The setting of the film was simple and straightforward: the now 77-year-old Friedl vom Gröller asks a (homosexual) escort to do a nude film session, has the man’s fine rib underpants pulled down by her younger accomplice, filmmaker Josephine Ahnelt – who, like a puppeteer, remains hidden...
The film virtually opens with a false lead, showing a poster for for Shiseido cosmetics – the kind of sign we are accustomed to seeing in display windows of perfume shops or department stores. The upper portion of the poster is painted over with the title of the film and the lower with the name...
The filmmaker Friedl vom Gröller films herself and her colleague, the filmmaker Christiana Perschon. A projector casts images from an earlier Vom Gröller film onto the wall. A silent, black-and-white studio film that brings together all the elements of the cinematic dispositif.
Friedl vom Gröller doesn’t give Christiana Perschon an interview. She gives her more: the film of a brief encounter, which in its ephemeral playfulness, precisely captures the artistic program of those portrayed. An intergenerational dialogue as affectionate togetherness.
A young woman sits on a bench in a baroque park. The motion of the wind in the leaves, in her hair, and also the flutter of her eyelashes, the opening of her lips, her imperceptible smile are all made visible with the absolutely static camera. A large baroque birdcage symbolizes a hopeless...
Photo session is a film about a pair. A human pair: man and woman, no longer young but when they laugh together they´re as exuberant as children. And an analogous pair: a reflex camera and a 16mm film camera recording one another.
Portrait of the artist’s mother as an old woman. A farewell vignette, a final sketch from her nursing home, silent, aloof, clumsy, metallic gray, candidly-bluntly-awkwardly direct.
“This unwavering attitude as well as his decision to develop his own film style under and with financially difficult circumstances are the empowering legacy for which I will always be grateful to Jonas.” (Friedl vom Gröller, 2019)
The filming of my discomfort at being a woman between the ages of 60-70 in our society has the function of a valve. It is based on the incomprehension of people who are not affected when I report negation, sometimes mistrustful reactions in daily anonymous dealings in public. Even women of the same...
A silent, black and white film portrait of two children set against the eponymous Swiss river, Ticino takes its cue from Franz West's famous "Adaptives" sculptures.
A salon piece in black and white. The filmmaker circles the amorous play. Gestures and blurs, intuitively precise in-camera edits condense the situation of debauchery and digression.
Five older women, loosely grouped in two rows, gaze into the camera. At times only details of their faces can be seen, a sixth woman walks through the picture, joins the others. The image flickers briefly, disappears, and the scene begins again from the start, this time with a slightly displaced...
