Etüde
Etüde draws on early avant-garde film theories and practices, on the utopia of the absolute film: hearing pictures, seeing music. With the technique of hand-drawn sound, the film medium becomes the instrument, something playable. Fruhauf allows us to take part in this process, gets the sound creaking and places a hand in the picture as a subject – where it increasingly threatens to rebel against its forced role.
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Also Directed by Siegfried A. Fruhauf
The dynamic performance of drummer Jörg Mikula serves as the trigger for a new work by Siegfried Fruhauf that explores the reciprocal relationship between the two time-based media of film and music in a wild way. WHERE DO WE GO reveals itself to be a synesthetic experiment rendering sight as rhythmical and the visual edit as musical. The filmmaker painstakingly animates brief phases of movement recorded with a Lomography Supersampler* to create a visual series of trains, tracks, bridges and nature that are re-constellated and brought together in a multiple split-screen projection.
FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
Exposed uses short scene from a feature film – a man observes a dancing woman through a keyhole – as the raw material. Solely fragments of this tableau are visible to the viewer, and Fruhauf "re-exposes" the scene by passing the perforations of a strip of film in front of the projector so that they resemble a moving sieve. While the moving stencil allows us to see no more than portions of the scene, the narration's "peeping tom" motif is repeated in our own perception. Sight can no longer be taken for granted and therefore increases in fascination. Fruhauf also breaks up the intended movement of the found footage on the temporal level. The apparent irregularity of the fields of light scanning over the strip of film is juxtaposed with a metronomically precise rhythm which segments the scene. Successive shots often vary to no more than a minimal degree. Similar to a record album with a crack, the progression shifts in minute but regular ways.
The raw material used in Blow-up comprises two shots from an old educational film about first aid: A man demonstrates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a life-size dummy; the dummy´s chest rises and falls. Fruhauf introduces this scene into his own métier, turning the "blow-up" metaphor into an image with a false bottom. With the aid of a digital photocopier, the strip of film was reduced in size to a narrow ribbon, and Blow-up shows this transformation in reverse.
Like a Santiago Álvarez squared (or multiplied by 4K, to be more precise), Siegfried A. Fruhauf –a descendant of Austria’s Great Generation of Tscherkassky, Deutsch and Arnold– rede- fines with Vintage Print the power of film as imagination, at the service of an amazing economy of resources. If the pioneer of Cuban montage cinema became immortal when he left us his phrase “give me two photographs, a moviola, and some music, and I’ll make you a film,” Fruhauf slims down that recipe by cre- ating thirteen hyperkinetic minutes out of a single, century-old glass negative in decomposition. Ranging from figurative to ab- stract art, analogy to digital, and documentary to experimental, Vintage Print’s definitive achievement is that it reverses a road movie in its own terms, and the first thing that is left behind is the very same notion of cinema.
Ground Control is a rough video miniature. It begins with the simplest and most fundamental thing the electronic moving-image machine has to offer: the uncontrolled beam of electrons directed across a photoelectric layer of cesium oxide lining a Braun tube, or snow. Recording this chaos involves a fascination that existed during the early days of film: the repeatability of a unique event. A visual sequence which has never before existed and will never happen again becomes reproducible, thereby losing the status of the chaotic. This idea, a result of the desire to control an uncontrollable world, is the beginning of the chain of associations in this video, which randomly acting ants push their way into. The image of them crawling is manipulated in the reproduced images, distortion of their movement is forced upon them. The insects become monsters when, after being locked into the frame, they suddenly burst into the (snow)storm as a sequence of individuals.
Movements of industrial meat processing machines cast in cinematic structures. Bloodless cinema. Heartbeat of the apparatus.
Found footage experimental film.
SUN – which is not necessarily typical for the genre – consists of nothing more than a dozen static shots with little or no movement. The main subject of both the video and the song's lyrics are identical. But this is not immediately obvious: In a slow reverse zoom the white glare filling the picture is gradually revealed to be the sun's ball of light surrounded by a green-ish yellow blaze.
The title of this miniature heralds a series of tensions for which Siegfried A. Fruhauf has found a new form: "Still Dissolution" measures the relationship between photography and film, standstill and motion, formation and dissolution, now and then, and material reality and illusion, and does so in an interplay of analogue and digital visual technologies.