Turtleneck Phantasies

Director Gernot Wieland worked for twelve years with an animal trainer who taught birds to fly in circles or squares. The film examines how aesthetic norms influence Western views of the world and why these norms end in failure.

Gernot Wieland's new film, Bird in Italian is Uccello (2021), furthers his interest in psychological states and the constitution of belonging in different social contexts. Drawing upon Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds, and its subsequent cinematic adaptation, Bird in Italian is Uccello (re)enacts a theatrical production of the horror-thriller. Working specifically with an account of a never performed theater production of Maurier’s story - one that was meant to be staged at a psychiatric hospital in northern Italy – Wieland's film inverts the original script’s roles: human characters become birds and the bird protagonists become humans.

This absurd documentary about (political) desire consists of collages and drawings with voice-over comments from a telephone speaker. The images visualize specific historical reminiscences from recent German history, while the voice-over extends and counteracts these images with a multitude of absurd and humorous interpretations. (Argos)

Ink in Milk is Wieland’s most recent film – a knotted string-figure of histories, fictions and images. Through the flickering vignettes of a schoolboy trauma, visits to a friend at a psychiatric institution and encounters with animals, Ink in Milk exposes the anxious, web-like structures that underpin the tragicomedy of existence. The artist’s narrative is accompanied by a series of schematic, childlike diagrams, line drawings, ink paintings, plasticine animations, and crystalline sculptural forms, punctuated with super 8 film clips. Sometimes these images illustrate the narrative voice as gathered evidence; at other points they are oblique documents, disrupting chains of causality.