The Present is Nowhere

By Morgan Falconer

Continuing our editorial relationhip with the fomer art magazine, Untitiled, we look at the work of German experimental filmmaker and curator Matthias Muller and how his work has been more concerned with being amateur than auter by using all sorts of footage from Hollywood to homevideos plus discarded scientific or educational films

Home Stories, Matthias Muller’s neatly tailored short from 1990, is comprised of a an inventory of some of Hollywood’s most preposterous assumptions about women’s behaviour. Searching through the archive of 50s melodramas, Muller compared each different film’s treatment of a typical scenario – the things go bump in the night scenario; he then borrowed short sequences and spliced them together into a staccato rhythm. Hence, when one young maiden reaches for the door, they all do; when another performs the distinctive pirouette (he’s behind you!) they all do.

It’s an affectionate pastiche of the genre, but not one so entirely enthralled that it cannot see the frightful idiocies at the heart of it. It’s light, but it’s revelatory. It’s alarming, but it’s also a rather nicely judged drawing room farce as well. Muller’s poor little Hollywood wives have been house-trained with an etiquette book in one hand and an iron rod in the other. If there is an assassin on the loose in their vast residences, they always put on a dressing gown first before going to investigate. And if they hear footsteps on the gravel, their jaws drop open only slightly, so if they look a little petrified, they also look a little cutesy and breathy as well.

The Memo Book (Aus der Ferne) preceded Home Stories by only a year, but it suggested a very different filmmaker. Muller made it in 1989 when he was mourning the loss of a close friend who had died of AIDS, and fearing the possibility that he himself might be infected. It brought about a startling change in his technique, as well as his ambitions – the film runs to nearly half an hour – and today Muller talks of it as his first serious production. It begins with the same kind of syncopation that is central to the structure of Home Stories, the editing flipping the motion of a man’s hands back a few moments as he gathers together letters and photographs in a knot of string and packs up the past.

Yet the film unfolds with a far rougher texture: it’s a pale, bleached duotone, not the fulsome, over-saturated technicolour of Home Stories. It’s something almost historical, with a succession of emulsion scratches and end flares that seem to burn up the surface of the film transport as it projects. The mood seems hotter too; the setting might be a wilting metropolis or merciless savannah. Accordingly, the sound-track clatters and tinkles, starved without Home Stories’ full melodies. If Home Stories shows a camp and comic artist, one with a preoccupation with feminism and femininity, The Memo Book shows Muller’s male world, one which nostalgically revisits the old homo-social worlds of factory floors, military barracks and dark, late night cities.

Muller made both of these films at the beginning of a decade that saw his work come to prominence internationally. Since then he has made over a dozen films, won a variety of awards, had a retrospective at MOMA in New York and made himself the star of Manifesta 3 with Vacancy, perhaps his finest film, about Brasilia. Earlier this year he held a show at Tim Taylor in London and at Liverpool’s Bluecoat gallery with his frequent collaborator Christoph Giradet; the latter is coming to London in the not too distant future.

One might say that Home Stories shows a filmmaker well-steeped in the poststructuralism of directors such as Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer; its feminist sympathies and its feel for the language of cinema put him in that generation. Although it also suggests a filmmaker who has come to the medium less as a theoretician and more as an enthusiast. In fact, Muller is self-taught, he started out in the German super-8 movement that was allied to the Punk and New Wave music scene. Since then, his stylistic and thematic diversity has made him very much a postmodernist filmmaker – if that term can have some descriptive, and not merely pejorative, meaning. He doesn’t seem interested in the mechanics of film language per se, at least not in the way structuralists like Michael Snow were preoccupied with the bare bones of its pans and boom shots.

Nor is he interested in returning cinema to some mythic point of origin in real-time footage, in the way some read Warhol. For the most part, Muller has been comfortable with clichés: his films of the 90s begin and end, even if they shatter into non-linear narratives and non-syncopated sound mid-way through. However, he has often processed his own film to scar the stock with scratches and flares in the manner of experimentalists like Brakhage. He has re-tinted found footage to over-saturate the old technicolour and has solarised the pictures to make his figures flash with erotic vitality. Yet his lexicon of formal devices are the vehicles for atmosphere as much as they are metaphor.

One filmmaker who has always been central for Muller is Bruce Conner, and in particular Conner’s 1959 film A Movie. It was a landmark in found-footage film making, and it inspired Muller’s enthusiasm for appropriating everything from Hollywood to home video and reels of discarded scientific or educational films. He seems to like his film more amateur than auteur, film that is less sophisticated in its story-telling, more cack-handed. When segued into passages from mainstream cinema, his finds can begin to look like a sort of sub-cinematic unconscious, a traumatised, thrift-store movie-making.

If Home Stories and The Memo Book open the door on Muller’s sexual and social imagination, Vacancy – and the whole centrality of found footage in his practice – opens the door on his historical imagination. Vacancy is a beautiful, sad thing, a collage of footage of Brasilia in the earliest days of its life, in that imperceptible moment before it deteriorated from young metropolis into something like ancient necropolis. The city is never envisioned whole, but only in trembling segments, as if through the end of a dark tunnel. It’s a hot wasteland of spaces, exquisitely planned, but somehow inconceivable; impossible to inhabit with the body as well as the mind. At the beginning of the film, when a young family stroll on to a plaza, they do so as if on to the stage of history: no real city could be portentous.

Towards the end, a balding, jowly man wanders up to a spiky surrealist biomorph, takes it in and strolls away, his arms dropping into his pockets: “The new man has not arrived so far,” the voice-over intones. Muller’s sense of history is a scrambling of past and future: a future imagined through the past’s projections of it; the past glimpsed through those same constructions. The present is nowhere.

Muller has begun a slight change of direction in recent years, and it’s possible that the filmmaker we see in galleries in Britain this year is one who is evolving fast. He undertook his first commission in 1999 for the Hitchcock show, Notorious, at MOMA in Oxford, while The Phoenix Tapes, made along with Christoph Giradet, seemed to take him towards new territory, even though it raided Hitchcock in a manner similar to the way Home Stories exploited the lush, fulsome melodramas of directors like Douglas Sirk. It looked hard at the extraneous detail of Hitchcock’s sets and showed them to be something more.

Since then, Muller has begun a more emphatic change of direction, embracing the gallery context with more interest. As he concedes, much of this has to do with the commercial opportunities available within the art world. In a sense, he has come in from the cold, since the earlier practices of avant-garde film-making have narrowed since it was brought into the academy in the ’70s and ’80s, while simultaneously, artists from a fine art background have begun to use film and video for their own ends. In some respects he has simply begun to investigate tangents leading off from his films, issuing stills as prints and making photographs from discarded film stock and old portraits, but he has also started to make looped videos. Where once he seemed conspicuous for his acceptance of the conventions of beginnings and endings, enjoying the passage from anticipation to denouement, now, in the simple act of joining beginning to end, all of cinema’s conventions are junked. He is thinking about gallery audiences, gallery environments and, one feels, gallery themes.

Where this will lead Muller is difficult to say. It seems ironic that he is apparently discovering the styles and techniques of the gallery when many artists are looking to pop videos, cinema, or the seductive texture of super-8, the very themes he began with. It’s an uncertain time. Muller’s latest film, Phantom, showed at Tim Taylor in London in June, and again it had that feel for cinematic suspense that formed Home Stories. Although, by solarising the print into a vivid polarity of reds and whites, Muller makes the characters weave between foreground and background: curtains part, windows dissolve and the surface becomes a glowing, flowing shimmer of movement. It’s video, surely, but it’s also, almost, abstract painting. Colour, space, figure and ground: the venerable old formalities.

This review was published by Untitled magazine in its Summer 2002 edition. Number 28, pages 50-53.

Main image: Der Pfeil, Matthias Muller