Wilhelm Hein
2021An Approximation of their Barbarous Manners
Christian Serritiello
Bruce Glover, Dulcie Smart
Tangier, Morocco. December 2019 87-year-old American character actor Bruce Glover (Chinatown) goes missing from a film set on the first day of shooting.
An Approximation of their Barbarous Manners
Materialfilme
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
For their 35mm Materialfilme (1976), the Heins randomly spliced together a mix of colour and black and white material taken from the header and footer of commercial films. The scratches, scribbles, hand-written and commercially printed numbers and dots that adorn such footage rush past the eye until they are replaced by images consisting only of washed-out colours or scratched black and white frames.
Materialfilme
Rohfilm
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
One of the most important structural films of the period, Rohfilm demonstrates a radical anti-representational approach, destroying the figurative image and bringing attention back to the ‘raw’ photographic material, particularly its physical form. Resisting a stable reference point, the film is a multi-layered onslaught of blurred impressions, shifting surfaces and grating sounds that activates a form of sensuous viewing. In the making of the film, the Heins employed just about every technique of defamiliarization, including direct intervention on the surface of the film strip, rephotography, remediation, and different kinds of mechanical interruption and destruction. It is a striking example of a truly handmade approach. (Kim Knowles)
Raw Film
Porträts
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
The series of portrait films that the Heins made between 1970-73 attest to their deepening interest in the movement generated solely through cinematic processes of reproduction. [...] Portraits (1970) is a collection of three of these films, Manson, Biggs, and Wilhelm Hein, that each underwent distinct processes of development so as to highlight different perceptual and aesthetic effects.
Portraits
Love Stinks
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
For nine months German filmmakers and performance artists, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein lived in New York. LOVE STINKS is a very personal, deeply disturbing and often shocking record of their visit. "For many people it will perhaps be depressing at first sight, but it was created from a tremendous strength"
Love Stinks
Reproductions
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
Reproductions, for instance, completed in relative speed after the lengthy process of making Rohfilm, explores the aesthetic and perceptual effects of the reproduction of just a single type of image: strips of black and white slide positives from the Heins' vacations in North Africa, Italy, and greece in the early 1960s. To make the film, the Heins cut these numerous small images into little strips which they manipulated by hand on a Movieola viewing machine. While one of them maneuvered the strips (inserted them into the machine and moved them in different directions), the other filmed the projected image as it appeared on the machine's small screen. They described the effect of this process as follows: "While filming the many different little strips (hundreds of them) a rhythm is gradually established: quick and slow changes, pauses, a stronger movement of the pieces and a slow insertion, their sudden appearance.
Reproductions
Materialfilme II
Wilhelm Hein
Using minimal means, Materialfilme is conversely one of the absolutely maximal experiences possible in cinema. It's a masterpiece revealing film as a toxic material, an industrial material—a material that corrodes, that wears, that fractures and most of all, a material that can be purposefully manipulated. Extraordinarily active as a filmmaker, film collector and catalyst since the 1960s, Wilhelm Hein is one of film's true individualists; still absolutely dedicated to the moving image as a means of provocation, subversion and documentation of the most intimate type.
Materialfilme II
Verbotene Bilder
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
Wilhelm Hein, Birgit Hein
A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)
Forbidden Images
Structural Studies
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
The film includes sections which explore the illusion of movement within the frame, the movement created by the filming and projection equipment, of movement suggested by camera manipulation (e.g. zoom, re-focus, etc.). Structural Studies exemplified the Hein’s central project of elaborating the central process of the cinema, situating those processes equally in terms of artistic production and mechanical reproduction.
Structural Studies
Kali-Filme
Birgit Hein, Wilhelm Hein
The KALI-FILME are a compilation of 8 single short found footage films, which were composed of Hollywood war-, horror- and women in prison B-pictures, historical war documentaries and porno films. In the trivial films we find images of our own subconscious instincts, which are tabu in the official high culture. KALI is a mother goddess of the Hindu mythology. She is the birth giving mother and at the same time the killing and castrating woman. Since primeval times men do fear her power.
Kali-Filme
