A Masque of Madness (Notes on Film 06-B, Monologue 02)
In this experimental film, British actor Boris Karloff (1887-1969) embodies over 170 characters, experiencing a schizophrenic horror trip in which he faces versions of himself in different masks, at different ages, of different genders and races. As Karloff’s career spans over 50 years, from the silent era to modern-day cinema, A Masque of Madness allows us to witness the aesthetic and technical developments of the medium in one single film.
Norbert Pfaffenbichler
Casts & Crew
Boris Karloff
Also Directed by Norbert Pfaffenbichler
Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.
For the artist Fernand Leger (1881-1955), the promise of film as a new art form lay in its potential to exhibit the visual, to present an image rather than tell a story. This attribute characteristic of early cinema, a cinema of attractions (Tom Gunning), has been directly associated with avant-garde film in terms of visual exhibitionism as well as the construction of an audience that is both directly addressed and actively engaged.
Sometime, hopefully not too soon, in a place wherever but not here, all life will have moved underground after a failed uprising. Everybody wears a mask, more often than not of the variety seen only at Halloween these days. In this scary universe (that on closer inspection looks like a twisted, perverted version of our here and now...), a man with a gorilla mask is searching for a little boy with a hessian hood. His quest leads him into a maze of depravity, a pandemonium of all our nightmares and darkest desires – where something awaits that he had already given up on: love.
The experimental short negotiates the conventions of the invisible camera. In a bare room without windows or doors, someone puts up a futile against the steady gaze of a bodiless camera. The camera evades the protagonist´s physical attacks by changing positions by means and hard cuts.
Santora is a metrically buildt cord of images based on the number 3 and the music of Fennesz. The video explores combinations of geometrical formes, building up corresponding sounds. Consious of their roots in historic avantgarde animation, but the same time drawing in structural cinema, the two filmmakers compose a "picture" which evolves from rectangels that appear on and disappear from the blank screen. White background, dark "windows", in which a figure seen from above passes through at various speeds. His diagonal passage, doubled and inverted, becomes another element of geometry and rhythm. The image, taken from an old film, evokes those of closed-circuit surveillance cameras by its impersonal repetitiveness. The sound obsessivily paces the variation in form on the screen.
A fascinating videoclip - fascinating for those familiar with the potential energy and beauty held in minimalism. A dialogue between images and music whereby the rhythm is concentrating on the material structure of the image.
In our vision of the future, everyone has received a neuronal interface, also called a brainchip. This chip enables direct mental interaction with external computers. A legal pathway into cyberspace is paralleled by illicit forms of virtual reality. The main character in this film is a "terminal addict", a cyber junkie in the grip of this electronic drug. In the course of the story, the borders between the real and the virtual are obliterated.
The work is based on the idea of making a video with a minimum number of parameters. A uniform white grid on a blue background structures the picture. This grid moves orthogonally to the left, right, upward and downward at four different speeds. All of the audiovisual composition´s parameters are based on the ratio of the screen´s dimensions in digital video, 720 x 576. These figures or multiples or fractions of them define the speed and length of the animation. Bernhard Lang´s soundtrack follows the same logic: The frequencies of a synthetically generated square sound were modulated on the...
Lotte Schreiber and Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 36 is a rigidly mathematical and graphic composition based on the number in its title. All of this video´s elements, including its length, are variables of this figure. Three apparently independent fields of perception are linked by Stefan Németh´s synchronized soundtrack. In the left field, 36 vertical and horizontal white lines run through various patterns of movement according to a binary digital system (0 = vertical, 1 = horizontal). They eventually unite in six squares onto which amorphous animated miniatures are projected.