Christoph Girardet

Catch

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

Muller/Girardet short

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.

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.

Cut

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

The body as a wound that never heals.

Maybe Siam

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

About blind people in Hollywood films

It Was Still Her Face

Christoph Girardet

Portraits of women, and the men who are spellbound by them. Painted portraits are revenants, omens of absence, metaphors for loss and death, objects of desire and fixation.

Hide

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and lips, juxtaposed against the sensual application of assorted foams, lotions, waxes, and creams, these carefully constructed, plastic images begin to fade, speckle, crack, distort, and burn with the material deterioration of the celluloid itself, before being reduced to the stark whiteness - and unadulterated purity - of an empty projection. At once idealized and grotesque, the disintegrating images become an integral reflection of the title's double entendre of hide as both an organic surface that inherently decays with time, and the deliberate act of concealing its irreversible plasticity

Screen

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.

Absence

Christoph Girardet

In slow dissolves, loops of images of enacted absence are projected in white light. Most of the images come from the black-and-white film series The Invisible Man, dating from the 1930s to '60s. The presence of an invisible actor seems to influence minimal cinematic events on theatrical sets. These events combine to become an enigma regarding the phenomenon of disappearance.

Ray

Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller

“A study of light.” (Christoph Girardet/Matthias Müller)