Phoenix Tapes

A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object.

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

Combining close-ups of redundant technology gleaned from 60s US sci-fi television series with a female voice of a 40s Hollywood melodrama, Manual makes absolute detachment clash with magnified emotion. When its record of the minutae of endless buttons, switches and control panels Manual reduces the notion of any manageability of life to a sheer absurdity.

The body as a wound that never heals.

This is somebody, nobody, anyone. This is us in the course of time. Persistently, in vain. The self is the need for permanent self-assertion.

Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and lips, juxtaposed against the sensual application of assorted foams, lotions, waxes, and creams, these carefully constructed, plastic images begin to fade, speckle, crack, distort, and burn with the material deterioration of the celluloid itself, before being reduced to the stark whiteness - and unadulterated purity - of an empty projection. At once idealized and grotesque, the disintegrating images become an integral reflection of the title's double entendre of hide as both an organic surface that inherently decays with time, and the deliberate act of concealing its irreversible plasticity

Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.

Muller/Girardet short

The film creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters.

Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal ?

About blind people in Hollywood films

The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city symphony, disaster movie and media trauma therapy become one.

In slow dissolves, loops of images of enacted absence are projected in white light. Most of the images come from the black-and-white film series The Invisible Man, dating from the 1930s to '60s. The presence of an invisible actor seems to influence minimal cinematic events on theatrical sets. These events combine to become an enigma regarding the phenomenon of disappearance.

A short feature about an optical experiment.

Chained up women are deprived of the narrative trappings of their film roles. You see red lips, fingernails digging in, a bosom rising and falling with the rhythm of the woman's breath, in short, all the essentials from horror films of the fifties and sixties and repeated insistently in serial collage.

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.