am mai zis pe aici, şi nu o dată, că am o anumită pasiune pentru found footage.
ultimul film văzut
Rumpelstilzchen de
Jürgen Reble 1989
ca să nu bălăcăresc eu limba română, las pe alţii să zică, mai ales că textul era pus direct pe pagina filmului, nici nu a trebuit să caut. şi e interesant.
Jürgen Reble’s film works are marked by layers of residue, shifting abstract surfaces, chemical traces, scratches and blotches, as though a virus has infected the image, distorting its tone and colour, imbuing it with unusual textures and a strange aura. In these films destructive processes are the creative aesthetic agent.
Reble worked with the group Schmelzdahin from 1984. They collected Super-8 prints of anything from action films to porn flicks, home movies to Hollywood classics. They became interested in the decaying effect of weathering (Reble once threw a film into his garden pond and “harvested” it after a year had passed), bacterial processes and chemicals that disrupt the colour layers and eat away at the emulsion. They were made aware that film is not a fixed medium but that the image is transformed through material disintegration, and on projection this transformation is magnified as an integral part of the image. It became common for the group to use similar anti-preservation techniques in performance. Film loops would be subjected to chemical and other treatments, the effect was witnessed in real time until the loops fell apart in the projector. This auto-destruction was a crude but effective performance metaphor for mutability and the inevitability of physical decay, albeit hastened by the artists. While with Schmelzdahin, Reble developed a repertoire of processes and a practice that he has been refining and developing ever since.
The “Piccolo-Film” credit at the opening of Rumpelstilzchen signals it as a “found footage” film. Piccolo released Super-8 prints for the German home movie market and Rumpelstilzchen was a 1955 B-Movie version of the Brothers Grimm story. Thus, originating from a Super-8 print of a 1950s version of the nineteenth century Grimm Brothers’ version of a traditional folktale, the provenance of Rumpelstilzchen is interesting. The Grimms were known to embellish, and for their Children’s and Household Tales (1812–1857) they introduced a spinning wheel and a miller’s daughter who could spin straw into gold to the Rumpelstilzchen tale. The spinning wheel sequences become a recurring motif in Reble’s reworking, a visual analogy to the reels on a film projector. Metaphorically the “straw” of the Super-8 film that Reble spins into “gold” is the live transformation of film material off the reel that Reble regularly practices in the mixed-media film performance, appropriately entitled Alchemy.
The use of found footage has become commonplace over the past decade or so, with European artist filmmakers such as Matthias Müller, Martin Arnold, Gustav Deutsch, Douglas Gordon et. al., among the celebrated practitioners. Typically the practice involves representing and reworking existing films (early Hollywood, Hitchcock, B-movies, documentary, public information films, and so on being popular candidates), while recognition of the original is usually a significant factor. In this form of post-production art, the physical material of the medium is usually of less importance than refining meaning linguistically through processes of appropriation, structural manipulation, editing, repetition, and contextualisation. Reble’s usage is quite distinct from this. For him found footage is a physical raw source, often arbitrarily selected and ripe for materialist transformation, while he underdetermines narrative structure and privileges texture and resonance.
Rumpelstilzchen is not an exercise in meaningful, gratuitous deconstruction or recontextualisation; material distortions layer and abstract the images, the narrative is a fragmented, hazy, hallucinatory drama as images and voices loop and echo. This emphasises and reawakens the disturbing Gothic strangeness of the folk story. Imbued with a darker German romanticism filtered through post-industrial detritus, Rumpelstilzchen is in the time-honoured folkloric tradition of writing over; contemporary in its retelling, retaining traces of its earlier form. […] —Steven Ball, www.sensesofcinema.com