CATEGORIES
Film ist.
1.Movement and Time, 2. Light and Dankness, 3. An Instrument, 4. Material, 5. A Blink of an Eye, 6. A Mirror, 7. Comic, 8. Magic, 9. Conquest, 10. Witting and Language, 11. Emotions and Passion, 12. Memory and Document.
Since 1996 Gustav Deutsch has been poring through film archives, retrieving scraps of film, including damaged ends of reel, test shots and discarded editings, and adding them to an ongoing project entitled „Film ist“. These found clips, freed from their original context, are ripe for reinterpretation. What Deutsch finds interesting is how easily new meanings can be ascribed to them, how they lend themselves in montage to new governing narratives. The brief clips, often looped to make their tiny but definitive gesture cyclical, hence satisfyingly complete in themselves, cover a century of film. The material used derives from scientific films which were made for the purposes of documentation or instruction, as well as film which originated in, or is redolent of, the overlapping realms of fairground and variety theatre, for the purposes of entertainment. - Brian Marley - http://www.index-dvd.at/php/de/reviews.php?show_review=5
FILM IST> A PRIMER FOR A VISUAL WORLD> by Tom Gunning
1. Film ist.
Film has an antagonistic relationship to theory; this goes beyond the usual opposition between theory and practice, or between words and images. It goes to the core of what cinema is, and the difficulty of defining it.
As André Basin understood, the task o film theory is to ask -continually- "What is cinema?" and allow for continuous transformations in the answer.
2. Word and Image: Making the point.
The best film theory has always, in fact been a dialogue with images.
Film ist. may be thought of as the first film theory done entirely in film.
What we see here is not a demonstration of categorization, but the power of names to point out, like an extended index fingers, aspects of our visual experience of film and to thus transform how we see these images.
3. The Lexicon and the Narrative
Not only do we see the principle of free association at its surrealist height, but we also realize the power of seeing shots in isolation, wrenched from context, twitching like amputated limbs, displaying their unique features divorced from contextual meaning.
4. The Archive of the Unconscious
At some point soon the artists and scholars of the twentieth first century will discover that the film archives of the world are not simply the repositories of the world's masterpieces of Cinematic Art, but also Aladdin caves of treasures unnamed and unnumbered.
Just how the various pieces find their own place and rhythm reminds one the modern poetry or the photo work of the American artist John Baldessari. Pictures which, from their origins, have nothing to do with each other, which don't "belong together", are compiled, tied together, fused with each other. (Alexander Horwalth)
FOUND FOOTAGE FILM : make use of pre-existing film material.
MONTAGE: Creating New Contexts of Meaning
REPETITION: From the very beginning of cinematography, repetition was a recurring motif: the juggler, the swimmer, the girl jumping rope, since taking our first breath rhythmically, repeated movement of the inner organs like heart and lungs have controlled our circulation and breathing. Thanks to rhythmically repeated movement we can move forward. Our everyday lives and jobs are characterized by repetition. Film loops permit perfect simulation of the repetition in life. They connect the beginning and the end of a scene, thereby creating a continuum. Repetition. In Life and Film. - Gustav Deutsch- Interview
