Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book

Begun as a portrait of a former lover who had died of AIDS, Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book is as much a self-portrait of the filmmaker, projecting into his own mortal fears, fascination with German romanticism, and his exorcising of memory. A tender, magical and melancholy love poem by an important new talent.

(John Gianvito)


Begun with the AIDS related death of a close friend, Aus des Ferne is both eulogy and science fiction, closing hands with an indiscriminate contagion without succumbing to fatalism or despair.
That site of desire should be so resolutely joined to death - or that the passage of death should follow the lines of love - these are the paradoxes beneath which Müller refashions the bodies of film and maker. While the film is shot throughout with the passing of a friend, it belongs finally to the filmmaker himself, who returns obsessively to his own body to gauge the possibility of going on.
Müllers´ virtuosic rephotography, editing and hand processing techniques are hurled into an erotic maelstrom, re-making, the divisions of the World in a continual flux of inside and out, container and contained. Learned in the tradition of Eisenstein, Genet, Anger and Jarman, Aus der Ferne seeks to re-make the male body, not in the service of higher ideals, but in a celebratory flow of communion and despair, mythos and logos. Its elegantly drafted sites live before "In the beginning was the world..." and are no less meaningful for doing so.

(Mike Hoolboom)


In the various hand-processed treatments undertaken on its image, Aus Der Ferne displays an emphatic tension between the aesthetic expression of ephemeral states, like dreamwork and memory, and the stark reminder of the film’s materiality. By emphasizing the materiality of the film, Müller sets up one of its most striking metaphors — the film as body.

(Roger Hallas, In: Camera Obscura, Durham, 2003)