 preempt what 1970s cinema will imagine. Two pieces of uncannily similar footage illuminate and contaminate each other.   [When preparing a lecture on 1950s cinema and culture I came across the eerie footage of tests by the US Atomic Energy Commission from 1955 which … Cued weiterlesen

Jerry Lewis‘ philosophy of video: Lewis‘ comedy of playback is also a meditation on the technology he relied on in the production of his films. Looping a scene from Lewis‘ film „The Patsy“ (1966) shows how the loops of the electronic video signal are included in the very illusion they helped to fabricate. The mise-en-abyme … Endless Regression weiterlesen

Playing around with the vocoder and the recording of a lecture on the body by Michel Foucault not only made me newly aware of the poetic quality of Foucault’s text but also made me think about one of his most beloved films, Werner Schroeder’s 1972 DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN

The beginning of cinema, the materiality of film, and today’s audio messaging.
The message from scholar and film theorist Jiří Anger on his research on the Czech film pioneer Jan Kříženecký made me see the things he is obsessed with. Visual research guided by a colleague’s voice.