Recycling Film History

The Phoenix Tapes were commissioned for the exhibition "Notorious: Alfried Hitchcock and Contemporary Art" at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Girardet and Müller combine recurring motifs from forty Hitchcock films and create a surreal resonance chamber of his patterns of suspense in the montage. Stefan Zlamal decouples the dialogues of two different soundtracks from the image and lets them meet in a new scenario: the voices gain attention and artificiality. Tscherkassky's source is the Sergio Leone film Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, from whose material he constructed a new narration of violence: an intoxicating thunderstorm of sound and image. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)