Fabula
Müller and Girardet’s Transgression and Transformation
Still from Personne, 2016, 15:00 min. Image courtesy of West Den Haag Gallery.
“Images, our great and primitive passion…”
Sometimes a work’s meaning is lost in translation; other times its essence is accidentally found in it. In the case of the contemplative film experiments of German artists Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, the familiar territory of conventional storytelling — the art of fabula — has been translated from pure entertainment into pure reverie. The two members of this creative pair of collaborative film artists are visual archaeologists, conducting a rich excavation at the site of cinematic mythology via the subtle use of found or appropriated footage.
As they explore the virtual edges of our visual domain in their compelling and challenging works, we are thrust into a jarring juxtaposition of painting, photography, storytelling and dreaming with our eyes open. Along with Girardet, his fellow student at the Braunscheig School of Art in the late 80’s, Müller shared a fascination for an accidental archive through the allure of found and/or appropriated footage. Once they began formally collaborating in 1999 — the evocative and strange allegory of The Phoenix Tapes being their initial excursion into what Carl Jung called the collective and Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious — they haven’t looked back. They dig deep into the dusty, kitschy crust of our collective dreams.
Still from Phoenix Tapes, 1999, 45:00 min. Image courtesy of Lightcone.
Many have called the duo’s work an intersection of visual art and film, but far from being a collision or overlap between the arts, their layered superimpositions set the framework for an evolutionary leap in image-making from the canvas to the camera. By deconstructing customary tropes of narrative cinema, they create seductive anti-narratives out of the debris left behind by conventional linear stories: tales for the eye and mind, hyper-romantic without surrendering to sentiment. Not exactly an easily accomplished aesthetic agenda. But such a seductive one.
Their works are alluring meditations on mediation itself and are deep ruminations on cinema and its storytelling artifacts that serve as our collective gaze both onto and into the world. They make films as visual art, and cinema as paintings with light, sculpting in time. As captivating as the work of this collaborative team is, the absence of found footage from their own German culture is striking, as is its replacement by a nearly fetishistic fascination for Hollywood tropes. Müller and Girardet have managed to surgically remove the hero from their found footage while maintaining the deep underlying strata of the heroic.
Still from Meteor, 2011, 15:00 min. Image courtesy of West Den Haag Gallery.
That layer of the heroic is a vital forcefield pulsing beneath the surface of such evocations of electric paint as: Manual (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2009, 10:19 min.) Kristall (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2006, 15 min.). Meteor (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2011, 15 min.) and Contre-jour (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller ,Germany 2009, 11 min.). Their works tend to explore the naked polarities of life and death — as well as the dualities of waking and dreaming — through the strange affinity that inherently exists between the uncanny effigies in our collective dreamworlds and the dramatic disruptions of aesthetic representation in commercial cinema.
Suspended expectation and delayed gratification are the core values at work in their masterful manipulations. They’re not transgressive for moral or pictorial reasons —far from it, since the imagery is often innocuous and quotidian — but rather for narrative reasons. Amputated plotlines, scarred storylines, cipher-drenched characters, and hyper-normal situations are transformed to a nearly operatic scale via repetition and variations on a chosen theme.
Still from Cut, 2013, 13:00 min. Image courtesy of West Den Haag Gallery.
Together they make a new kind of narrative being, a Frankenstein-like assemblage of separate parts which somehow magically coalesce into a found fabula of astronomical proportions. This uniquely positioned pair of artists, poised to both negate and celebrate a cinematic tradition at the same time, take us behind the narrative mirror into the realm of the cinematic uncanny. Indeed, following Kristall, their works began to veer away from a robust embrace of Hollywood’s subterranean ethos and has moved closer to the formality of experimental visual art, installation and video. Cut (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany, 2013, 12:54 min.), for instance, contains about 75 separate clips but has the feel and tone of more avant-garde museum work, with its compulsively presented faucets and chairs, bugs and bandages exploring the darkness of their shared medical fetishes.
Still from Reflex, 2013, 1:24 sec. Image courtesy of West Den Haag Gallery.
Meanwhile, they have traveled far into the hinterland of experiential and behavioral science proper, with one of their shortest yet most gripping sagas, Reflex (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2013, 1:24 sec.), feeling like a BF Skinner primer on auto-reflexive responses. Everything Not Said (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2014, 12:00 min.) is a two-carousel slide projector loop containing multiple bandaged burn victims or facial surgery patients alternating with unnerving psychological test questions in text.
Personne (dirs. Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany 2016, 15:04 min.) is a masterful meditation on the male gaze reversed to focus obsessively on the myriad of about 120 clips of the famous French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, bring us into direct contact with their most surreal images and unsettling urges: those employing hyper-repetition and pattern recognition from the dream factory. In the gifted hands of these two adventurous partners, film is, like a dream, a game of participatory impulses in which their viewers are compelled to experience emotions despite the fact that they know them to be entirely fabricated representations. In point of fact, the more fabricated they become in their emotional parading of our deepest cinematic mythologies, the more absolutely do they absorb us in an uncanny waking dream.
Still from Personne, 2016, 15:00 min. Image courtesy of West Den Haag Gallery.
