Siegfried A. Fruhauf - News - Siegfried A. Fruhauf

Siegfried A. Fruhauf sees cinema as a natural process in the broad sense. It is that nature as a subject in his films always serves as a poetic investigation into the laws of the cosmos and the universe. His aesthetic enterprise therefore consists in projecting us beyond perceptual habits, to see the celestial bodies that hide in the lining of a landscape. To do this he uses the camera like a scientific device, that is, as an instrument capable of taking what is invisible to the human eye. The images that will appear next can no longer be deciphered by physics or mathematics. What they show stems from the disaster of burning and dying stars.

In order to carry out this translation where the camera gives us a way to interpret the language of the stars, the filmmaker pushes the limits of the camera as a tool. It is by accentuating the decomposition of the film or the interference of the grain that he realizes sincere odes to disorder. Thus, his images derive their power from the fact that they bring the device to the fore, that they bring the life of the machine to the screen. New filmic manifestations arise from representation "errors", proving that there is a cosmos in every image, however small.

In fact, among cosmic phenomena, it is perhaps "dissolution" which constitutes the central leitmotif of the works of Siegfried A. Fruhauf. In Night Sweat (2008) the dialogue between nature and the nature of the film continues to question the limits of the machine, but sublimates the interferences. The zooming assaults in the night eventually liquefy the image to suck us into a chaotic universe where our minds project black holes on the dance of pixels. By disorganizing the image in this way through a craft of intoxication, the filmmaker breaks with the idea of classical representation. It dissolves matter and plunges us into a plastic mess that only our inner world can rearrange. The real then opens up to new modes of structuring imagination. This creates a political approach by filmmaker, who brings into play the foundations of objectivity as if to better invite us to rethink the world.

“We live with the idea that there is no alternative, that if the world turned out otherwise everything would fall apart. This is not true. There is another order, and it works too. When the Earth was flat, it worked too.“ Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Talk at The Austrian Film Museum, video recording, January 11, 2020.

Drawing on this history of cinema which brings together Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, the work of Siegfried A. Fruhauf constantly sheds new light on the limits of moving image. His free and non-academic approach to the Austrian heritage (Kren, Kubelka, etc.) indicates that it is less for him to "show something else" than to find a "new way of seeing" the familiar. As a result, as evidenced by the archaeological montage of his films, his work indeed finds it’s place in a process of updating our reality. We think here of his way of piling up traces of images, to make the disappeared and the dissimilar coexist at the "infinitely small point of the present". Fruhauf's cinema apprehends time and phenomena through the prism of repetition; and everything is reborn to the rhythm of the hypnotic sound loops of Anna Katharina Laggner and Jürgen Gruber.

- Etienne Bomba, trad. Jim Stickel, Re:voir (2021)

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