Friedl vom Gröller - titles -SILENCE ON THE SCREEN

SILENCE ON THE SCREEN

a selection of 19 films by Friedl vom Gröller

MA PEAU PRÉCIEUSE (MY PRECIOUS SKIN)

(Austria, 2013, 3 Minutes)

Normally they are hyper-perfect – the images and worlds in which anti-aging products appear. Not a single speck of grain is allowed to mar the quality of the pictures, and the faces of the women advertising the products are usually surprisingly smooth. In contrast, the first grainy images of MY PRECIOUS SKIN allow us to anticipate that we have landed somewhere entirely different. (No dialogue.)

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

(Austria, 2013, 2 Minutes)

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT is a portrait of a group of women. They make their appearance in a flare of light – there are seven. The camera records them in medium close-up, as torsos from the waist up, seen through a fence. They stand quietly, close together, looking into the camera. They do not relate to one another but solely to the camera. (No dialogue.)

66, RUE STEPHENSON

(Austria, 2013, 2:30 Minutes)

Produced at the junction of two millennia, the Like a dark screen stencil, a young woman dances in front of an open window. Although the film is silent, the rhythm of the music to which she dances can be imagined through her movements, often ecstatic. Bidding farewell through graceful movements, the dancer´s place at the window gives way to a view of an urban cityscape. (No dialogue.)

POETRY FOR SALE

(Austria, 2012, 4 Minutes)

In her short film, Friedl vom Gröller impressively contrasts the intimacy of the act of writing and the publicity of its presentation. The difficulty of the undertaking, selling poems in the subway, shows the difficulty of material survival for poets. The double breaking of the rules on which the film is based—both selling and filming are forbidden in the subway—exposes both poetry and filming as criminal acts, thus revealing the true status of poets and filmmakers. (Language: German and English)

THE PARIS POETRY CIRCLE

(Austria, 2013, 8 Minutes)

This film was made in honor of the "Paris Poetry Circle". For the past 20 years it meets every Wednesday in the treatment room of the psychoanalyst Habans Nagpal, founder of the "Paris Poetry Circle". One sees filmed portraits of participants resembling photographs, registers the filmmaker’s longing and her unrestrained interest in the human face. (Language: German and English)

IM WIENER PRATER

(Austria, 2013, 2 Minutes)

Evident here are both a conscious reference to Viennese Actionism and the counterpart to one of vom Gröller´s early films, BOSTON STEAMER (2009). Yet rather than the close-ups of anatomical details and the associated sexualization, what is actually `unsettling´ about IM WIENER PRATER is the gaze forced upon the viewer: this woman looks at us, questioning and self-confidently—now that´s pure cinema of attraction. (No dialogue.) 

DAS NEUE KOSTÜM (THE NEW SUIT)

(Austria, 2013, 2 Minutes)

If clothes indeed make the man, one might well be excited at the prospect of a new suit. For a new outfit not only alters outward appearance but also has invisible consequences. Snapshots function as a temporal distillation of vom Gröller’s metamorphosis, accompanied by close-ups of her smoking audience – until the film camera again abruptly resumes its job and the dressmaker completes her work with the perfect placement of the collar. (No dialogue.)  

WARUM ES SICH ZU LEBEN LOHNT (WHY LIFE IS WORTH LIVING)

(Austria, 2013, 2 Minutes)

Vom Gröller is seated in a dentist’s chair. She is undergoing a treatment that involves several phases and is composed in an escalating rhythm. She is placed under examination, she receives anesthesia, and teeth are pulled. In-camera editing slows down and repeats operations that are thereby intensified, like in a dream or ritual. WHY LIFE IS WORTH LIVING is a question and an answer at one and the same time: Why is it really worth it? Why do we suffer pain? Perhaps to watch and to see, even with our eyes closed. (No dialogue.)   

EMPÖRT EUCH! (TIME FOR OUTRAGE!)

(Austria, 2014, 3 Minutes)

TIME FOR OUTRAGE! is the title of Stephane Hessel’s pamphlet on exploitation. An elegant, iridescent and hungry boa represents the natural law of capitalism which continuously influences us and our surroundings. Any other point of view will be listened to thankfully. (No dialogue.)   

RUHE AUF DER LEINWAND (SILENCE ON THE SCREEN)

(Austria, 2014, 1:30 Minutes)

A museum visitor spends an average of eleven seconds in front of an artwork. Friedl vom Gröller turns the gaze to a painted portrait for one minute and thirty seconds. Her portrait of a portrait in the surroundings of its reception is an invocation for contemplation as well as concentration—an appeal to one’s own pictorial competence. (No dialogue.)

27.12.2013 ST. LOUIS SENEGAL

(Austria, 2014, 3 Minutes)

St. Louis, is a historically important northern lagoon city on the Delta of the Senegal River. In the superimposition of the movements, an imminent, proud collectivity shines through, which the film distances itself from only slightly. Relations are kept in suspense, something ghostly is evoked. (No dialogue.)

ADAMA DIOUF

(Austria, 2014, 3 Minutes)

Adama Diouf is an acquaintance, a neighbor, and a scholar, “… [A] covert mayor of Ziguinchor in southern Senegal.” The film is a portrait of Diouf and the places and people he interacts with. “[I]t is a profound act, to show people in movement and one cannot err when doing so,” said the Sengalese filmmaker Filmemacher Djibril Diop Mambéty. (No dialogue.)

MASCHILE - ROMA

(Austria/Italy, 2015, 3 Minutes)

Friedl vom Gröller has granted the portrait film a special position in her cinematic work, opening up a field that places the attention of reception on feelings, societal issues, human relations, and social constructions. The film shows four men, then three times three different men, one after the other, with an interest in approaching someone and involving them in a film, in order to be able to look at them (longer). (No dialogue.)

IN ROME

(Austria/Italy, 2015, 3 Minutes)

Although this film does not follow the genre of the city portrait in any way whatsoever, it nonetheless presents a documentation of the filmmaker´s sojourn in Rome. The shots installed in the camera fluctuate between structure and human figure- a pan of the stonework combined with the (body)fragments; shoulder, belt buckle, face, ear or (wrinkled) neck evokes both a sense of escape and retreat into the inner universe, evoking the relationship between inner and urban architectures. (No dialogue.)

TICINO

(Austria/Italy, 2017, 3 Minutes)

Two children on the brink of puberty, on the Italian shore of the river Ticino: frontal close-ups of their faces and fluid sculptures that reflect the river´s vacillating course. In grainy black-and-white, Friedl vom Gröller captures the visual impact of people, objects, and landscapes; the beauty of the movement of bodies and light. Ephemeral moments in which the flow of time becomes manifest. (No dialogue.)

ATELIER D´EXPRESSION

(Austria/Senegal, 2016, 20 Minutes)

Friedl vom Gröller met seven artists at the Atelier d’ Expression - a workshop space on the grounds of the psychiatric department of the clinic in Fann near Dakar. The filmmaker portrayed them individually with their works, in many cases based on their own instructions, and frequently stepped back, leaving the portrayed individuals alone with the film camera. (No dialogue.)

WINTER IN PARIS

(Austria, 2018, 3 Minutes)

Friedl vom Gröller stages the gruesome-erotic allegory of death and the maiden as worldly and highly personal: an encounter driven by mutual desire – with herself in the end playing the female role as the impishly mischievous woman gazing into the camera. WINTER IN PARIS realizes a gaze free of restrictive circumspection, an emancipated "open" looking. (No dialogue.)