Heinz Emigholz
Encyclopedia
Heinz Emigholz is a filmmaker, actor, artist, writer and producer. He is a Professor for Experimental film
at Berlin University of the Arts
(since 1993) and at European Graduate School
in Saas-Fee
, Switzerland. He worked as an illustrator and a retoucher, and studied philosophy and literary studies in Hamburg. He founded the film company Pym Films in 1978. He has produced a comprehensive filmic and artistic oeuvre and has also done performance art and acted in other directors’ films (Cynthia Beatt, Silke Grossmann, Stefan Hayn, Birgit
and Wilhelm Hein, Ken Jacobs
, Sheila McLaughlin, Sandra Nettelbeck, Elfi Mikesch, Lior Shamriz
, Joseph Vilsmaier
, Klaus Wyborny a.o.).
, display "a complex interaction between abstract temporal compositions – or filmic movements, respectively – and selected urban and natural landscapes" (Emigholz) In Demon (1976/77), he began to examine words. The film explores the prose poem "Le Démon de l’Analogie" (The Demon of Analogy) by Stéphane Mallarmé
. "Just as previous films were cut so that fixed features of the landscape and their connections met with a score, in this film, there is one shot for each word." (Frieda Grafe) Emigholz included narrative and scenic elements in Normalsatz / Ordinary Sentence (1978–81) and his subsequent films. His visual composition and framing, which establishes a phenomenological relationship to space, is striking, as it ignores the conventional perpendicularity and the central perspective. "The visual space is always populated in the films rather than being empty space whose coordinates are fixed to categories borrowed from abstract geometry, such as the horizon and the vanishing point. Where there is a space, there is also a body that defines it, even if it be via its negative form, absence." (Ronald Balczuweit) This type of construction of space remains defining for his series Photography and beyond, a "collection of films that can be combined freely and that deal with products designed by humans – architecture, drawings, writings, sculpture" (Emigholz). The series was established in 1993 and drew on previous work from the 1970s and 1980s. The films of the subseries Architecture as Autobiography show the extant buildings by architects, civil engineers and designers such as Bruce Goff
, Adolf Loos
, Robert Maillart
, Rudolph Schindler
, Louis Sullivan
and others in chronological order.
About film Emigholz states: "As a technical medium, film projects the spaces of memory themselves rather than presenting them solely by means of a mental trick. The media of writing, drawing, photography, film, electronic imagery and computing have shifted the complex art of recollection into a readily-available array of technically -generated storage systems. The ancient art of the rhetorician is still present, albeit in rudimentary form, in the memorizing of text by actors and speakers.
in 1974, Emigholz began to work on Die Basis des Make-Up/The Basis of Make-Up, a series which grew to more than 600 drawings by 2008. The title goes back to the caption of a photo showing a skull in a makeup textbook from the 1930s. All the drawings were in black and white and were published as photographic prints in the format 54 x 64 cm. Like many of his films, they were developed from the artist’s notebooks which he uses to record sketches of his own texts and to paste various specimens of civilization garbage, sentences overheard on the street or on television, advertising, diagrams from military textbooks and much more. These bits and pieces were transformed in the drawings and films and were connected to one another in austere compositions, but their origins remained discernible. Narrative approaches emerge, yet they do not connect to a single narrative, but can still be combined freely. The "experience of the provisionality and relativity of all interpretations" (Hanne Loreck) is mirrored in this formal openness.
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
at Berlin University of the Arts
Berlin University of the Arts
The Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK is a public art school in Berlin, Germany, one of the four universities in the city...
(since 1993) and at European Graduate School
European Graduate School
The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
in Saas-Fee
Saas-Fee
Saas-Fee is the main village in the Saastal, or the Saas Valley, and is a municipality in the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland...
, Switzerland. He worked as an illustrator and a retoucher, and studied philosophy and literary studies in Hamburg. He founded the film company Pym Films in 1978. He has produced a comprehensive filmic and artistic oeuvre and has also done performance art and acted in other directors’ films (Cynthia Beatt, Silke Grossmann, Stefan Hayn, Birgit
Birgit Hein
Birgit Hein is a German film director, producer and screenwriter who has made experimental films with her husband Wilhelm Hein since the 1960s.-Biography:...
and Wilhelm Hein, Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs is an American experimental filmmaker. He is the director of Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son , which was admitted to the National Film Registry in 2007, and Star Spangled to Death , a nearly seven hour film consisting largely of found footage.He coined the term paracinema in the early 1970s,...
, Sheila McLaughlin, Sandra Nettelbeck, Elfi Mikesch, Lior Shamriz
Lior Shamriz
Lior Shamriz is a writer, producer, and film director. He currently resides in Berlin. A prolific filmmaker, churning out experimental shorts and two features, Lior Shamriz channels the trickster spirit of the 60's auteurs in his cinema of humorous/political deconstruction...
, Joseph Vilsmaier
Joseph Vilsmaier
Joseph Vilsmaier is a German film director.-Work:After attending a boarding school near Augsburg, he was trained as a technician to make film cameras and then spent nine years at a music conservatory. Following this he was a member of a jazz group...
, Klaus Wyborny a.o.).
Films
Emigholz’s first films, dating back to the early 1970s and the context of avant-garde and Experimental filmExperimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
, display "a complex interaction between abstract temporal compositions – or filmic movements, respectively – and selected urban and natural landscapes" (Emigholz) In Demon (1976/77), he began to examine words. The film explores the prose poem "Le Démon de l’Analogie" (The Demon of Analogy) by Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
. "Just as previous films were cut so that fixed features of the landscape and their connections met with a score, in this film, there is one shot for each word." (Frieda Grafe) Emigholz included narrative and scenic elements in Normalsatz / Ordinary Sentence (1978–81) and his subsequent films. His visual composition and framing, which establishes a phenomenological relationship to space, is striking, as it ignores the conventional perpendicularity and the central perspective. "The visual space is always populated in the films rather than being empty space whose coordinates are fixed to categories borrowed from abstract geometry, such as the horizon and the vanishing point. Where there is a space, there is also a body that defines it, even if it be via its negative form, absence." (Ronald Balczuweit) This type of construction of space remains defining for his series Photography and beyond, a "collection of films that can be combined freely and that deal with products designed by humans – architecture, drawings, writings, sculpture" (Emigholz). The series was established in 1993 and drew on previous work from the 1970s and 1980s. The films of the subseries Architecture as Autobiography show the extant buildings by architects, civil engineers and designers such as Bruce Goff
Bruce Goff
Bruce Alonzo Goff was an American architect distinguished by his organic, eclectic, and often flamboyant designs for houses and other buildings in Oklahoma and elsewhere.-Early years:...
, Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...
, Robert Maillart
Robert Maillart
Robert Maillart was a Swiss civil engineer who revolutionized the use of structural reinforced concrete with such designs as the three-hinged arch and the deck-stiffened arch for bridges, and the beamless floor slab and mushroom ceiling for industrial buildings...
, Rudolph Schindler
Rudolph Schindler
Rudolph Schindler may refer to:* Rudolph Schindler * Rudolph Schindler...
, Louis Sullivan
Louis Sullivan
Louis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...
and others in chronological order.
About film Emigholz states: "As a technical medium, film projects the spaces of memory themselves rather than presenting them solely by means of a mental trick. The media of writing, drawing, photography, film, electronic imagery and computing have shifted the complex art of recollection into a readily-available array of technically -generated storage systems. The ancient art of the rhetorician is still present, albeit in rudimentary form, in the memorizing of text by actors and speakers.
Art
In New YorkNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1974, Emigholz began to work on Die Basis des Make-Up/The Basis of Make-Up, a series which grew to more than 600 drawings by 2008. The title goes back to the caption of a photo showing a skull in a makeup textbook from the 1930s. All the drawings were in black and white and were published as photographic prints in the format 54 x 64 cm. Like many of his films, they were developed from the artist’s notebooks which he uses to record sketches of his own texts and to paste various specimens of civilization garbage, sentences overheard on the street or on television, advertising, diagrams from military textbooks and much more. These bits and pieces were transformed in the drawings and films and were connected to one another in austere compositions, but their origins remained discernible. Narrative approaches emerge, yet they do not connect to a single narrative, but can still be combined freely. The "experience of the provisionality and relativity of all interpretations" (Hanne Loreck) is mirrored in this formal openness.
Filmography
- A Series of Thoughts (Miscellanea V, VI, VII und IV), 1987-2011, HDV, color, 91 min., director, camera, editing
- Zwei Projekte von Frederick Kiesler (Two Projects by Frederick Kiesler) 2006-2009, HDV, color, 16 min., director, camera, editing
- Sense of Architecture (explores over 50 projects of contemporary Austrian architects), 2005-2009, HDV, color, 168 min., director, camera, editing
- Loos Ornamental (about Adolf LoosAdolf LoosAdolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...
), 2008, 35 mm, color, 72 min., director, camera, editing - Schindler's Houses (about the American work of Rudolph Schindler), 2006–2007, 35 mm, color, 99 min., co-producer, editing, director, script, camera
- Miscellanea III, 1997–2005, 35 mm, color, 22 min., director, editing, camera
- The Basis of Make-Up III, 1996–2005, 35 mm, color, 26 min., director, camera, editing, drawings
- D’Annunzios Cave (a superb film about Gabriele d'AnnunzioGabriele D'AnnunzioGabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...
and his pretentious villa), 2002–2005, DigiBeta, color, 52 min., director, editing - Goff in the Desert (explores 62 buildings by architect Bruce GoffBruce GoffBruce Alonzo Goff was an American architect distinguished by his organic, eclectic, and often flamboyant designs for houses and other buildings in Oklahoma and elsewhere.-Early years:...
), 2002-2003, 35 mm, color, 110 min., director, camera, editing - Maillart's Bridges (explores the works of the legendary bridge builder Robert MaillartRobert MaillartRobert Maillart was a Swiss civil engineer who revolutionized the use of structural reinforced concrete with such designs as the three-hinged arch and the deck-stiffened arch for bridges, and the beamless floor slab and mushroom ceiling for industrial buildings...
), 1995-1999, 35 mm, color, 24 min., director, camera, editing - Sullivan's Banks (about Louis SullivanLouis SullivanLouis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...
's buildings for banks), 1993-1999, 35 mm, color, 38 min., director, camera, editing - mammamia, 1997/98, by Sandra Nettelbeck, actor
- Schlafes Bruder, 1994/95,by Joseph VilsmaierJoseph VilsmaierJoseph Vilsmaier is a German film director.-Work:After attending a boarding school near Augsburg, he was trained as a technician to make film cameras and then spent nine years at a music conservatory. Following this he was a member of a jazz group...
, actor - Stalingrad, 1991/92, by Joseph VilsmaierJoseph VilsmaierJoseph Vilsmaier is a German film director.-Work:After attending a boarding school near Augsburg, he was trained as a technician to make film cameras and then spent nine years at a music conservatory. Following this he was a member of a jazz group...
, actor - The Holy Bunch, 1986–1990, 35 mm, black and white and color, 89 min., director, script, camera
- Die Wiese der Sachen, 1974–1987, 16 mm, black and white and color, 88 min., director, script, camera, editing, lighting, actor
- Home Movies 1971 - 1981, 1985, actor
- The Basis of Make-Up, 1979–1984, 16 mm, black and white and color, 84 min., director, script, camera, editing
- The Basis of Make-Up I, 1974–1983, 35 mm, color, no sound, 30 min., director, script, drawings, note books, camera, editing
- Execution. A Study of Mary, 1979, narrator
- Normalsatz, 1978–1981, 16 mm, black and white and color, 105 min., director, camera, editing, script, actor
- Bartleby, 1976, actor
- Demon. The Translation of "The Demon of Analogy" by Stéphane MallarméStéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, 1976/77, 16 mm, black and white and color, 30 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production - Der Ort der Handlung, 1976/1977, actor
- Hotel, 1975/76, 16 mm, black and white, 27 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production
- Stuhl, 1974/75, director, producer, camera, editing, script
- Tide, 1974, 16 mm, black and white, no sound, 33 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production
- Arrowplane, 1973/74, 16 mm, color, no sound, 24 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production
- Schenec-Tady III, 1972–1975, 16 mm black and white, no sound, 20 min., director, conceptual design, composition, camera, editing, production
- Schenec-Tady II, 1973, 16 mm, color, no sound, 18 Min., director, conceptual design, composition, camera, editing, production
- Schenec-Tady I, 1972/73, 16 mm, black and white, no sound, 27 min., director, conceptual design, composition, camera, editing, production
- Morningglory-Fragments, 1971, director, camera, editing, producer, script
External links
- Heinz Emigholz' official Website
- Heinz Emigholz Faculty Page at European Graduate SchoolEuropean Graduate SchoolThe European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
. (Biography, bibliography and video lectures) - Heinz Emigholz - Catalogue of the German national library
- Article in Der Standard
- Viennale-Site with pictures and reviews
- bilingual Website »Goff in the desert«
- Website »D’Annunzio’s CAVE «
- Website »Schindlers Häuser«
- Website »Loos Ornamental«