edition arsenal experimental
- Album, 2004
THE MEMO BOOK
Films, Videos and Installations by Matthias Müller
edited by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
with contributions by Christa Blümlinger, Robin Curtis, Mike Hoolboom, Georg Kaplan, Scott MacDonald, Volker Pantenburg, Dirk Schaefer, Marc Siegel and Daniel Hendrickson
The films of Matthias Müller can be read as an unwritten history of German experimental film. In his artistic biography and film aesthetic – from the Super 8 movement in the eighties as well as the genre crossing work with found footage, though the mutual interweaving of analogue and digital image media up to the cinematographic installation – Hollywood cinema, avant-garde and queer cinema are taken apart as much as the radical changes in media and representation technologies in the eighties and nineties – together with the resulting changes in the cinematic landscape, which for him have also opened up to include art spaces. Müller's determined interest in questions of memory, traces of the past the meaning of historical bodies makes him a central point for the most varied and widely associative reflections.
The authors of this volume trace this outstanding and unique position that lies in the boundary breaking quality constitutive of Müller's work, continually causing it to reflect back on cinema and to found it anew.
Matthias Müller currently teaches experimental film at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.
The book "The Memo Book" has been available since September 2005.
- bilingual German and English
- 280 pages with numerous colour illustrations
Verlag Vorwerk 8
ISBN 3-930916-76-2
In cooperation with LUX (London), YYZ (Toronto) and the Bundesverband Kommunale Filmarbeit (Frankfurt). Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Kulturwerk VG-Bildkunst (Bonn).
On the occasion of the release of the book, we are offering the following three programs of films and videos by Matthias Müller.
If schedules permit, Matthias Müller and/or Stefanie Schulte Strathaus are happy to travel to a book presentation with accompanying film program.
For screenings in Germany, the rental costs for the film are just 200 € per program as well as a potential fee for Matthias Müller in the amount of 100 €.
Travel and accommodation costs are covered.
Of course, individual programs may also be shown.
Program 1
AUS DER FERNE – THE MEMO BOOK, Matthias Müller, 1989, 28 min
SLEEPY HAVEN, Matthias Müller, 1993, 14 min
STERNENSCHAUER - SCATTERING STARS, Matthias Müller, 2004, 2 min
HOME STORIES, Matthias Müller, 1990, 6 min
ALPSEE, Mattias Müller, 1994, 15 min
AUS DER FERNE – THE MEMO BOOK (1989) is a reminiscence of a friend who had died of AIDS. His own mourning finds expression in the blending of found and original material, which seems to become one with the film material. In this film, as also in SLEEPY HAVEN (1993), a particular corporal proximity to the screen is created. SLEEPY HAVEN brings together found images of ocean liners and super-8 material, in part shot by friends, of their own bodies into a wash of images in oceanic blue. The film was inspired, among other things, by texts by Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and films by Kenneth Anger and Jean Genet. STERNENSCHAUER - SCATTERING STARS (2004) presents a glowing fantasy and is reminiscent of Kenneth Anger's Fireworks. HOME STORIES (1990) stages Hollywood bodies once again. The film is among Müller's best know works: Lana Turner and other actresses narrate a very peculiar history of the melodrama through gestures and looks. In ALPSEE (1994) Müller dove into the world of a young boy who lives in a sterile household in the sixties, where an overflowing glass of milk seems the same in a child's fantasy as the overflowing of motherly order.
Program 2
NEBEL, Matthias Müller, 2000, 12 min
PENSÃO GLOBO, Matthias Müller, 1997, 15 min
PHANTOM, Matthias Müller, 2001, 5 min
VACANCY, Matthias Müller, 1998, 15 min
ALBUM, Matthias Müller, 2004, 24 min
This program contains Matthias Müller's most recent film and video works. It begins with NEBEL (2000), the filming of a poem by Jandl. This is followed by PENSÃO GLOBO (1997), the cinematic journey of a person with AIDS. Diaries by Wolfgang Max Faust, Hervé Guibert, Derek Jarman and Mike Hoolboom, in a voice-over by the Hoolboom, form the film's basis, PHANTOM (2001) was created by art spaces and play meditatively with the idea of the cinema as a curtain. VACANCY (1998) brings together the construction of the city of Brasilia as a model for the future of his generation with Müller's year of birth (1961). ALBUM (2004) is a very personal weave of collected images and texts.
Program 3
PLAY, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, 2003, 7 min
PHOENIX TAPES, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, 1999, 26 min
MANUAL, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, 2002, 10 min
BEACON, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, 2002, 15 min
MIRROR, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, 2003, 8 min
The last program contains works that were created in collaboration with Christoph Girardet. Like Müller, Girardet studied at the HBK Braunschweig, and they began their collaboration in 1999 with PHOENIX TAPES. Following PLAY (2003), a loop that puts the movie and theater auditorium into the scene, we show parts 3-6 from the Hitchcock installation, which was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford for the exhibition "Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art." MANUAL (2002) is a choreography in which switches, knobs and levers are used. This work as well as BEACON (2002) brings the collected film images of the two artists together, in this case of shots of the ocean. In the dialogue of the images, a spoken text by Mike Hoolboom, read by a woman, is intermixed. The ending of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962) was the inspiration for Girardet and Müller's MIRROR (2003), which once again puts the cinema itself into the act through its 35mm Cinemascope format (created from two DV cameras mounted next to each other).
For more information and reservations:
or: +49 (0)30-26955150
