Part of Winter 2002
Some choose to debate the future of film endlessly, but Gustav Deutsch chooses instead to turn his attention to cinema’s past, recognizing the wealth of images that lie dormant and unprojected. Film Ist #7 – 12 (90:00 min., 35mm, 2002) is an on-going catalogue of film’s history – a film that records the life of film. Like cinema itself, it shall never be completed. Deutsch will be present to show the recently completed second part of this on-going project – devoted to the history of early cinema. His rigorous juxtaposition of these segments reveals the poetics of the image and the inherent experimentalism that were a feature of the vanguard of cinema. The pioneers of cinema had to develop special techniques to capture everything from the scientific phenomena of motion studies to classic narrative devices like the high-speed chase. Deutsch harvests these forgotten relics of history from the archives of film institutes across Europe and finds that they resonate deeply with the images that flicker across today’s screens. This project of history becomes an important step forward, for, as Deustch quotes Mahler in the prelude, “Tradition is the handing down of flames, not the worship of ashes.”
