Christoph Girardet (born in Langenhagen, Germany, in 1966) works primarily with found footage, mostly from the 1950s and 60s. It serves as source material for his visual research, in the course of which he initially dissembles and deconstructs scenes, before reassembling them in a way such that the actual structures and internal mechanisms of their content are rendered visible. Analysis of found footage thus engenders its own visual world, one that is revealed also in series of small-format framed film stills.
From appropriation of dominant cinematic archives, to critical scrutiny of film techniques, the 12 modern and contemporary artists' works presented in this program exemplify an alternative and highly self-reflective form of cinema. Following Erika Balsom’s understanding of contemporary art as a potential “laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled,” they reconsider what cinema is (or was) and what it can do. With an emphasis on the ideology behind the operation of filmic apparatus and the technological externalization of memory and time, the works in this program expose critical and aesthetic potentials of “an other cinema,” oscillating between white cube and black box.
Dates:
Monday, September 6, 2021 (All day) to Monday, September 20, 2021 (All day)
Their approaches to found footage, at once likeminded and singular, have served Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller well since 1999, during which time the two of them have collaborated on nearly thirty films and photographic works. Varied metaphors and modes of inquiry have been used to analyze their oeuvre: to some, Girardet and Müller provide a “suggestive continuum,” exposing the patterns of light and darkness, absence and presence, by which cinema operates; to others, the filmmakers dissect the body of film history and of the cinematic apparatus, suggesting the moving image as a corporeal grouping of skin, guts, brains, and bones to pick apart.
The title of the Fall 2016 issue of Millennium Film Journal – Image Machines – invites readers to consider artists’ moving image as an interplay between the activities and intentions of filmmakers and the variety of machines and methods employed in the creation of their works. Through disarming voice-overs, archival excavations, and personal interventions, these digital and photo-chemical works chart the leaky tensions between interior and exterior landscapes.
Buoyed in part by the Academy of Media Arts (Kunsthochschule für Medien, or KHM), Cologne has become an epicenter of experimental film and video within Germany. This program, organized in collaboration with Cologne-based filmmakers Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing, presents nine works from the Cologne/Bonn region viewed through the lens of “formal subversion”. All included works somehow undermine basic elements of their form, structure, or the medium itself to reveal unforeseen creative potentials .
Dates:
Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - 19:00 to Wednesday, September 7, 2016 - 18:55
Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.
In an experimental approach to film, the mirror as a reflective device is used more in its concrete dimension that in the metaphorical: the mirror surface denounces the cinematographic transparency, the famous "window to the world" dear to André Bazin and manifests its power of illusion, infinitely poetic.
This programme will give rise to various speculations about the self-portrait, memory, landscape, but also on the presence of mirrors in Hollywood movies that reveals a double or the narcissistic staging full of doubts and anguish.
Dates:
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - 18:00 to Thursday, February 25, 2016 - 17:55
Belgian experimental film festival L’Âge d’or 'returns' to Brussels on October 8-14. 'Reviving the spirit' of the EXPRMNTL festival will present twenty-three films in competition as well as programmes dedicated to and with the presence of Birgit Hein (president of the jury), Gustav Deutsch (who will also deliver a masterclass), Friedl vom Gröller, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Robert Todd and John Smith. Mark Webber, editor of the recently published anthology of writings by Gregory Markopoulos will introduce two programmes of his works with new prints. The festival will also pay homage to Stephen Dwoskin and Adolfas Mekas and present curated programmes dedicated to the Italian avant-garde, and a double selection of “ethnographic poems”, with works by Raymonde Carasco and Robert Gardner.
The festival's brochure, including the complete programme, can be downloaded here.
The work of these two German artists, Christoph Girardet (* 1966) and Matthias Müller (* 1961), is of outstanding importance for filmic and video art. The publication offers, for the first time, in-depth insights into the joint filmic and photographic oeuvre of these two artists. Girardet and Müller have been working in continuous collaboration for more than 14 years now, primarily on the basis of filmic material already in existence (found footage), from which they produce associative/narrative compositions.
The theme of the 11th edition of AVANT is Found and Excavated. Films, videos and live performances based on re-edited found footage, or films that have been going through processes of decay and destruction, film that is in constant transformation, aesthetically or politically.
Friday evening begins with a selection of films by the German collective Schmelzdahin and continues with a live performance of the film Materia Obscura, made by the film alchemist and former Schmelzdahin member Jürgen Reble and with live music by the multimedia artist Thomas Köner.
Saturday opens with four films by Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet who have excavated new stories from well-known movies by re-editing and assembling them anew. After this follows a complete retrospective of the films by Schmelzdahin and a screening of Wolfgang Lehmann’s one hour long intense flickering journey into the fantastic world of nature documentaries. Saturday concludes with two programmes: The Spanish artist Maria Cañas’ political collages and a unique program with Soviet and Russian found footage film, curated by Masha Godovannaya.
Set in the field of experimental cinema, the films of Antoni Pinent are a kind of reflection on the cinematographic medium, where the material aspects of moving images form the content. Over the years, he has developed a very particular camera-less cinema, working directly on the support and fragmenting its smallest unit, the still, in a technique he calls “polyframe”, which he has used to make his latest films. This task of décollage using filmic materiality and presenting the film as something concrete that you can work on with your hands is a reference to the cinema of attractions, that powerful visual experience packed with punches, shocks and humour of early film. This session will present some of his works in a dialogue with others by Volker Schreiner, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Morgan Fisher, David Matarasso and Peter Tscherkassky; some have been an important influence, others introduce concepts to reflect on his work.
Dates:
Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 20:00 to Friday, January 10, 2014 - 19:55
