Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put...
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...
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...
Dedicated to Dieter Meier. voice-over by Gregory Markopoulos, reading an excerpt in English translation of Paul Valéry’s L’Homme et la nuit (Man and the Night).
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...
‘625' operates with changing blurs of TV screen rasters, filmed off the TV set and negatively reproduced, and made up of 625 lines. The sound is derived from the light levels of the individual picture elements via a photoresistor.
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...
"This film is a found footage montage of war coverage since World War II. The clips are taken from television documentaries from Arte to CNN. The images show aestheticized fireworks from Dresden to Bagdad, where people only appear as shadows. The sound is also a collage with Liszt's 'Prelude' as...
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...
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...
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...
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...
With WEISSFILM (White Film) the Heins ended a ten-year period of producing structural films: works that drew attention to the mediating presence and function of the film material itself. This comparatively short film consists of strips of transparent and semi-transparent film leader, which are...
In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.
