Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
An early declaration of war on narrative cinema, using a barrage of visual and acoustic elements while at the same time juggling ironically - as he still does - with the term 'avant-garde'. A number of other preferences and obsessions were evident at an early stage, e.g. the mind-numbing habit of...
Other essential predecessors of film were those devices that created the illusion of motion by taking advantage of the persistence of vision and the stroboscopic effect, such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope or wheel of life, zoetrope or magic drum and praxinoscope and later on, the more...
The film looks at ways of creating spezial illusions through amiguous images, perspective theatres, folding peepshows and from the 19th century, the stereoscope, which look forward to today’s holography.
The history of the magic lantern with demonstrations of moving slides, watertank or polarisation slides, followed by images on paper, which are brought to life with mechanical manipulations, with light shining through them or as panorama.
The film traces the history of the camera obscura, the understanding of perspective and anamorphosis, peepshows and it shows the beauty of historical shadowtheaters and shadow toys.
