Birgit Hein

The KALI-FILME are a compilation of 8 single short found footage films, which were composed of Hollywood war-, horror- and women in prison B-pictures, historical war documentaries and porno films. In the trivial films we find images of our own subconscious instincts, which are tabu in the official high culture. KALI is a mother goddess of the Hindu mythology. She is the birth giving mother and at the same time the killing and castrating woman. Since primeval times men do fear her power.

The series of portrait films that the Heins made between 1970-73 attest to their deepening interest in the movement generated solely through cinematic processes of reproduction. [...] Portraits (1970) is a collection of three of these films, Manson, Biggs, and Wilhelm Hein, that each underwent distinct processes of development so as to highlight different perceptual and aesthetic effects.

For their 35mm Materialfilme (1976), the Heins randomly spliced together a mix of colour and black and white material taken from the header and footer of commercial films. The scratches, scribbles, hand-written and commercially printed numbers and dots that adorn such footage rush past the eye until they are replaced by images consisting only of washed-out colours or scratched black and white frames.

Using minimal means, Materialfilme is conversely one of the absolutely maximal experiences possible in cinema. It's a masterpiece revealing film as a toxic material, an industrial material—a material that corrodes, that wears, that fractures and most of all, a material that can be purposefully manipulated. Extraordinarily active as a filmmaker, film collector and catalyst since the 1960s, Wilhelm Hein is one of film's true individualists; still absolutely dedicated to the moving image as a means of provocation, subversion and documentation of the most intimate type.

One of the most important structural films of the period, Rohfilm demonstrates a radical anti-representational approach, destroying the figurative image and bringing attention back to the ‘raw’ photographic material, particularly its physical form. Resisting a stable reference point, the film is a multi-layered onslaught of blurred impressions, shifting surfaces and grating sounds that activates a form of sensuous viewing. In the making of the film, the Heins employed just about every technique of defamiliarization, including direct intervention on the surface of the film strip, rephotography, remediation, and different kinds of mechanical interruption and destruction. It is a striking example of a truly handmade approach. (Kim Knowles)

Short film by Birgit Hein with paintings and texts by Gabriele Kutz.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

‘625' operates with changing blurs of TV screen rasters, filmed off the TV set and negatively reproduced, and made up of 625 lines. The sound is derived from the light levels of the individual picture elements via a photoresistor.

"Since the beginning of history women have also been perpetrators. They have been as courageous and brave as men. They can be equally brutal and criminal and of course just as horny. Nevertheless, to this day, there exists the feminine ideal of "non-aggressiveness – peacefulness – asexuality“ with which women have been surpessed for centuries. This film shows women as soldiers, partisans, watchmen, criminals, as well as child-bearing, drunk, masturbating strong femals but also as circumsized, dismembered victims, who must pay for the fear that women cause within men. Scenes from old and recent documentaries, from trivial films and my own stagend sequences are mounted to a collage of images. These are sup-plemented by a collage of sounds and a montage of quotes and my own texts. It’s also about me about my fears and my fighting to be able to live my own strength." - Birgit Hein

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.

Reproductions, for instance, completed in relative speed after the lengthy process of making Rohfilm, explores the aesthetic and perceptual effects of the reproduction of just a single type of image: strips of black and white slide positives from the Heins' vacations in North Africa, Italy, and greece in the early 1960s. To make the film, the Heins cut these numerous small images into little strips which they manipulated by hand on a Movieola viewing machine. While one of them maneuvered the strips (inserted them into the machine and moved them in different directions), the other filmed the projected image as it appeared on the machine's small screen. They described the effect of this process as follows: "While filming the many different little strips (hundreds of them) a rhythm is gradually established: quick and slow changes, pauses, a stronger movement of the pieces and a slow insertion, their sudden appearance.