STILL DISSOLUTION

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.
Four color prints from the holiday photo genre are filmed individually and arranged alongside one another on a split screen. Although the digital, high-resolution film recordings are subjected to a steady game of here again—gone again within a gently vibrating, increasingly pulsating, flickering composition, at the same time, this undermines the pictorial movement depicted in each of the individual fields, namely, the slow fading away of the photographic, pre-cinematic carrying material. In the melting process, unique, seemingly dynamic bubbles, blotches, and streaks emerge whose changing forms and colors gradually dissolve the photographed seaside landscapes. Appearing in the end are moving diagrams from a medical imaging process that shows the heartbeat in vivo.
The film thereby re-surveys the artistic position of Hollis Frampton, who as “meta-historian,” assigned film to the machine era and associated the American avant-garde with its becoming obsolete in the radar era. More than forty years after Frampton’s Nostalgia, Fruhauf once again uses burning photographs to question the cinematographic structure of temporal processes. But he is less concerned with examining the relationship of word and image with which present and past are defined in film: all that can be heard in Still Dissolution is humming and rhythmic droning. The media archeological accent is now on the burning of the archive whose technical basis, as is known, determines the life of the images.

(Christa Blümlinger)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt



Director´s Statement
Media such as film emerged from the desire to hold unique events. Basically, this idea may be right, but experience shows that media are limited in their suitability for capturing the moment of the infinitely small point of the present. Rather media make clear that there is a past. Film shows this transience. In the digital era the problem of the preservation of our audio-visual heritage suggests these considerations.
Still Dissolution originates from thoughts of transience and took over ten years to find its form for the screen as a cinematographic miniature.

(Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

Orig. Title
STILL DISSOLUTION
Year
2013
Country
Austria
Duration
2 min 30 sec
Category
Avantgarde/Arts
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
Credits
Director
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Concept & Realization
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Available Formats
DCP 2K flat (Distribution Copy)
Aspect Ratio
16:9
Sound Format
Dolby Surround
Frame Rate
24 fps
Color Format
colour
Digital File (prores, h264) (Distribution Copy)
Festivals (Selection)
2013
Roma - Cinema XXI International Film Festival
Wien - Viennale - Int. Filmfestwochen
2014
Graz - Diagonale, Festival des Österreichischen Films
Wroclaw - New Horizons Festival
Wien - VIS Vienna Independent Shorts
Linz - Crossing Europe Film Festival
Vila do Conde - Festival Internacional de Curtas-Metragens
Uppsala - Int. Short Film Festival
Cork - IndieCork Film Festival
Cork - Int. Film Festival
Prizen/Kosovo Dokufest Doc Film Festival
München - UnderDox, Festival für Dokument und Experiment
Jihlava Documentary Film Festival
Santiago de Compostela - Curtocircuito
Kassel - Dokumentarfilm- & Videofest
2015
Trondheim - Minimalen Short Film Festival
Trondheim - Minimalen Short Film Festival