Film Ist, a girl & a gun
by Gustav Deutsch. Austria/Germany 2009. 93 min
at La Casa Encendida
Every Tuesday in December, 20h
Ronda Valencia, 2, Madrid

FILM IST. a girl & a gun is a film drama in 5 acts about one of the oldest topics in cinematography and in the history of mankind: the confrontation of the sexes. From the Genesis of the universe and the world by collaboration and confrontation of the gods of creation, to the innocent cohabitation of men and women in the state of Paradise, to desire, temptation, love, jealousy, and hate between the sexes under the sign of Eros, to the escalation and violent repression and exploitation of the sexes in war and pornography reflected in Thanatos’ mirror, over to the solutions and enlightenment offered by religion and politics in the dialog of Symposium, film fragments from the first four and a half centuries of cinematography were researched and reassembled into sequence of pictures and stories and thereby given new meaning as to their original content.

For this hypnotizing exploration of cinema as an expression of either Thanatos or Eros, international-flim-archive spelunker Gustav Deutsch starts with D.W. Griffith‘s maxim (revived by Godard) that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. Assembling bits from ethnographic films, war footage, science documentaries, early porn reels, and scenes from 1930s narrative Euro features, Deutsch uncannily collapses all boundaries between the genres, suggesting a feverish celluloid dream –or nightmare. - Village Voice