GME Distributes New Collection of Films by Siegfried A. Fruhauf
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Filmmaker Siegfried A. Fruhauf. Source: Flickr.
In collaboration with INDEX Edition, a joint venture of the Vienna-based Sixpackfilm and Medienwerkstatt established for the publication of Austrian films and video art, GME is proud to distribute a new collection of 14 films by Siegfried A. Fruhauf, spanning 1998 to 2010, titled SIEGFRIED A. FRUHAUF: EXPOSED. This publication is currently available to the North American university market as a DVD and DSL/DVD bundle.
As noted by film critic Stefan Grissemann, "Fruhauf's films cannot be denied a certain hypnotic effect. In them, material battles, mirroring effects, and illusions of perception take place, audio tracks and image interference signals rage; all the structural experiments that the filmmaker dares do not lead to a rigidity in the purely theoretical. Fruhauf's cinema is highly atmospheric and decidedly non-academic. On the contrary, it is radically undogmatic, oscillating between abstraction and objectivity, between punk and classicism."
The titles included in this release are: LA SORTIE (1998, ELEVATION RUSH (1999), BLOW-UP (2000), EXPOSED (2001), REALTIME (2002), STRUCTURAL FILM WASTE. DISSOLUTION 1 (2003), MIRROR MECHANICS (2005), GROUND CONTROL (2008), NIGHT SWEAT (2008), PALMES D'OR (2009), and TRANQUILITY (2010). Included as bonus titles are FRONTAL (2002), PHANTOM RIDE (2004), and MOZART DISSOLUTION (2006).
Many of these films convey Fruhauf's fascination with the filmic medium. In LA SORTIE, Fruhauf dialogues with one of the first films in cinema history, LA SORTIE DES OUVRIERS DE L'USINE, made by the Lumières, which shows workers leaving a factory. Instead of showing workers leaving, however, Fruhauf aligns the mechanical aspects of filmmaking to the inherently (often grueling) mechanical aspects of assembly line work. Similarly, in BLOW-UP, Fruhauf makes footage of a man blowing air into a female doll via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation analagous to the cinematic copying process of "blowing-up" a smaller image to a larger film strip (e.g. 16mm to 35mm).
The namesake of this collection also deals with filmic elements and double meanings. EXPOSED "takes a short feature film scene [in which] a man watches a dancing woman through the keyhole, as source material, which is only revealed to the viewer in fragments. By allowing the perforation of a film strip to move in front of the projector like a moving screen, Fruhauf 're-exposes' the scene. The audience's view of the scenario remains selective. While the movable template only allows us to see small parts of the image field, the 'Peeping Tom' motif of the narrative repeats itself in our own perception."
Perhaps the main thrust of MIRROR MECHANICS captures Fruhauf's engagement with the medium best: "The film as a mirror and subsequently the phenomenon of identification, which is particularly inherent in feature films, is condensed into a kind of essence of what film can be."
A 20-page English-German bilingual brochure accompanies the DVD version of this release. GME is also proud to distribute Fruhauf's 2008 film NIGHT SWEAT (which is included in this collection) in the compilation VISIONARY: CONTEMPORARY SHORT DOCUMENTARIES AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM AUSTRIA. This edition is available as both a DVD and a DSL/DVD bundle.
For more information about institutional acquisition of this title, please visit our ordering page. For additional DSL, DVD, and Blu-Ray offerings by Austrian filmmakers from GME, please visit our Austrian Avant-Garde Film and Video page.