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by Gustav DEUTSCH
2005 / b&w / sound / 1S / 93' 00 |
Episode 1 : Kinematograf Theater Erdberg, Wien 1912. Episode 2 : Apollo Theater, Surabaya 1929
Episode 3 : Cinema São Mamede Infesta, Porto 1930
In Gustav Deutsch's most recent found footage work the masses „absorb« (Walter Benjamin) the artwork. Three historical camera pans across the streets and squares of Vienna, Surabaya, and Porto provide a starting point for reflection on the relationship of everyday stories and cinematic machinery.
Welt Spiegel Kino's steadfast piercing of the dynamic of this relationship is astounding. Each of the three pans - taken between 1912 and 1930 - contains a cinema, in the montage, the passers-by become chance protagonists in a series of micro-tales, which report on both cinematic and world history. Deutsch's method for connecting archive material is highly hypertextual: every person in the film refers to a multitude of socio-cultural contexts, similar to the hyperlinks in the interactive CD-Rom „Odysee Today« from Deutsch and his partner Hanna Schimek. The gaze of a Viennese passerby in 1912 leads the film as though with a time machine to the battle of Isonzo, Vienna's Prater, and to the punishing of suburban ruffians. In Salazar's Portugal, a general awards honors to weeping veterans, a group of girls stares steadfastly into the camera of an anonymous film chronicler while their mothers dream from inside a sardine factory of overcoming their situation. For Gustav Deutsch, the cinema (and pars pro toto every similarly „insignificant« artefact) is a mirror to the world. And conversely, the cinema belongs to these „infamous people«, the secondary characters of history. Their being-in-the-world creates its photochemical process, the twentieth century person is reflected (and discovered) in the eye of the camera. (Michael Loebenstein)
1 PRINT IN DISTRIBUTION
| distribution format | 35mm |
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| screen | 1,37 - Standard (single screen) |
| speed | 24 fps |
| sound | optical sound |
| rental fee | 245,00 € |