Peter Tscherkassky A Poet of Images – The work of Matthias Müller Prologue: Found Footage Film In the mid 1980s there was a tendency in cinema towards artistic elaboration using material come across by chance, which came to be known internationally as "found footage film." The use and adaptation of others’ footage actually arose before avant-garde cinema. There were already films made entirely of stock footage in 1931, such as English filmmaker Adrian Brunel’s Crossing the Great Sagrada and L’histoire du Tombeau inconnu by Henri Storck of Belgium. Also in the 1930s, New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye began making his "hand-made" films using found footage; in 1936, American Joseph Cornell was making the first of his masterpieces in the genre, Rose Hobart. His compatriot Bruce Conner made practically all of his films using found material, starting with A Movie (1958). Key films of the New American Cinema were created using stock footage, such as Ken Jacob’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), as well as classics of structuralist cinema like Eureka (1972-79) by Ernie Gehr. Yet found footage has never enjoyed as comparably important a position in cinema as it has in the past fifteen years, when it became a genre in and of itself. Today, the aesthetics of found footage contribute definitively to the profile of contemporary avant-garde cinema.[1] This phenomenon can be explained in different ways. The avant-garde is often considered iconoclastic while found footage, on the contrary, can seem like a path towards restoration, a development that looks to the past. However, so-called iconoclastic filmmaking is not in opposition to the picture as much as it is against the yielding to a representationally realistic cinema. The definition of film as a "window to the world," as it was articulated in the 1950s by the most influential theorist of realistic cinema, André Bazin, constitutes the perfect antithesis of avant-garde theory. This hypothetical "transparent window" deprives the cinematographic image of its own identity, and it is this identity that is at the core of the avant-garde approach; the avant-garde’s apparent iconoclast thinking lies more in the investigation of the actual image, whose reality must be created within that image. Avant-garde filmmakers underline the artificial qualities of the medium in their work, in contrast to the apparently "natural" relationship between film and reality. Thus, they shatter the corresponding codes between the two, codes that commercial cinema uses invariably. This critical analogy, from the artist’s point of view, has been one of the cornerstones of post-WWII avant-garde filmmaking. The avant-garde’s contrariety to the cinema industry was its principal characteristic until the artistic crisis of the 1970s, when the medium seemed to have become overly academically rigid. But that crisis was nothing more than the antecedent to the mutation of aesthetic paradigms subsequently introduced to this artistic universe by video. Up until that point, the most advanced technology was cinematography. But this privilege disappeared in the early 1980s, with the spread of the electronic arts. Today, the exploration of the endless possibilities of computer-generated pictures has borne a new kind of medium, whose creative potential we are only now beginning to imagine, in both the artistic and commercial realms. Found footage was the response of a new generation of avant-garde filmmakers, from a technological standpoint, to the overwhelming presence of electronic imagery: a conscious return to the artistic specificity of the medium’s historical expression. What that means is that found footage maintains its loyalty to elaborating the particularities of the chosen medium. The focus of its attention is not the deceptiveness of representational cinema; rather, the same content of the collected pictures is used as a means of escape from the contrariety. Structuralist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s had eliminated all apparent naturalism from film’s sensory experience, demonstrating the mechanisms of the construction behind the meaning in film all too obviously. So much so that a discussion today about the false nature of film would seem as antiquated as a discussion condemning authoritarian methods of rearing children. In the meantime, it became possible to shed dogmatic positions, and instead play between the lines, with the manifest and latent meanings of found images. Matthias Müller’s first films The films of 39-year-old Matthias Müller play a central role in the international panorama of found footage. Müller’s work is a constant presence at festivals: it has won over forty awards, and merited numerous conferences and the like, all part of the international recognition of the German filmmaker. Müller’s first works were made in the beginning of the 1980s. In those years, the Super-8 format was enormously popular. Quite often Super-8 films had an extremely fast cutting, accompanied by punk music: a celebration of the "no future" generation’s sense of existence. The themes of these films seemed strongly conditioned by the manageability of the equipment and low production costs rather than by the preceding works of the avant-garde. This certainly offered an ample sense of déjà vu to the more knowledgeable viewers, yet these films could also claim authenticity in their celebrations, done very much in the style of the times. At this point, Müller’s films, also shot in Super-8, already clearly distinguished themselves from that environment. The first films, in particular Continental Breakfast (1985), Final Cut (1986) and Epilog (1987, in collaboration with Christiane Heuwinkel), depict a fascinating mix of images similar to the iconoclasm of the avant-garde as well as individual themes. The latter would be expanded on even more elaborately in his following productions. Seen again today, these films disclose a hesitant and experimental attitude, a search for a personal, figurative language within the familiar expressive forms of the post-war avant-garde. With a knowledge of Super-8’s qualities, Müller succeeds in turning the medium’s apparent weaknesses into creative expressions: the film’s modest chromatic surface is sublimated in luminous monochromatic sequences (above all in bright red, orange, and blue); the granularity of the film is pushed to the limits of abstraction using rear-screen projection and refilming. Elements of found footage are represented here by film start leaders and mixing marks and laboratory notes (which were already icons dearly held by the classical avant-garde), documentary and home movie clips, and other images of that kind. In these works, a strongly characterised, formal approach is already established. Müller experiments using the split screen, juxtaposing figurative shots, multiplying the lights and speeding up the motion – some of which were techniques he was to use later in elaborating his images. All of this flows almost always in dreamlike ways, though latent threats in his work were impending. Müller’s debt to atmospheric and melodramatic cinema, to which Home Stories (1990) can be seen as an enormous monument, can already be found in his earlier works, which seem enigmatic upon first glance. What is also striking about these films is the perfectly harmonious musical accompaniment created by composer Dirk Schaefer. More than any other filmmaker of his generation, Müller recognised the creative potential of the soundtrack. Despite the relatively rudimentary sound technology of Super-8, which allows for only simple manoeuvring, from the beginning he insisted on complex and precise music for his films. Another element certainly favourable to their collaboration was the fact that Dirk Schaefer uses, according to the canons of musique concrète, sounds that are "found" in various different ways. The Breakthrough: Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book There is a work that marks the passage from the aesthetics of Müller’s early films to a mature masterpiece. It is a half-hour film called Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book. The success of this film, made in 1989 as an extreme farewell to a friend who died of Aids, was the basis for Müller’s world-wide success. Here the director elaborates his own expressiveness under the existential pressure brought on by death and by his own fear of having been infected with the Hiv virus. Here he establishes his own place in the world of cinema, planting two border stakes: autobiographic reflection and the history of cinema, especially Hollywood’s history. The two elements are articulated in a highly personal figurative language. But what are they made up of? Simplifying a bit, the film can be described as follows. In the beginning, a young man writes a goodbye letter, the text of which is read off-camera, and ties a packet of old letters together with twine. The opening credits are followed by a series of pictures of a catastrophic landslide. Elegiac music brings out another sequence in which a young man (the lost friend of the letter) seems to be at the very same place, observing the scene through shimmering glasses. Finally, found footage of a musical (two men dancing, a Hollywood star singing) coming from a television screen connotes memories of happy times. What follows is a trespassing into the territory of intensive medicine: medical equipment, an IV hung from its support, measuring devices, found footage of an operation, the feet of a corpse. Finally, the panic-stricken flight of a hospital visitor: a dash through the city, the return to his apartment, in search for shelter in sleep. Then the breaking of waves along a coastline spliced alongside the picture of a sheet covering a body. A dreamlike scene unfolds in a botanical garden, where the monochromatic brown of the first part of the film subtly changes to bright red. Sounds of chirping over pictures of flamingos. Close-ups of leaves and flowers superimposed as transparencies over pictures of male pubic hair, of an erect penis, of an ear. All are part of a daydream full of eroticism and nostalgia. Müller also uses scenes from Fritz Lang’s classic Die Nibelungen (the first part, Siegfrieds Tod, of 1923), including Siegfried bathing in the dragon’s blood, with the fatal leaf that falls on his shoulders and causes his death. The reawakening of the main character immediately brings forth the rest of the world: beginning with a glance out the basement window, reality announces itself insistently through the sounds of the city. The filmmaker returns to the light, to the open, looking towards the sun over an enclosing net, into the beyond. An end that actually marks a new beginning in the world. The film is shot entirely in Super-8 and developed by Müller. During the developing stage, intentional damage was caused to the film, such as stains, overexposures, and solarisation effects. Almost all of the shots were taken with a hand-held camera. The film’s editing is very fluid: when one refers of the "flow of images," it is very similar to what has been achieved in this film. The narrative technique For the first time a central element in Müller’s work is distinguished in this film, in respect to both the "traditional" language of the avant-garde, and his earlier works: Müller stages a story, thus opposing all the anti-narrative conventions of avant-garde cinema. In many ways, his expressiveness is that of a classical director. Nevertheless, the narrative structure of Müller’s films is clearly different from that of "normal" cinema. The fundamental characteristic of conventional film narration is the horizontally chronological structure: the story is normally developed following in a linear manner, as in a novel; its unfolding follows an outline of cause and effect. To use literature as an example, we can say that its extreme opposite is poetry. In describing this contrast, linguistics offers us the terms "paradigm" and "syntagma." Every form of communication is subject to certain rules, which determine the choice of specific signs, as well as the connection of these selected signs according to the syntagmatic rules. The system can be represented by a Cartesian diagram composed of a horizontal and a vertical axis, the former indicating the choice of meanings and the latter indicating their mutual alignment. In a sentence like "the visitor flees from the hospital", the word "visitor" could be substituted along the vertical axle – of paradigm – with the word "guest." In the same way, "escapes" could be used in place of "flees," and so forth. That means that the chosen elements of this axis constitute a source of similar elements. In turn, the relative norms of the horizontal axis – of syntagma – ensure that the sentence cannot be written "flees hospital visitor the from the." We can say that this second axis measures the "correct" sequence of the chosen elements. The horizontal axis appears prominently in daily language and in conventional narration. Contrarily, in poetry the author’s attention is turned primarily to the vertical axis. "In other words, poetry does not concern itself as much with grammatical norms as with the ceaseless search of the actual patrimony of words"[2]. Applied to Müller’s films, this means that the filmmaker’s work represents stories recognized as such, but within those stories there predominates a poetic principle. Müller aims for the paradigmatic representation of elements, which are then lined up like loosely threaded beads. His scripts focus on moments designed to capture the synthetic expression of a specific feeling. These moments generally acquire depth, to become impressions like those expressed by poetry; they are condensed feelings, glimpses of a state of mind. One of the techniques essential to Müller after having achieved this goal consists of repeating similar themes, which are superimposed, layered and blended with one another. The flow of time is replaced by the simultaneity of happenings that gives depth to the images, from which springs forth the desired ambience. The aforementioned flight from the hospital is not the result of a conventional (horizontal) structure, with exiting the building, crossing the road and entering the house. Instead, numerous frames are superimposed of the feet of the passers-by and pictures of roads taken while fleeing, repeated with slight variations. Running up the stairs is filmed from ten or fifteen different angles; these tangled images produce a dreamlike effect, a slowing down, a repetition as heavy as Sisyphus’ boulder, until the character finally arrives at the apartment door. Once home, he washes his face, and even this simple gesture is repeated several times until it is condensed into an almost ritually cathartic image. Every time that a film is seen as following conventional rules – rules that are familiar to all audiences – in the film’s structure, the story seems to narrate itself, while the narrator – the filmmaker – disappears behind the scenes. At this point the viewer can occupy the space that has been freed (by the author’s disappearance) by "primary identification". This is a pleasurable and regressive act, not unlike omnipotent childhood fantasies, which allows the viewer to believe he or she is being represented in the actual narrative (children do not distinguish between themselves and the world; their perspective creates the world)[3]. Contrarily, within a poetic (cinematographic) discourse where the rules of composure are invented and charged with layers of additional meaning, the filmmaker is recognisable as the narrating subject, whose images make the viewer part of the creative process. That means that Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book tells a story in which it is understood that the filmmaker will be constantly present, as should ideally happen in every avant-garde film. From this point on, one notices in Müller’s work a tendency to condense and rarefy narrated stories. Condensation and distancing are defined in linguistics by the terms metaphor and metonymy. Both terms refer to the substitution of one word for another, with the method of substitution determining the rhetorical paradigm. In the case of metaphor there is a similarity between the chosen expression and the designated object; in metonymy there is instead a proximity that can be spatial, temporal, or logical. Metonymy can be defined as the use of a part to represent the whole; an example of this in cinema is the close-up. Thus, in Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book the hospital is never seen in its entirety, but suggested by the pictures of instruments and machines found in an intensive care unit. The space is evoked through the metonymy of the machines, while at the same time something is being said about the space, and about the alienation that the human body experiences because of the medical machinery. In Müller’s work, stock film is used in the process of condensation relevant to metaphor. An example is the sequence in which Siegfried bathes in the dragon’s blood, which should have rendered him invulnerable. Here the leaf that falls on the hero’s shoulders creates a metaphor of vulnerability, of the death of the loved one. Metaphor and metonymy can be found in almost every film. What is characteristic of Müller, however, is the effort to make them the principal narrative tools. By these means, Müller distances himself from any kind of "realistic" narrative to construct his own original, poetic expressions. In fear’s embrace: Home Stories >Compared to the intensity and impetus of Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book, Müller’s next film, Home Stories, almost has the effect of a friendly parody. In this film, the filmmaker connects another sequence of grand Hollywood drama with six minutes of an authentic saraband of terror. In the beginning, Dirk Schaefer’s soundtrack expresses an undisturbed serenity, but all that changes quickly. We see women who are trembling in their beds, prey to anguish, misfortune, desperation. Suddenly, something happens: one woman after another jumps out of her bed, straining her ears anxiously to the sounds outside the door. They turn on the lights, then turn them off, then on and off again, over and over: they would like to drive away the darkness while simultaneously hiding in it. The threat remains invisible, but present. Finally, they run, panic-stricken, through empty hallways that lead into the dark of night… Müller learned to accept the narrated story as a place of strong emotions, a kind of condenser of feelings despite, or rather against, his own stereotypes. This rigid codification of emotional expression is what allows found footage to evoke such intensely specific feelings. With the connection of pre-chosen sequences, Müller recreates even more explicitly that which he described in Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book: the transformation of a linear, syntagmatic development in a world of purified feelings that find their expression in paradigmatic elements and are related to each other through their mutual similarities. The process of condensation here gives life to a grandiose poem of terror. In the embrace of the senses: Sleepy Haven After terror, it’s pleasure’s turn. Sleepy Haven is a cinematic ode to homosexuality. Again, Müller boldly uses Hollywood stock footage; this time the filmmaker returns to film history using two avant-garde classics, to which he acknowledges his debt. The first is Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, one of the first films of the American avant-garde. Anger – a seventeen-year-old eccentric irreversibly marked by Hollywood, which he would later depict rather impetuously in his book "Hollywood Babylon" – created a milestone in gay avant-garde cinema in 1947 in just one week, taking advantage of his parents’ house when they were out of town. Fireworks is a flash of immediate genius in a teenager, a sadomasochistic fantasy of gay sexuality and cruelty among a group of sailors that sadistically live out their erotic desires. Müller follows Anger’s footsteps explicitly: Sleepy Haven is an erotic daydream of a tropical evening that goes down in the form of an image; a cocktail in which the original and found footage are meshed together as if in a sexual act. Nevertheless, even here the "shaker" in which the film was developed has left evident traces. The sailors are even more resplendent due to solarisation, and their naked bodies, tattooed by chemical agents, acquire an aura of strong physical attraction. Müller slowly transforms his objective metaphors into metaphors of love. Giant boats are shown at the beginning of the film, anchored at port. Continuous openings and closures of the camera lens give the screen a sense of heavy breathing, as it lifts open and then closes again; the circular movements are reminiscent of the body’s openings. The anchor plunging into the water gives a glimpse of that evening’s plans on land. The metaphors are allusive: the boat’s ropes are tied around the phallic form of the bollards; a strip of leather on naked skin is revealed only in the second shot as an accordion strap. The colour blue that dominates the shots transmits an ambivalent mixture of distance and attraction, later actualised in the sadomasochistic scenes. Along with Fireworks, one can also glean in this film an homage to another classic: Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, one of the first representations of explicit onscreen homosexuality, made in 1950. Set in a prison, the film shows two prisoners communicating by blowing cigarette smoke into each other’s mouths through a hole in the wall. As a metaphor for orgasm, Müller uses the steam blown from the ship’s smokestack, spliced together with the montage that pays homage to Genet – cigarette smoke escaping from the open and lascivious lips of a sailor, together with a shot of the port immersed in sleep. A private home movie: Alpsee After Sternenschauer (1994), a kind of Sleepy Haven in miniature, Müller turns decidedly towards directing. He shoots the fifteen-minute short Alpsee also in 1994, moving around the set as if he were in his natural environment. All the ingredients of traditional cinema are present: actors, a cameraman, a sound technician, costumes, make-up, set pieces. The theme of the film is growing up: Müller places the main character, a ten-year-old boy, and his mother in a perfect recreation of the early 1960s. This dance of images opens with clips of a home movie shot by the director’s father. What follows is a series of short sequences and single shots, which are condensed in the remake of Müller’s own childhood: a wedding dress, with the seductive rustle of its cloth; the sound of wedding bells; the parents’ separation early on, which is shown metaphorically by reverse projecting found footage of rings that are removed from fingers. A dark blue curtain through which a boy enters a stage and the world: a metaphor of birth, superimposed over the blue of his mother’s skirt in a picture of domesticity. Müller presents no total view of this house; what dominates instead are metonymic compositions, still lives that could have been taken from a museum of household items from the 1950s and 1960s, painfully disposed of in perfect conditio; and found footage of rudimentary turntables, which reconstructs and heralds high domestic technology of the future. Details are shown of the mother sewing, ironing, doing laundry, cooking, slicing bread, opening jars, cleaning. She is never seen in full, just in extreme close-ups of parts of her body. There is a part for everything. The world is revealed to the boy in its details. We see him rummaging through drawers that his mother then closes with care, as she does with the doors and windows, as if she wants to protect her son from the outside world. Images are shown of heart surgery, with the caption "What you are now seeing is the human heart." What clearer reference is needed as to the autobiographic nature of the film? External shots show rows of 1960s houses as fortresses of a kind of Biedermeier domesticity (in the end they are subtle reference to the Nazi period); then cold and modern metropolitan architecture, also presented in extreme close-up. The outside world is found in the imagination of the boy, as in an illustrated volume on redwood trees (certainly a small homage to the Hitchcock of Vertigo). The world of cinema exists for the boy in afternoon television programmes, in Lassie and in Timmy. This is where the discovery of his own feelings happens – emotional socialisation takes place on television (a characteristic typical of an entire generation of today’s found footage filmmakers). The soundtrack accompanying images of clouds announces the coming of a storm, of bad luck. The mother pours milk in a glass. From frame to frame the glass becomes larger, but it still cannot contain the milk, which spills out and flows over the edge of the table, onto the floor, down the stairs, threatening to wash away the house. The obsession with cleanliness and the tidy and disturbing guise of the surrounding environment are about to explode. In the end, the child watches the broken pitcher, a micro-catastrophe whose real dimensions he does not know how to grasp, and tries to glue back together that which cannot be put back together. The only verbal communication is that of soundtracks of stock material: "Be a good boy and go to bed. Good night". The same is true of physical contact: Müller inserts, one after another, ten shots of mothers embracing children. Mother’s Day flowers are no help either: the mother disappears behind a curtain, which is now blood red. The father, however, remains absent. Only his home movies continue to serve as the framework of Alpsee. Even the last scene is seen from his perspective, through the lens of an 8mm camera: pictures of the mother bathing in a mountain lake. The images that make up Alpsee are often divided by fade-outs and several seconds of black. This editing technique underlines the fact that the story is made up exclusively of symbolic imagery. Not a trace of fat is seen on the narrative skeleton. The images, firmly condensed and focused on the most important elements, serve as metaphors of the most defining moments of childhood. Even Dirk Schaefer’s spartan soundtrack consists of barely five notes. It is impossible not to notice the different approaches in this film and Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book. If in the latter what dominates is the physical manipulation of the pictures, Alpsee’s splendour lies in the aseptic distance created in perfectly lit shots, artistically rich in their use of colour. Yet their differences should not deceive: both films are exemplary models of the metaphorical and metonymic approach that Müller skilfully and knowingly develops. A re-encounter with death: Pensaõ Globo Continuing this theme, Müller creates a fifteen-minute short, Pensaõ Globo, which is closer to actual poetry than any of this other films. The film’s content can be summarized in just one sentence: a terminally ill man comes to Lisbon, where he passes the time waiting for death in the Globe Inn or walking the streets of the city. The initial scenes are of a chambermaid preparing the room, while the man gets off the train and makes his way to the inn. He signs in at the reception desk; goes up to the room; he sits or lies on his bed, thinking; he watches television, he goes down to the street; he roams around the city; he returns to his room. His death is not shown, all that we see is the chambermaid taking away the sheets. The End. The film presents one visually dominant theme, the constant superimpositions, or double exposure effect, of what is being shown. The man seems to be accompanying himself as a ghost, the world escapes him continually, things are no longer fixed in their proper places; nothing remains still. The shots of the man in the hotel are taken from two slightly different positions but from the same distance, the lighting is intensified and is slightly distorted in time and space. The external shots, however, are taken from two markedly different perspectives. This principle can be read as a reference to the history of cinema: in many Hollywood films, the characters’ deaths have been represented by showing their souls leaving their bodies but maintaining the same physical aspects, using a technique that has been employed innumerable times, in photography even before cinema. But this is actually the vertical paradigmatic axis of the previous discussion making itself visible in Pensaõ Globo. What is being shown are the different possibilities for one visual expression, possibilities that are then interwoven. As in a poem whose theme is the act of choosing words, Müller is freed by the ballast of the diachronic, or syntagmatic, axis. He can thus dedicate himself completely to the visual values of his universe of synchronous, condensed, paradigmatic images. Moreover, even individual cut sections follow a lyric principle. While the man is roaming the streets of Lisbon, his entire body is never shown. To show a "complete" body could have multiple meanings, but to reduce it to just legs – a series of superimposed shots akin to an incessantly repeated metonymy – allows for the condensation of many images into one, the visual concept of walking, of "going".[4] Even Dirk Schaefer’s soundtrack adopts this technique of repetition. At its core there is a simple melody that is constantly repeated, evoking a melancholy state of mind. Interwoven with the melody are quotes, from Fado melancholy as well, accompanied by daily noises that give volume to the pictures. An off-screen voice informs us of the main character’s thoughts, weakening and essential thoughts of a man resigned to die. In this film the use of found footage is limited: we see medical clips with x-rays of a chest and shots of a mother nursing her child. The mother appears bathed in a bright and surreal red colour, due to the inversion of the film and the negative. Both of the inserts represent moments of vulnerability and the need for help. But while the child receives that help, the medicine will mean an upcoming death. The end of Pensaõ Globo is announced by the covering up of a naked chest. A small gesture becomes a metaphor for the end of life: Müller shows us a red shirt that is being closed fifteen or twenty times, superimposing and continually repeating the pictures. Life closes like a flower, whose pictures are cut in. In the last sequence we see the inn’s chambermaid taking away the sheets: yet another circle closes, with the film returning to its beginning even on the more general narrative plane. There have been too many attempts to transform poetry into film in the history of cinema. Pensaõ Globo, however, represents something else. Müller does not limit himself to an attempt to translate an existing verbal structure into images. His success lies is being able to repeat in cinema the same structural act that is the basis of poetry. The emptiness of the city: Vacancy In making his new film, Müller stays within the environment of the Portuguese language, but radically changes locations. After the tortuous streets of Lisbon, suddenly Brasilia appears, the city designed on a drafting table, in the role of main character. Moreover, with Vacancy (1998), the filmmaker returns to a wider use of found footage. He finds even further ways to develop it, using the off-screen voice-over technique, with a mixture of texts by Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, and David Wojnarowicz. Müller’s return to an autobiographical component in his work follows a declaration at the beginning of this film about the filmmaker’s birth: "In the year that I was born [1961], a new city was built. A white city. For the future". The visual material in Vacancy comes from three sources: amateur footage of Brasilia in its first year, advertising and semi-official government footage of the new city, and footage shot by Müller as he was making the film. The film begins with the shaky pictures of a plane’s landing, shot with a hand-held 8mm camera. He follows that up with proud Brasilian tourists in the 1960s, intent on conquering the new capital with their new film cameras. Their filming Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic and cold architecture is uncertain, as it painfully tries to grasp onto some familiar theme. The travel companions are made to pose next to a modern statue instead of historical buildings. In the propaganda footage, it is the people who appear as decorative elements in an off-scale architectural model. It is obvious that they exist for the city, and not vice versa. The facades of the gigantic parallelepipedon seem unfriendly. Unlike in Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), there is no historic centre in which to find shelter. There is, however, the desert, constantly visible and present, which surrounds the city. Its reddish-brown colour deeply penetrates the images; it is ploughed by well-beaten tracks which people have crossed, each person on his or her own path towards the metropolis. Müller seems to have intuited faint traces of life in the original footage. But later, large roads and deserted sidewalks dominate the footage shot from an oblique perspective, and look like graphics drawn in the sand. Müller superimposes and dissolves into one another the streets and curves that seem to lead nowhere: "Streets join in a kiss, seeking others of their own kind. They lead nowhere". Then there are street signs incapable of resisting erosion: "Emptiness is hidden beneath a thick coating of signs. The city repeats its signs so that they can begin to exist". Müller rediscovers in Brasilia the aseptic coldness of his own childhood, which he had previously reconstructed in a studio for Alpsee. "His year of birth" seems to have found a monument of large-scale madness here, preserved like humanity’s cultural legacy, a legacy that speaks of hopes unanswered, of dreams transformed into nightmares. The soundtrack is a tight and minimal acoustic commentary, which elegantly accompanies the pictures. So elegantly that it received important recognition for its sobriety in the first prize at the Oberhausen International Shorts Film Festival. Traces of Suspense: the Phoenix Tapes The Phoenix Tapes (1999, made in collaboration with Christoph Girardet) came about from a festival dedicated to Hitchcock by the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England. Using material they were given from forty of Hitchcock’s films, Müller and Girardet decided to create a very different kind of homage. Thus they began to conduct on these movies detailed research of specific aesthetic and stylistic elements, the results of which took shape as six different sequences of clips, presented as chapters. Each chapter has a title and a distinct way of looking at Hitchcock’s work. Originally shown on six monitors in as many exhibition rooms, today The Phoenix Tapes are shown sequentially in a 45-minute "unit." The first chapter, "Rutland", is comprised of shots of solitary and deserted spaces, interrupted by short fades to black. The accompanying soundtrack is original and extremely arid, made up only of noise; there is no dialogue. The frames are not presented sequentially, but spliced together in a complex arrangement of repetitions. The second chapter, "Burden of Proof", is a montage of numerous close-ups of semantically significant objects. It is immediately evident that keys were one of Hitchcock’s favourite motifs, as well as matches, briefcases, telephones, and so forth. These details are accompanied by fragments of dialogue. If in Home Stories Müller constructed an original narrative in miniature using film clips, here he pushes the edge of rigorous analysis and dissection instead. The third chapter, "Derailed", interweaves different leimotivs to create a small nightmare. From the available material, the filmmaker chooses a short sequence in which Gregory Peck is shown sleeping and loops it to construct the leitmotiv of the chapter. The circular repetition of Peck’s body movements gives the impression of a restless, troubled sleep. If this sequence seems a dramatic revisiting of Andy Warhol’s six-hour Sleep (1963), the other dominantly visual theme of this section, the pictures of derailed trains, recalls instead one of the classics of found footage film – Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste (1969). One shot of Gregory Peck in a train compartment instinctively evokes the impression that the character is seeing himself in a dream, which can also be read as a reference to another classic, Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou. The fourth chapter, "Why Don’t You Love Me?", recognises Hitchcock’s obvious obsession with mother figures, which was probably also responsible for his misogyny. Hitchcock established the theme of the strong and possessive mother, even from beyond the grave, in numerous dialogues, all of which have been used in The Phoenix Tapes. Entire passages are repeated, while the theme of a "mother conspiracy" implicit in so many images makes comprehensible the latent maternal presence in the criminal son’s hatred towards his female victims. Chapter 5, "Bedroom", digs even more impetuously into Hitchcock’s hidden aversion towards women. The pictures collected here alternate between the classical defence mechanism – fetishism towards the female body – and the cruel passion with which the assassin is presented in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock shows the meeting of the sexes, an exchange of kisses, and the separation. The woman, stylised in an icon, meets the guilty gaze of the man: the victim is suddenly transformed into an executioner who uses violence and kills. Thanatos’ mask is imposed over what Eros seemed to reign. In images such as these there lies hidden a latent attempt to legitimate murder as an extreme form of self-defence against feminine tyranny. The extremely low volume seems to almost make the rustle of the film audible. However, the sound is actually produced by Dirk Schaefer, who accompanies the growing drama of the images with slow, cleverly growing acoustics. Chapter 6, "Necrologue", shows Ingrid Bergman in a four-minute scene, extremely slowed down. She sleeps, opens her eyes, then closes them again. From a tear that streaks her cheek, one realises only after a while that the shot is actually running backwards, almost imperceptibly. Another circle is closed. The Phoenix Tapes is the result of work conducted in an extremely systematic and extraordinarily detailed way. It reveals how Hitchcock often used a symbolic narrative technique in the visual aspects of his films. What is revealed here is Müller’s precise, analytical perspective, which he has developed in two decades of found footage filmmaking. The filmmaker turns the technique of synthesis upside down, directing us to the potentialities of analysis, placing in front of us Hitchcock's mastery: "Look, this is the stuff that suspense is made of". One should not think that Müller dedicated particular attention to Hitchcock’s work before, which is exactly why the visual similarities that characterise the two directors’ films are so surprising. For example, there are the oblique shots of deserted streets and signs that can be found in "Rutland" and Vacancy, and the close-ups used in "Burden of Proof" which use a metonymic narrative technique reminiscent of the imagery in Alpsee. "Derailed" and "Bedroom" appear as variations of the theme in Home Stories. The mother who disappeared in Alpsee returns, albeit demonised, in "Why Don’t You Love Me?". Like Hitchcock, Müller is a master of details, and his true masterpieces reveal his ability to artistically weave these details together. Epilogue: Müller’s success Found footage provided a masterful way out of the academic impasse of the 1970s. Many young filmmakers have taken it, and to them Müller has been one of their most consistent gods. The international recognition that Müller enjoys today stems from his superior narrative use of original and stock footage. It is obviously not a question of an ingenuous return to the "machine of illusions." In his work there remains, as in all successful avant-garde work, the dialogue with the public. His films are extremely personal and authentic attempts to interpret a reality that cannot be ignored. His found footage work holds up a mirror to the part of reality that goes by the name of "the history of cinema"; yet at the same time his poetic "fracturings" aspire to a place all their own within this same history. 1 The concept of "avant-garde cinema" is a problematic one, which presents itself as a relic of a time when it seemed that "progress" could be actualised through its form. Yet the notion of an "experimental" cinema is also a highly problematic one, since it reduces some of the most refined and constructed (in the best sense of the word) films of history to "an orderly search for uncertain results." Naturally, experimental films do exist, but in their construction they have little to do with highly proficient avant-garde expression. Ultimately, one can say that avant-garde film is not a "genre," but an essential cinematographic subdivision on the same level as documentary, animated film, and narrative cinema. Within each of these fields it is possible to recognise various genres, based on common characteristics of style, content, aesthetics, and so forth. Thus, according to these divisions, found footage represents a genre within the general category of avant-garde cinema. 2 Gabriele Jutz, "Eine Poetik der Zeit. Kurt Kren und der strukturelle Film", in Ex Underground. Kurt Kren, seine Filme, edited by Hans Scheugl, Wien, 1966, p. 107. 3 Cfr. Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma, Paris, 1977, subtitled in English as Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier, London 1983. Cfr. anche P. Tscherkassky, "Psychoanalyse und Film - Zur Theorie des imaginären Signifikanten", in Moderne Labyrinthe: Frauenbilder Kinowelten Aufklärungsphantasien, edited by W. Donner, Frankfurt a/M, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Wien, 1992. 4 We can even refer to the renowned Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, in which the author described a banal event using numerous linguistic variations. Published in the catalogue of XXXVI Mostra Internationale del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro Film Festival 2000 close