The Ideal: Ecstasy & Beauty

Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.

The film begins with a visualization of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, and Wyborny nearly misses the first movement. Yes, the "savage and bare fire" (Kaiser) of this tempestuous last piece of Beethoven nearly tears him apart. He who, while the aggressive Allegro explodes (when the sonata has begun to spread out with a deliberately "false" address in the old French overture rhythm), gets wrapped up in every pause and every peak; he who absolutely wants to work on these dialectical poles of tension in the finest agogic gradations, to shape the contrasts of the tempo in an angular way, will be torn apart. Wyborny escapes from the abyss, Beethoven would have done the same in an emergency, improvising on his own. Many spectators probably did not notice the drama. Others noticed it, were shocked, pulled themselves together, took a breath - and then were overwhelmed by the ingenious solution.

Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”

The second of five parts of Klaus Wyborny's "Lieder der Erde" / "Song of the Earth" cycle of films, whose theme is "the emergence of modern European civilization." The series comprises five large parts, which are in turn divided into various selections or short films.

In 2010, Klaus Wyborny filmed the world premiere of his cinematic work STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES (STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST), 2010 in Vienna’s (meanwhile closed) Stadtkino at Schwarzenbergplatz. He liked the images from the dark movie theater, only partly lit by the film, so much that he did the same at later screenings, presented between Portugal and the United States, in order to weave these images into a fabric of places and times – into a vision of cinema gliding over continents through the light of the projector.What’s celebrated here is a practice that has to be defended for its inherent democratic spirit. In CINÉMA VÉRITÉ, Wyborny has now condensed this cinematic utopia into trailer length, to manifesto density. Cinema, as Wyborny understands it and as the Viennale practices it, is a constant departure into reality.

The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

UNREACHABLE HOMELESS is particularly lost on the eye, at times changing color, focal length, or focus with every other frame. Its staccato rhythms are not unlike those of Paul Sharit's flicker films, though the use of continually recognizable imagery creates compelling effects within the picture's deep space as well. Wyborny's shots are brief but filled with interior motion. He varies his exposure so that background areas suddenly materialize, or uses single framing to scurry occasional cars or barges across the screen.

30 minutes of images with music by Anthony Moore

Part 3 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein"

A German TV movie