WELT
SPIEGEL KINO
In Gustav Deutsch's most recent found footage work the masses "absorb"
(Walter Benjamin), the artwork. Three historical camera pans across the streets
and squares of Vienna, Surabaya, and Porto provide a starting point for reflection
on the relationship of everyday stories and cinematic machinery.
Welt
Spiegel Kino's steadfast piercing of the dynamic of this relationship is astounding.
Each of the three pans (taken between 1912 and 1930) contains a cinema; in
the montage, the passersby become chance protagonists in a series of micro-tales,
which report on both cinematic and world history. Deutsch's method for connecting
archive material is highly hypertextual: every person in the film refers to
a multitude of socio-cultural contexts, similar to the hyperlinks in the interactive
CD Rom "Odysee Today" from Deutsch and his partner Hanna Schimek.
The gaze of a Viennese passerby in 1912 leads the film as though with a time
machine to the battle of Isonzo, Vienna's Prater, and to the punishing of
suburban ruffians. In Salazaras Portugal, a general awards honors to weeping
veterans; a group of girls stares steadfastly into the camera of an anonymous
film chronicler while their mothers dream from inside a sardine factory of
overcoming their situation. For Gustav Deutsch, the cinema (and pars pro toto
every similarly "insignificant" artifact) is a mirror to the world.
And conversely, the cinema belongs to these linfamous people, the secondary
characters of history. Their being-in-the-world creates its photochemical
process; the twentieth century person is reflected (and discovered) in the
eye of the camera.
(Michael Loebenstein)
Further information: http://www.sixpackfilm.com/catalogue.php?pid=1596&lang=de