Cityscapes
The perception of the city in the modern era is characterized by its fleeting and momentary nature. Social and architectural constructions are fragmented and dashing past. Cityscapes attempts to make archived recordings from the Austrian Film Museum legible along these lines. Single images are isolated from the cinematographic flow in order to scrutinize their inscribed cognitive potential. For Walter Benjamin, history disintegrates into images and not stories. Cityscapes is a search along the tracks of these images.
Michaela Grill
Martin Siewert
Also Directed by Michaela Grill
Trailer for the 2014 Diagonale Film Festival.
Experimental short based on a car ride.
In Michaela Grill´s work, the opulence of these images is diametrically opposed to a minimalistic reduction to an element of urban architecture. The disintegration of the initial material (the windowed façade of a building), which resembles a chemical process, produces the colors violet, light blue and white and dissects the urban vocabulary of forms. The dispersion of the big city´s lights carries over to the structure of time and space and ceases to conjure up an external danger. Instead, the viewer is confronted with sound and images which decompose the personal criteria employed in sensory perception.
Making and listening to music are physical processes embedded in social movements, writes Simon Frith. This fact is important with regard to the visual characters of electronic music productions to the extent that it is normally negated. The sensorial complexity of these practices seem to be reproducible only through the precision and abstraction of digital data.
With trans, Martin Siewert and I used the 5 act structure of classical drama to create an atmosphere of in-between-ness and levitation. I found these old photographs of a harbor that totally embodied this emotion (also the sadness and melancholy of parting and saying goodbye). So I used them as my starting images and worked through the layers of the images, scratched away the unnecessary until I reached the essence.
The experimental forest, the name of a place, a title, and a statement of intent. The first step into this forest is represented as a black-and-white silhouette, branches against a background of clouds moving rapidly across the sky, with a modulating soundtrack that records and further develops nature’s sounds. A picture, whose aesthetic excess takes up well-known references to landscape paintings and photography, as well as genre cinema. But as soon as one penetrates deeper into the forest, the visual and tonal register changes, the view moves ever closer to the landscape’s pre-civilizational elements; vegetation, water, and wildlife. Attention urns to details, rhythm; to subtle and also surprising changes and movements. Nature’s enigmatic aspect moves to the forefront and the viewer is captivated by formal beauty, by pictures, which must first be decoded in their visual alienation and play of various size relations.
Experimental filmmakers from Jean Painlevé onwards have long explored the wonders inherent in scientific and medical footage, particularly when trained on microscopic phenomena. There are multiple universes of unfolding and exploding forms revealed in UNDER THE MICROSCOPE, but Michaela Grill is not content to leave these amazing images unadorned. Using the cinematic resources of colour treatment, flashing and strobing, looping and repetition, plus a rich counterpoint soundtrack by Sophie Trudeau, she fashions a symphony of mysterious, mutating movements.
Shifting and gliding views of the Arctic Ocean oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Snow, ice, clouds, and pixels melt and collide, confusing our sense of spatial orientation.
"Lost Destinations" is the name of a Web site dedicated to obscure locations in the USA. "Abandoned, unusual, wild and weird road trip photography and beyond" is presented for the viewer´s pleasure, including illustrations of an abandoned concrete and building-material factory in Idaho Falls (the "Monroc Facility"), which is the starting point for Michaela Grill´s video of the same name. A still image of the picturesque industrial ruin appears repeatedly throughout the half-hour work like a refrain, its stanzas comprising three independent abstract studies. The soundtrack by Martin Siewert underlines the suite´s synesthetic character, such as by casting acoustic shadows in places where the video image builds on musical parameters such as rhythm, timbre and tonality. When the color and brightness of individual images are modulated in the reprise, the three episodes independently sample a range of more abstract visual characteristics.
KILVO is a classical music video in the sense that the music already existed, a track by Radian called Kilvo like the town in Lapland. I wanted to know what the place looked like that inspired the music, so I went online and found all these old postcards and I started collecting them. I reduced the postcards to lines to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the represented landscape. I wanted the final videoimage to look like a postcard, so I divided it in 4 parts and generated every image on a black, a gray and a white background. Each beat of the bassdrum moved the images to the next quarter and I made an arrangement so that each quarter had to move in every three colors and in every possible direction. So in the end it became this very dynamic, animated postcard.
Also Directed by Martin Siewert
With trans, Martin Siewert and I used the 5 act structure of classical drama to create an atmosphere of in-between-ness and levitation. I found these old photographs of a harbor that totally embodied this emotion (also the sadness and melancholy of parting and saying goodbye). So I used them as my starting images and worked through the layers of the images, scratched away the unnecessary until I reached the essence.
"Lost Destinations" is the name of a Web site dedicated to obscure locations in the USA. "Abandoned, unusual, wild and weird road trip photography and beyond" is presented for the viewer´s pleasure, including illustrations of an abandoned concrete and building-material factory in Idaho Falls (the "Monroc Facility"), which is the starting point for Michaela Grill´s video of the same name. A still image of the picturesque industrial ruin appears repeatedly throughout the half-hour work like a refrain, its stanzas comprising three independent abstract studies. The soundtrack by Martin Siewert underlines the suite´s synesthetic character, such as by casting acoustic shadows in places where the video image builds on musical parameters such as rhythm, timbre and tonality. When the color and brightness of individual images are modulated in the reprise, the three episodes independently sample a range of more abstract visual characteristics.