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.

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

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

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

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.