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.
From appropriation of dominant cinematic archives, to critical scrutiny of film techniques, the 12 modern and contemporary artists' works presented in this program exemplify an alternative and highly self-reflective form of cinema. Following Erika Balsom’s understanding of contemporary art as a potential “laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled,” they reconsider what cinema is (or was) and what it can do. With an emphasis on the ideology behind the operation of filmic apparatus and the technological externalization of memory and time, the works in this program expose critical and aesthetic potentials of “an other cinema,” oscillating between white cube and black box.
Dates:
Monday, September 6, 2021 (All day) to Monday, September 20, 2021 (All day)
On Friday, May the 7th, 19:00 (CET), FRACTO is glad to present a special streaming program of found footage films by Joseph Cornell, Matthias Müller, Cécile Fontaine, Naomi Uman and Martin Arnold: ‘DREAM-DELIRIUM-APPARITION’.
Their approaches to found footage, at once likeminded and singular, have served Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller well since 1999, during which time the two of them have collaborated on nearly thirty films and photographic works. Varied metaphors and modes of inquiry have been used to analyze their oeuvre: to some, Girardet and Müller provide a “suggestive continuum,” exposing the patterns of light and darkness, absence and presence, by which cinema operates; to others, the filmmakers dissect the body of film history and of the cinematic apparatus, suggesting the moving image as a corporeal grouping of skin, guts, brains, and bones to pick apart.
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 .
Dates:
Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - 19:00 to Wednesday, September 7, 2016 - 18:55
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.
Dates:
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - 18:00 to Thursday, February 25, 2016 - 17:55
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.
