Michael Brynntrup | film video etc

Filmscreening Vietnam Saigon International Film School (September 10, 2016) [ supported by the Saigon International Film School (SIFS) and the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) ]

Michael Brynntrup is an artist and filmmaker, and has been Professor of the Film Class at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) for over ten years now. The regular program of study takes four to five years, and features a mixed group of both new and experienced students. After achieving an MA (Diplom), the most advanced students may stay for an additional year of Masterclass (so-called Meisterschüler). - The present film program brings together several films by Prof. Brynntrup (from a period spanning more than thirty years) along with recent works by current Masterclass students.

Program - Part 1: Portrait Michael Brynntrup
[ 49 min | 1983-2016 | 5 filmvideo ]

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: MICHAEL BRYNNTRUP

Being used to a certain aesthetic presented in mainstream TV and cinema, people often find experimental short films strange and hard to digest. However the personal works of Michael Brynntrup, one of the most profilic German filmmakers working mainly on the underground circuit, are regarded as small jewels of cinematic culture that are very appealing and attract enthusiastic audiences.

Michael Brynntrup often performs the leading role in his movies. Yet his films are different than the films originating from an autobiographical filmmaking tradition in North America who use private lives as a form of artistic expression. When Michael Brynntrup exposes his subjectivity, it's not a one-to-one representation and he addreses always the human being in general. His films can be seen as experimental reflections of a narcissistic artist who presents himself as a man portraying himself to others who are supposed to recognise themselves in him.

"I see cinema, in essence, not as mass media, but as an individual experience that takes place in the mind of each viewer." (Michael Brynntrup) He leaves the audience to decide on the ambivalence of his work and to reflect on themselves while identifying with the exposed character in the film. As an experimental and independent filmmaker who sees his work as a medial self-reflection (film as metafilm) and working from a gay male perspective, he tries to direct his films to different contextual and technical limits. How well can reality be presented? What limits do morals and the media set? Despite his preoccupation with heavy existential themes of death and personal identity in his work, his vision is often ironic. He is able to integrate a personal diaristic strategy using humour and pathos to subvert, to create films which are both intimate and visually stunning.

(Tampere International Short Film Festival, catalogue 2004 - Maarit Jaakkola)

Where I come from, people stay at home.
Except when they go on holiday or off to war.
{Information sheet of the film, 1983}

Some filmmakers, like Michael Brynntrup, blissfully ignore conventional technical limitations and expand the presentation possibilities for super-8mm. Brynntrup's single-screen »The Rhine, A German Tale« (»Der Rhein, ein deutsches Märchen«, 1983) is an ambiguous reworking of a home movie of a family trip which the filmmaker layers so that an uncomfortable equation is made between sentiment of nostalgia and the spirit of war.
(Berlinart, exhibition catalogue Museum of Modern Art, New York 1987 - Laurence Kardish)

DER HIERONYMUS - Totentanz 6
THE HIERONYMUS - Death Dance 6
7 min | 1989 | Super8 + 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#25]

"Gravediggers: species of beetles, black, live off cadavers of small animals, which they roll into balls."
{Information sheet of the film, 1989}

Totentanz 6 returns out of doors. Shot in a high weeded field, a gnome-like figure picks his way through a flourishing vegetable life until arriving at the ubiquitous skull, now covered over with swarming flies. He rubs his face against it in a gesture of sympathy, replaces an eye, and picks out the bloody entrails which remain in its cavities. Obsessively he begins to clean it, to try to restore it to a pure skeletal state, to separate it from its life as meat, but is unable to do so. Frightened, he flees, the skull now reappearing in a crimson overlay haunting his departure, threatening his every movement. Forced to return, he forms a kind of flesh altar around the skull, acceding to its demand to partake of this world and the next, before clambering up a nearby tree and waiting, frozen against the afternoon sky.
The skull's traditional bone-on-bone iconography signals for the gnome its separation from the natural world he inhabits, signals perhaps a destination or afterlife quite apart from this one. But this acceptance, this pact between worlds is broken when he is confronted by the specter of finality inhabiting his traditional haunts, his home. The skull's sudden appearance disrupts his customary traversals, its lingering entrails enjoining the meat of this world to embrace its demise in the next. In the end his negotiation is less acknowledgment than submission, unable to muster a cosmology which can embrace the skull's join of meat and bone.
(Millenium Film Journal No. 30/31, Fall 1997 - Mike Hoolboom)

TABU V (wovon man nicht sprechen kann)
TABU V (About Which One Cannot Speak)
13:00 min | 1998 | 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#52]
(Tagebuchfilm) | (film diary)

About which one cannot speak, one must make films.
(loosely based on Ludwig Wittgenstein)
{Information sheet of the film, 1998}

TABU V plays with the medium of film in a light-hearted and inquisitive manner; a concentrated, intelligent and multilayered film in which wit is juxtaposed assuredly with profound, searching analysis.
(New York Film Academy Award - Best Short Film, Panorama 1998)

TOTALE MONDFINSTERNIS ÜBER DEM MEER
Total Lunar Eclipse Over the Ocean
15:00 min | 2011 | HD (16:9) | col | sound (5.1) [MBCFILM#74]
(sphätherischer Film) | (surround film)

The earth as seen from the earth.
Weltanschauung in front of cosmic background radiation.
“As seen from the Moon, a lunar eclipse would appear as a solar eclipse.”
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mond - uptodate110401)

The film first seems to be antithetical to Michael’s other films, both aesthetically and in its content: no rapid sequences of images, no charged storyline, but an extended meditation, supported by an overwhelming soundscape.
(program notes directors lounge Berlin, June 2011 - Klaus W. Eisenlohr)

Bye-bye, bits and bytes: I’ve mathemetized myself into digital codes.
-- .. -.-. .... .- . .-.. -... .-. -.-- -. -. - .-. ..- .--.
QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response Code) is an optical label that contains information arranged in a square grid on a white background, which can be read by an imaging device (such as a camera, scanner, etc.) (en.wikipedia.org)
Bye-bye, bits and bytes: I’ve mathemetized myself into digital codes.
{Information sheet of the film, 2016}

Program - Part 2: Master Student's work
[ 44 min | 2016 | 4 filmvideo ] FILMKLASSE BRAUNSCHWEIG

Every year at the HBK Open House, the students of the Film Class present their new works. In addition to a two-hour film program, they also exhibit photo works, sound installations and video installations. The Masterclass students also get an opportunity to exhibit their works in a gallery space. The program presented here includes some single-channel works by the 2016 Masterclass students. The students are free to choose their own artistic tools. The crucial factor is always the student’s personal worldview, creativity and power of imagination. This has resulted in very diverse visual worlds: besides formal/abstract works, there are also documentary ones and poetic/intimate ones. However, the focus and interest of each auteur is to report on the self as an individual, and on one’s personal view of the world. (MB)

Deborah Uhde
State of the Art of the State - A Dysfunctional Machine
11:52 min | 2016 | HD3K (4:3) | col | stereo | OVen

A tète-á-trois: What happens when the machineries of precision metrology of natural science, governmental administrative bodies and art production encounter one another?
Technical machines obviously work only if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction. (Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L‘Anti-Oedipe)
Deborah Uhde (*1982). Her special focus is set on experimental and documental films, as well as on situative formats. After studying Philosophy, History of Art and Journalism she startet her studies in Fine Arts with special focus on film as art. Uhde finished the postgraduate degree of Meisterschüler at HBK Braunschweig with Prof. Michael Brynntrup in 2016. Before, she was German scholarship holder in 2014/2015 and the annual awardee of the Anatol-Buchholtz-Foundation Fux 2015. [ www.duhde.de ]

Martina Gromadzki
Neumond
7 min | 2016 | HD (16:9) | col | sound | OVdt

Stars are shining in the sky. There is a heavenly body moving on the firmament. It watches the other side of this world, far away from me, that's how it seems to me. Yet hidden within the beauty it remains a secret, which I cannot see.
Martina Gromadzki (*1990) got the Diploma-degree for Fine Arts at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2015 and studied then from 2015 to 2016 as Meisterschüler of Michael Brynntrup.

Erik Pauhrizi
Unpredictable Waters
13:55 min | 2016 | HD (16:9) | bw | sound | OVen+id (UTen)
MEISTERSCHÜLERPREIS 2016

A short experimental documentary film about a near-death experience from an Indonesian father who were just leaving home and family to study abroad and to get a better job for the family, but almost drowned while swimming in the dark, cold Heidbergsee lake in Germany, as at the same time refugees were found washed up on Turkish shores after their boats capsized.
Erik Pauhrizi (*1981 in Bandung, Indonesia) finished his Meisterschüler studies under Professor Michael Brynntrup in 2016 and won 'Meisterschülerpreis 2016' from Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz (SBK). He studied Diplom from 2009-2012 video art/ experimental film and Photography at Braunschweig University of Art / Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (HBK). In 2015 he received B.A. from Faculty of Art and Design at Bandung Insitute of Technology, Indonesia (Cum Laude).
Erik focuses on Post-Colonial issue through conceptual approach; he often utilizes text, drawing, painting, photography, video/film, object/installation to analyze how human figures are represented in political culture. He also investigates the relationship between east, west and middle east, immigrants, refugees, citizens and nationalities and explores individual and collective memory, sleep, life, death and identity.

Jiejie Ng
Mein Hutong
11:19 min | 2016 | HD (16:9) | col | sound | OVdt (UTen)

The Hutongs in Beijing contain a special atmosphere for me. As an overseas Chinese who has never lived in China, I nevertheless found a way to identify with these places. After the experience of wandering around them as a foreigner, I imagine some myths coming alive in the Hutongs. Even though buildings and artifacts disappear in the face of modernity, myths remain and preserve our collective memory.
Jie Jie Ng (*1977 in Singapore). Studied Comparative Literature in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA (1999-2003). Has been studying in the Art University of Braunschweig in the Film Class of Professor Michael Brynntrup since 2010. She finished her studies as Meisterschuler from Professor Michael Brynntrup.