Michael Pilz's 285-minute Himmel and Erde is an essay film or an ethnographic documentary. It contemplates the finite lot of individuals as part of a continuum of human experience in the natural world. Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The...
In this evocative work, we hear and see the interactions of a man and a woman in a pristine forest. We gain a sense of intimacy with them and nature. Suddenly we leave the worries of our scattered lives and begin to remember the primal elements of existence: earth, wind, fire, water, people, and...
Karl Prantl, the main character in the film, is one of the leading figures of Austrian art. As a sculptor - as one who shapes stones - he has produced an oeuvre of rare consistency and coherence, created out of an awareness of the fundamental concerns and utterances of man.
For one night Michael Pilz rides through New York with a remarkable taxi driver, Jeff Perkins. Sitting by his side, looking and listening, sometimes intervening, he uses his handy high-8 camera like a writing instrument, a „camera-stylo“.
To this day, a work in progress called 'Curtains' can be found on the extensive website of Austrian maverick master Michael Pilz. The idea was to edit all the curtains shots he ever made in strictly chronological order – as a pars pro toto representation of his oeuvre and philosophy of cinema. ...
"Deep is the doctrine of events as arising from causes, and it looks deep too. It is through not understanding this doctrine, through not penetrating it, that this generation has become a tangled skein, a matted ball of thread, like munja-grass and rushes, unable to overpass the doom of the Waste,...
Originally intended as a four-room media installation, allowing the viewer to "live" the film, come and go, Michael Pilz's essay about South Styrian painter Gerald Brettschuh was adapted to one 751 minutes sequential documentary with three parts and an epilogue. Part 1: The Use of Bodies, Part 2:...
