Der Ort der Handlung

The Birth of a Nation

The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.

Studies for the Decay of the West

Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema.

Burning Beds

Harry, a timpanist and pyromaniac, and Ginamove into the same apartment due to Hamburg's housing shortage. This is the beginning of a wonderful enmity, with Harry, who has been tried and tested in marital warfare, and relationship terrorist Gina proving to be quite equal opponents.

Histoire du cinema

Film footage from The Birth of a Nation, Die Abenteuer des Mister West im Lande der Bolschewiki, The Docks of New York, Tabu, Morocco, Citizen Kane, Kiss of Death, Johnny Guitar, Das Rote Frauen-Bataillon, Fireworks, Rabbitt's Moon, Eaux d'Artifice and Invocation of my Demon Brother.

The Open Universe

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

The Holy Bunch

After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

D’Annunzio’s Cave

Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends—cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz—simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.

Bartleby

Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.

Elementary Filmhistory

"In the early 1970s I filmed compact versions of a series of films that came on television and interested me, which should lead to revealing at least essential parts of their structure. In 1974, 30 of those experiments were mounted in sequence - so more or less chronologically - forming a film entitled Elementary Filmhistory. This film was intended to make a broad reading of the direction in which the cinema grew from 1960." (Klaus Wyborny)

Richard

Part 1 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein" (for Laurence Rickels)

Syntax

Woman with American accent reads German phrases and words from a study book on manipulated and degraded film stock.

Studies on Monet (In the Imaginary Museum)

There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.

The Haunted Screen

Using his original 8mm films, but blowing them up to 16mm, he created a collage of images that became his four-part film DÄMONISCHE LEINWAND (The Haunted Screen, 1969), quoting Lotte Eisner’s famous study of Weimar cinema in its title.

Grace, Things (Song of the Earth Part 5)

The fifth of five parts of Klaus Wyborny's "Lieder der Erde" / "Song of the Earth" cycle of films, whose theme is "the emergence of modern European civilization." The series comprises five large parts, which are in turn divided into various selections or short films.

Britain’s Glory

Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.