Matthias Müller

Catch

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

Muller/Girardet short

Nebel

Matthias Müller

Matthias Müller's short is based on the poems to childhood by famed Austrian lyrical aertist Ernst Jandl who tried to write these poems in a language used by children, including nursery rhymes and prayers. Müller uses found footage and amateur films from his own childhood to create a visual equivalent to these poems. (M.M).

Pensão Globo

Matthias Müller

Bavo Defurne, Heiko Dupke

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself.

Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book

Matthias Müller

AUS DER FERNE – THE MEMO BOOK (1989) is a reminiscence of a friend who had died of AIDS. His own mourning finds expression in the blending of found and original material, which seems to become one with the film material.

Home Stories

Matthias Müller

This one is a collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc. In the montage, the movements and gestures of the actresses – stars like Lana Turner, Tippi Hedren, and Grace Kelly– seem choreographed and planned for each other. The soundtrack supports this effect with connecting passages of sound that imitate the stereotypes of the genre. The treatment concentrates the dramatic shift from the familiar to the eerie and shows how women become the victims of the voyeuristic glance of film.

Alpsee

Matthias Müller

Christina Essenberger, Victor Helpap

For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.

Sleepy Haven

Matthias Müller

Mike Hoolboom

Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour.

Play

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

"With their montage of found footage of audiences, Müller and Girardet shape a captivating dramatic arc. It contains condensed suspense with highs, lows, hesitations, peaks, tension and humour; it's all a bit uncanny, since our imagination can read fathoms deep into the faces." (Anke Groenewold, Neue Westfälische, Bielefeld, 2003)

Personne

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

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.

Manual

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

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.

Beacon

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

Allison Plath-Moseley

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.

Kristall

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

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.

Phoenix Tapes

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

The film comprises edited excerpts from 40 Hitchcock films in six chapters, each focusing on a different motif that reveals some of Hitchcock’s dark obsessions and techniques.

Meteor

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

John Smith

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

Vacancy

Matthias Müller

Mike Hoolboom

Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.

Mirror

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

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.