In der Herstellung eines Films ist der Prozess des Kopierens ein essentieller Vorgang. Die Vervielfältigung ist im Medium selbst angelegt und zudem ein entscheidender und umfangreicher Gestaltungsmoment. Das Material zu Schwere Augen (Heavy Eyes) hat in seiner Genese viele Umkopierungen und unterschiedliche Bewegtbildformate durchlaufen. Von 16 mm Found Footage über DV-Cam zu VHS, von VHS zu Files unterschiedlichster Codecs, bis hin zu einer Ausbelichtung auf 35 mm Film als Endformat. Leider ist die Vorführung einer 35 mm Kopie mittlerweile nicht mehr in jedem Kino Standard. Auf Grund dieses Umstandes ließ ich diesen Film des öfteren als Video im nicht endgültigen Format zeigen. Damit war ich immer unzufrieden. In der Überarbeitung wurde darum nun eine Version geschaffen, die als digitale High-Definition-Vorführung konzeptionell stimmig ist. Über den Wechsel des Mediums in der Vorführung stellt sich eine ganz andere Erfahrung ein. Selbst wenn sich inhaltlich nichts wesentlich verändert hat, es ist ein neues Werk geworden. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
The pictures in Siegfried A. Fruhauf ‘s Heavy Eyes (10 minutes, 2017) have been already seen, and even bear the marks of this looking – like pre-washed jeans. They belong to the growing genre of found/stolen footage movies and supercuts where pictures are boosted from their original sources and repurposed. Do we need to make new pictures, when so many already exist, clamouring for our attention? Our picture mountains may be shredding the project of attention itself, as they become too available, creating new forms of invisibility. Not the traditional invisibility of repression and silence, but the new invisibility of transparency and abundance.
The artist is drawn here to white men and women who are beautifully lit, the soft light producing eternal face monuments. The faces are so iconic that the director can’t help but return to them himself. After finishing a well-travelled version of the movie in 2011, he has come back, like a thief to the scene of the crime, to recut his own film, producing a denser, more satisfying cut-up.
The faces that are at the heart of the movie don’t offer themselves immediately to the viewer. Instead they appear in a palimpsest of emulsion and digital processing. These silvery pictures are shattered and multiplied. No sooner does a face appear, then it doubles, then doubles again, as if there was no way to maintain a single identity any longer.
As Lacan reminds us: love means giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. Here the look, which is also the emblem of desire, fractures the subject. And the look moves in two directions – it strikes out at its subject, turning the other into object, prey, utopian hope, escape route, saviour and villain. But it also turns back/inwards, and breaks apart the one who is desiring. Who am I now that I love you? I’m producing a new version of you, through my desire of you. I’m producing a new version of myself, by wanting you so much. Love is like found footage, endlessly recycling and remapping, producing multiple vantages and selves.
Desire is carried on two shoulders in this movie. The first is analog film and the second is digital video. Analog film returns us to the body, the direct impression of light falling on a body and then onto silver. Emulsion is alive, a vibrant chemical dream that continues to shift across time. It bears the marks of time, like any body. So much of what used to be called experimental film offers its viewers a return to the body of the pre-verbal infant. It is a haptic cinema of touch, an infantile encounter of overwhelming sensations, colours, surfaces and textures. These forms of cinema – carried on most notably by Stan Brakhage, though many came before and after the maestro – invite the viewer to re-enter the bodies they used to have, to surrender to the play of the senses, and to reawaken to the world in a new way, which is ironically the old way.
Digital cinema offers the possibility of an endless tinkering and reworking of the original image. In Heavy Eyes, the artist takes the faces struggling to see and to be seen, and creates copies, which is the cornerstone of digital consciousness – the endless proliferation of copies which cannot be told apart from the original. As the copies become the original, the notion of a single identity, an original self even (which the analog movie project is bent on restoring), is called into question, left in ruins.
The artist’s reflection on desire and looking is carried by two traditions, though he leaves it up to the viewer to wander between them, marvelling at the surface
of broken mirrors, the silvery beauty of cracked emulsion, the avatars which invite us to join each of these faces on their restless pilgrimmage to the heart of our own longings. (Mike
Hoolboom)
Originally published in Festival Daily, Jihlava Film Festival, October 2017
http://dokrevue.com/clanky/heavy-eyes
Consistent manipulation of found footage showing people and faces in an urban landscape dissolved their movements into visual echoes. The melancholy remnants of
the original film are subjected to the digital poetry of blurriness and the loss of meaning, gestures, and physical movements. (Ji.hlava International
Documentary Film Festival)
Producing a film includes the essential process of creating copies. Duplication is built into the medium itself and moreover, it constitutes an elaborate and decisive phase in the creative realization of a film. The footage of HEAVY EYES (Schwere Augen) evolved over the course of many copy generations and a number of different motion picture formats. From 16 mm found footage to DV-Cam to VHS, from VHS through a wide variety of digital file codecs, all the way to the striking of a 35 mm film print which constituted the final format of the work. Unfortunately, 35 mm film projection is no longer a standard available to all movie houses. For this reason, I increasingly allowed the film to be shown as a video instead of its intended final format. But I was always dissatisfied. So a revised version has now been created, allowing for a digital high definition projection that has conceptual integrity. The transition to this medium has created an entirely different experience. Though nothing has significantly changed in terms of content, HEAVY EYES has become a new work. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
