Distorted Mirror

DISTORTED MIRROR. Every good picture leaves its mark. It digs itself in. This is how history is made. The geology of cinema is no longer just a matter for theorists; the decisive excavation work is now carried out by the practitioners themselves. The avant-garde of the moving image always speaks of the history on which it is based.

Anyone who ventures into the confusing terrain of the histoire(s) du cinéma participates in the game of shifts, borrowings and reflections: In Siegfried A. Fruhauf's Mirror Mechanics, flashing thriller associations are reformulated as a Rorschach test, while Peter Tscherkassky's Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine short-circuits the visual rhetoric of the old Italowestern with a very contemporary reflection on the materiality of the cinematic. Imaginary, dreamed spaces open up beyond the mirror: The luxurious CinemaScope interiors that Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet create in Mirror allow us to look deep into the unconscious of the European auteur film of the sixties. 

Lisl Ponger also undertakes research trips into the interior of the cinematic. Like Peter Kubelka's study of consumerist voyeurism, her Phantom Stranger Vienna is initially just a series of raw, seemingly barely edited images that are only actualised and "animated" through the calculation of montage. From off-screen, Ponger comments
comments on the creation and possible orders of her Super 8 views of a secret, "foreign" Vienna, which she ironically decouples as a filmic construction.

The astonishing richness of relationships in "non-narrative" cinema - which is all the more addicted to narrative - becomes manifest in these films: the wondrous, alienating world that they so passionately report on only becomes tangible in its reflection. Objects in the mirror are always closer than they appear. (Stefan Grissemann)

Program
Mirror Mechanics (Fruhauf, 2005, 25mm, b/w, 7.5 min.)
Phantom Stranger Vienna (Lisl Ponger, 2004, 35mm, F, 27 min.)
Mirror (Christoph Giradet / Matthias Müller, D 2003, 35mm, F, 8 min.)
Poetry and Truth (Peter Kubelka, 1996-2003, 35mm, F, 13 min.)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, 2005, 35mm, b/w, 17 min.)

for more information see downloads