AT 2007, bw, 16 min
music: Martin Siewert, production: Michaela Grill, Martin Siewert, Austrian Filmmuseum distribution: sixpackfilm, Light Cone
The perception of the city in the modern era is characterized by its fleeting and momentary nature. Social and architectural constructions are fragmented and dashing past. cityscapes attempts to make archived recordings from the Austrian Film Museum legible along these lines. Single images are isolated from the cinematographic flow in order to scrutinise their inscribed cognitive potential. For Walter Benjamin, history disintegrates into images and not stories. cityscapes is a search along the tracks of these images. (Michaela Grill, Martin Siewert)
According to the philosopher Claus Pias, digital information technology is a methodical and systematic instrument for forgetting. Phenomena of the analogue world are quantified; opposing the analogue principle of entropy (films fall apart, just as statues die) is the digital principle of being able to totally reverse and configure discrete values.
In a sense, cityscapes is a test set up for how the „third life“ of twentieth-century motion pictures might look in the twenty-first century. The Vienna recordings that Michaela Grill has digitized and processed have been taken entirely from archived films – fragments of lost news reports and weekly shows, unidentified artifacts without authors, the ruins left behind of the – in part, lost forever – film practices and life practices from cinema´s first two decades. For Walter Benjamin, film has blasted the pre-modern understanding of history with the „dynamite of a one-tenth fraction of a second“ and has made it possible to understand the world´s fragmentation. Accordingly, in image and sound (composition: Martin Siewert) cityscapes points to the radical contingency of digital coding and decoding processes: binary knowledge is a machine knowledge from which we attempt to (re)construct images, sounds, melodies, and histories. (Michael Loebenstein)
Festivalplacements:
Diagonale Graz/A, Int. Film Festival Rotterdam/NL, Cinecity Brighton/UK, Sonar Barcelona/E, Vila do Conde Int. Film Festival/P, Abstracta Rom/I, Ljubljana Animateka Film Festival/SL, NewNew!Festival Brno/CZ, 25 FPS Festival Zagreb/HR, Int. Animated Film Festival Vilnius/LIT, Denver Int. Film Festival/USA, TIE Montevideo/URG
Screenings:
Austrian Filmmuseum Vienna/A, Filmarchiv Austria Vienna/A, Top Kino Vienna/A, Stadtkino Vienna/A, Echoraum Vienna/A, Filmhauskino Wien/A, Künstlerhauskino Vienna/A, Stadtwerkstatt Linz/A, Kulturverein Blick im Winkel Innsbruck/A, Rechbauerkino Graz/A, Funplexx Kufstein/A, Moviemento Linz/A, GAYA gallery for young art Gmunden/A, Lichtspiele Lenzing/A, Medienkulturhaus Wels/A, Blaugelbe Gallerie Zwettl/A, Zentral Kino Wr. Neustadt/A, Austrian Filmgallery Krems/A, Diesel Kino Gleisdorf/A, loenArt Leonding/A, triennale Linz/A, SK Stiftung der Sparkasse Köln/Bonn/GER, Kino 46 Bremen/GER, La Casa Encendida Madrid/E, Festival de Cine Europeo Sevilla/E, Light Cone/F, Austrian Cultural Forum London/UK, Copenhagen Cinematheque/DK, Centre Pompidou Paris/F, Caen Cinematheque/F, Ljubljana Animateka Film Festival/SL, Slovenska Kinoteka Ljubljana/SL , San Francisco Cinematheque/USA, Anthology Film Archive/USA, UCLA Film & Television Archive Los Angeles/USA, LA Filmforum/USA , MOMA New York/USA, Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival/ARG, Image Forum Tokyo/J, Febiofest Bratislava/SK, Festival international de musique actuelle Victoriaville/CAN
Exhibitions:
Avant Art Festival Wroclaw/PL, Dazibao Montréal, Inside the Frame, Verksmiðjan Hjaleyri/IS
TV:
ORF Austrian Broadcasting Corporation/Austria, OKTO TV/Austria, TVE Espana/Spain
cityscapes live see site-specific collaborations
