Gustav Deutsch
Tradition and modernity, contrasting ways of life: the master of archival footage has assembled an impressive collection. His serene narration takes us inside the private lives of migrant families in different eras, from the beginnings of film to the present day. This new film from one of the great avant-garde directors is also a powerful tribute to a neglected genre.
Travelogues can also contain “mini-dramas”: this is what the “pocket films” of Notes and Sketches I (2005-15) reveal. Surprising behavioural studies of man and animal, the hidden humour of nature’s phenomena as well as of automatized routines make good entertainment for your home cinema and for all ages.
A series of snapshots from the life of a fictional actress named Shirley serves to weave together thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (e.g. "Office at Night", "Western Motel", "Usherette", "A Woman in the Sun") into a fascinating synthesis of painting and film, personal and political history. Each station in Shirley’s professional and private life from the 1930s to 1960s is precisely dated: It is always August 28/29 of the year in question, as the locations vary from Paris to New York to Cape Cod.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
Fragments of several (mostly) silent films are shown. They're guided by quotes from, among others, Plato and Sappho and a soundtrack.
In Gustav Deutsch's most recent found footage work the masses "absorb" (Walter Benjamin), the artwork. Three historical camera pans across the streets and squares of Vienna, Surabaya, and Porto provide a starting point for reflection on the relationship of everyday stories and cinematic machinery.
A condensed omnibus of all twelve chapters of Film ist. by Gustav Deutsch. Chapters 1-6 consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films, while chapters 7-12 is a collection of moving pictures from the first thirty years of a medium which was then still silent.
The second half of Gustav Deutsch's experimental Film ist. series, constructing new narratives and moods out of existing footage, mostly from early silent era films.
The pictures are burning. A house is in flames for exactly one minute. Cinema under attack: An anonymous fragment from the early days of film is turned into a reflection on reproduction and reality as well as on destruction which takes place on two levels through Gustav Deutsch’s reworking of the material.
Film ist. consists almost entirely of excerpts from various scientific films. This footage shows the flight of pigeons, intelligence test performed on apes, upside-down worlds and stereoscopic vision, hurricanes and effect of shock waves. How glass breaks, how small children walk and a Mercedes crashing into a brick wall in slow motion
Mariage Blanc in Morocco means a sham marriage between a Moroccan man and a European woman in order to obtain a residence permit and thereafter the citizenship of a European country. The theme of Mariage Blanc is this very intimate form of attempted immigration which is, for Mostafa Tabbou, simultaneously fiction and reality. The film was shot in three days in July of 1996 in the Hotel de Paris in Casablanca, Morocco.
24 formula on the medium film. 24 sound quotes on film history. 25 frames of a blink of an eye. Cinema is a battlefield and an amour fou, a time between two blinks of the eye and an artificially delineated territory between two signal beeps. Commissioned as a Viennale-Trailer 1996.
100 film loops for 100 film-viewers. Each loop deals with one basic aspect of repetition in life and film. The essential characteristics of each aspect become evident by endless repetition in the loop. "With the Pocket Cinema project I want to trace the repetitions in life and film as an attempt at the essential elements of film - motion and time.
21 fragments of a feature film, made in India, found in casablance, adapted in Vienna.
An authentic film-experiment in 600 takes; 3 seconds each.Of A European's private images in Africa and of an African's in Europe. A mutual perception of the one´s and the other´s native place. As a child I pictured an oasis to myself as a small lake surrounded by palms, with nothing but sand dunes around it. Only when I first visited an oasis ten years ago, did I realise that my picture was wrong. In a similar way this happened to me with almost all those exotic pictures of travel lust impressed on my mind by children's books, travel folders and motives on bank notes.I was quite surprised when I discovered pictures of snowcapped mountains including alpine huts and lakes in many cafés in North Africa.
ADRIA is an artistic analysis of film as a medium and of its meaning as SCHOOL OF SEEING. The subjects of this analysis are the beginnings of the Austrian hobby and amateur film creation, restricted to holiday movies from the Adriatic Sea. The footage was analyzed according to set focal points (image detail, camera movement, etc.) then dissected according to serial aspects (tracking shots, pans, etc.) and edited into new sequences (descriptions, reactions, etc.) These sequences are liberated from their individual isolation and unified in a sequence that reflects the general situation. This general situation reflects upon two aspects. One is the first active involvement with film as a medium - in front of and behind the camera - and the other aspect highlights social contexts such as the first holiday abroad and organizing one’s leisure time.Therefore the private depiction of an individual situation becomes a document of a general situation.
Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.
