Matthias Müller (alternative spelling Matthias Mueller) (born 1961) is a German experimental filmmaker and curator, often working in the field of found footage films. From 1994 to 1997 he worked as Guest Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany), and from 1998 to 1999 at the Dortmund Fachhochschule. Since 2003 he is Professor for Experimental Film at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany.
During the fifth Night of Experimental Film Art Cinema OFFoff again combines avant-garde (silent) film with innovative experimental music based on an overarching theme. This year the night flirts shamelessly with romanticism. The great feelings like Weltschmerz and Sehnsucht, individualism, and the longing for the unknown are back in contemporary alliances between musical impulses and cinematic desires.
Buoyed in part by the Academy of Media Arts (Kunsthochschule für Medien, or KHM), Cologne has become an epicenter of experimental film and video within Germany. This program, organized in collaboration with Cologne-based filmmakers Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing, presents nine works from the Cologne/Bonn region viewed through the lens of “formal subversion”. All included works somehow undermine basic elements of their form, structure, or the medium itself to reveal unforeseen creative potentials .
Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.
In an experimental approach to film, the mirror as a reflective device is used more in its concrete dimension that in the metaphorical: the mirror surface denounces the cinematographic transparency, the famous "window to the world" dear to André Bazin and manifests its power of illusion, infinitely poetic.
This programme will give rise to various speculations about the self-portrait, memory, landscape, but also on the presence of mirrors in Hollywood movies that reveals a double or the narcissistic staging full of doubts and anguish.
B3 is presenting an exhibition about yann beauvais's 40 years of activist, within experimental cinema and video art, since 1974. The show is curated by Jean-Michel Bouhours (Curator from Modern Art National Museum Historical Dept- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and will be on display for 3 months from November 22nd 2104 to February 22nd 2015. For yann beauvais: Making experimental cinema is taking into account both an undervalued story, but also examine how non-narrative, are breaking with historical patterns of narration from a linear support: the movie.
Belgian experimental film festival L’Âge d’or 'returns' to Brussels on October 8-14. 'Reviving the spirit' of the EXPRMNTL festival will present twenty-three films in competition as well as programmes dedicated to and with the presence of Birgit Hein (president of the jury), Gustav Deutsch (who will also deliver a masterclass), Friedl vom Gröller, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Robert Todd and John Smith. Mark Webber, editor of the recently published anthology of writings by Gregory Markopoulos will introduce two programmes of his works with new prints. The festival will also pay homage to Stephen Dwoskin and Adolfas Mekas and present curated programmes dedicated to the Italian avant-garde, and a double selection of “ethnographic poems”, with works by Raymonde Carasco and Robert Gardner.
The festival's brochure, including the complete programme, can be downloaded here.
The work of these two German artists, Christoph Girardet (* 1966) and Matthias Müller (* 1961), is of outstanding importance for filmic and video art. The publication offers, for the first time, in-depth insights into the joint filmic and photographic oeuvre of these two artists. Girardet and Müller have been working in continuous collaboration for more than 14 years now, primarily on the basis of filmic material already in existence (found footage), from which they produce associative/narrative compositions.
The theme of the 11th edition of AVANT is Found and Excavated. Films, videos and live performances based on re-edited found footage, or films that have been going through processes of decay and destruction, film that is in constant transformation, aesthetically or politically.
Friday evening begins with a selection of films by the German collective Schmelzdahin and continues with a live performance of the film Materia Obscura, made by the film alchemist and former Schmelzdahin member Jürgen Reble and with live music by the multimedia artist Thomas Köner.
Saturday opens with four films by Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet who have excavated new stories from well-known movies by re-editing and assembling them anew. After this follows a complete retrospective of the films by Schmelzdahin and a screening of Wolfgang Lehmann’s one hour long intense flickering journey into the fantastic world of nature documentaries. Saturday concludes with two programmes: The Spanish artist Maria Cañas’ political collages and a unique program with Soviet and Russian found footage film, curated by Masha Godovannaya.
Set in the field of experimental cinema, the films of Antoni Pinent are a kind of reflection on the cinematographic medium, where the material aspects of moving images form the content. Over the years, he has developed a very particular camera-less cinema, working directly on the support and fragmenting its smallest unit, the still, in a technique he calls “polyframe”, which he has used to make his latest films. This task of décollage using filmic materiality and presenting the film as something concrete that you can work on with your hands is a reference to the cinema of attractions, that powerful visual experience packed with punches, shocks and humour of early film. This session will present some of his works in a dialogue with others by Volker Schreiner, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Morgan Fisher, David Matarasso and Peter Tscherkassky; some have been an important influence, others introduce concepts to reflect on his work.
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller predominately make use of found footage in their films which they combine to produce new works. Their dealings with the media of film come together in intense combinations of images and film collages that unfold new layers of meaning.
Locomotive from 2008, a fast-moving video triptych comprising scene showing railway trains taken from hundreds of movies, came about in this manner. Departure and arrival, endings and new beginnings, exoticism and the thrill of adventure interlock are condensed into an exciting new narrative.
Meteor from 2011 is a filmic metaphor for childhood desire and imagination. Assembled from movies, uprooted fragments from fairy tales and old science fiction material, Meteor stages the imaginary world of the child at the threshold of self-discovery and disentanglement. Black and white excerpts of aggressive, fearful or languorous boys from films by Jean Vigo, Ingmar Bergman or François Truffaut merge with glowingly colorful images of rockets speeding through outer space or cosmic objects from the genre of science fiction.
