Michael Brynntrup | film video etc

Buchvorstellungen mit Filmprogramm Book presentations with film program » MICHAEL BRYNNTRUP: SUPER 8 « [ Vorführungen / Termine ]

Anlässlich der verschiedenen Buchvorstellungen wird eine Auswahl der folgenden Filme gezeigt.
On the occasion of the various book presentations, a selection of the following films will be shown.

Between an overgrown West Berlin graveyard and a desolate stretch of land under communist rule, there is a supposedly dead no-man's land. - Around noon, the main character arrives at this inevitable place.
{Information sheet of the film, 1983}

At the start of 1983, Brynntrup joined forces with almost twenty filmmakers, artists, musicians, and others active in the squatter cinema movement to form the collective OYKO. [...] On July 17, 1983 in the Hasenheide park in Kreuzberg, OYKO put on their first public event: a five screen – better, a five bed sheet – open air projection of super-8 films accompanied by live music. Such an expanded cinema event was not untypical in the super-8 world, in which innovative and performative modes of film exhibition flourished.
(Marc Siegel, "Reflections on Arriving [...]", In: "West Berlin Film in the ‘80s", b_books verlag, Berlin, 2008)

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)

The title of this film isn't -as is mistakenly assumed- 'Moving Pictures for the Movement Disabled'. ... an educational training film.
{Information sheet of the film, 1984}

There is not at all mute educational and exercise film »Silent Movie for the Deaf«, which is reminescent of the history of Super8-films, which has primarily used in a didactic context. Stills of people communicating in sign language demask the symbols of the language system. However, photographed 24 frames per second, the abrupt gestures are united to flow gesticulation and suddenly demask him, who thinks these signs are absolutely unnecesseary for his personal communication.
(tip Berlin, 16/86 - Michael Volber, translated 1993 by LFMC-catalogue)

The identity is being denied.
On the very first take I wanted to pose naked in front of the camera. But I guess I didn't have the guts. - By the way, I took that shot by self-timer.
{Information sheet of the film, 1984}

Brynntrup here announces the theme that will run throughout his work--the dissolution of the original and individual via replication. In this film, an intertitle "Self-Portrait with Skull" announces a series of images of Brynntrup with mouth and eyes wide open; as each blowup draws us closer into his pupil we see a skull form and then disintegrate before our eyes, as if linking mechanical reproduction to death.
(Alice Kuzniar, "The Problem of Agency in the Digital Era: From the New Media Artist Michael Brynntrup to Run Lola Run", Rutgers German Studies - Papers Series, New Brunswick, NJ, 2003)

My apartment has a nice lay-out.
There are a lot of paintings on the walls. I have a big carpet, too.
{Information sheet of the film, 1985}

We watch him in his apartment, recognize him when, from time to time, he looks in a mirror with a camera. We see how he seems to live, among sheepskin rugs and pictures he painted himself, countless self-portraits on the walls and uncounted death's heads.
(Michael Höfner, translated by Constance Hanna, printed in: Lebende Bilder - still lives, catalogue MoMA, New York - Berlin, April 1992)

Sooner or later everyone is confronted with this problem: what to do with the body. A problem film. - Psychosomatic birth preparation with practical exercises for euthanasia.
{Information sheet of the film, 1986}

He is addressing himself directly to the audience. He looks into the camera, he talks to the spectator, he reads texts off camera - or he displays written statements like "please publish after my death" (in »Testamento Memori«). (...) In some of his films the skull is his partner and his second ego (»Musterhaft«, 1985 or »Testamento Memori«, 1986), with whom he talks, plays, kisses, and even has sexual intercourse. The death theme runs through his work from his early films on. Death is the end in the beginning, before life has really started. (...) »Testamento Memori« ironically describes the birth-death theme. Texts with music about breathing techniques accompany his playing with the skull, in which the exhortation at the end is satirized. In this film his talent to create his own new images comes to full expression. His face, his hands, the skull, and a 'Chinese' bird cage dangle in the room like silver shadows on a golden background.
(Berlin - Images in Progress, Katalog Hallwalls Buffalo, Mai 1989 - Birgit Hein)

BRAVO
BRAVO
3 min | 1986 | Super8 | bw | sound [MBCFILM#16]

As said. - bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravissimo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo
{Information sheet of the film, 1986}

The biblical prohibition of images word for word. God's life story in the form of a trailer: from zero B.C. to the Second Coming of Christ - coming soon.
{Information sheet of the film, 1986}

Brynntrup even went so far as to make a special promotional short for »JESUS« called »VERONIKA«. As well as raising theological questions on the Turin Shroud, »VERONIKA« divulges the best way to knock a nail through the hand; how to experience eternal mysteries anew, and that yes, He is coming "to this theatre - soon." - Still no joy with the Catholic church.
(Headpress Manchester, 3/91 - David Kerekes)

Women piss too - only less.
{Information sheet of the film, 1987}

Photo, film, and TV images from September 22nd, 1981. Corner of Potsdamer Strasse and Bülowstrasse. (This film is dedicated to Klaus-Jürgen Rattay).
{Information sheet of the film, 1987}

Ohne Titel (Without Titel) - Early September: High noon of the squatters movement, last movments of Klaus-Jürgen Rattay. Chased by the police he dies under the wheels of a bus. The pictures remain, what else.
(catalogue International Super8-Festival Leicester, November 1987)

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)

DIE BOTSCHAFT - Totentanz 8
THE MASSAGE - Death Dance 8
10 min | 1989 | Super8 + 16mm | bw | sound [MBCFILM#26]

"blind spot: term for a currently not reachable or visible space."
{Information sheet of the film, 1989}

Totentanz 8 returns to the figure of a young woman, perhaps the young girl from the very first film grown older. She climbs a V-necked stairwell, lighting on a birdcage stuffed with bird feathers before flinging them into an open courtyard. She appears again in an immense, emptied warehouse space, the image now rephotographed and solarized. She begins to dance through this fantastical silvery sheen, this veil of abandon. She recalls for us that death is also a place for celebration. Her frenzy spent, she rests in a large window opposite the skull, continuing to cast feathers. She takes up the skull and kisses it long and longingly with her tongue. Hers is a final embrace and acceptance, an eroticization of death, a romantic fury. In the end, in the film's sumptuous closing image, she casts feathers out the window in a storm of solarization, the light pouring through its aperture in a silver storm which suggests another world waiting beyond.
(Millenium Film Journal No. 30/31, Fall 1997 - Mike Hoolboom)

NARZISS UND ECHO
NARCISSUS AND ECHO
14 min | 1989 | 16mm | bw | sound [MBCFILM#30]
(Rätselfilm) | (riddle film)

Long seemed invalid the Prophet's word, - But honored it was, - By the outcome at last: - How odd the maddness, how strange a death! (Ovid, Metamorphoses)
{Information sheet of the film, 1989}

Brynntrup creates his own rococo version of the classical myth of Narcissus and Echo, a story of longing, love, and self-love. Brynntrup comments "A film in the form of a riddle is a special kind of entertainment film whereby the film's content must be deduced from the film's formal structure."
(Information The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, 1992 - Karen Lund)

DIE STATIK DER ESELSBRÜCKEN
THE STATICS - Engineering Memory Bridges
21 min | 1990 | 16mm | bw | sound [MBCFILM#32]
(Filmpuzzle) | (puzzle film)

Rests and tests from the inquiry into prototypes.
Formal proofs through pregnant experiments on one's own body.
{Information sheet of the film, 1990}

Test cards, doodlings, film techniques and visual experiments - the mechanics of film itself form the narrative of »Die Statik der Eselsbrücken«. And again, the result is hypnotic.
(headpress Manchester, 3/91 - David Kerekes)

LIEBE, EIFERSUCHT UND RACHE
LOVE, JEALOUSY AND REVENGE
7 min | 1991 | 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#35]
(Lehrfilm) | (educational film)

Du weißt ganz genau, daß jetzt viele Länder Filme in ihrer Sprache herstellen ... (Original mit Untertiteln). - You know that every film has its own language ... (subtitled original)
{Informationsblatt zum Film, 1991}
You know very well, that nowadays many countries produce films in their own language ... (original with subtitles).
{Information sheet of the film, 1991}

The witty »Love, Jealousy and Revenge« explores the mobile meanings of language in film with the help of sophisticated telecommunications; an aural/oral offering.
(Hygiene and Hysteria Tour Program, UK 1994 - Sarah Turner, Ian Rashid)

ZEICHEN UND WUNDER
SIGNS AND MIRACLES
2 min | 1991 | 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#36]

Life is a deadly illness, which is carried over by sexual contacts.
(Graffitti on a public toilet, 1990) - A historically-current anti-aids clip.
{Information sheet of the film, 1991ff}

Brynntrup's films neither protest nor do they abort a critical view on human civilization. The avoidance of one-dimensionality leaves the films open to different levels of meaning that overlap each other as they circle around death 'and' eros. They seem to touch and enliven facets of social reality. Example: AIDS.
(catalogue on the Cineprobe at MoMA, New York - Berlin, April 1992 - Christoph Tannert, translated by Constance Hanna)

My first video take, - a film, that rhymes between the lines.
So, very good, very good. And... to that I really don't want to add anything else. That was -as you've just now seen- my first Video.
{Information sheet of the film, 1993ff}

»Mein zweiter Vers.« offers on the one hand an obsessive documentation of a trivial event, that is of his first video take, shot within the apartment in question. However it simultaneously also documents and examines the not-so-trivial assumption that the camera and its perspective can be conflated with the artist and his “voice,” for in this film three cameras and three different kinds of film stock or video material, which are all trained on this “trivial event,” compete for attention.
(Robin Curtis, "From the Diary to the Webcam: Michael Brynntrup and the Medial Self", In: "After the Avant-Garde [...]", October 2008)

Using found footage from the early 70s porn films, Michael Brynntrup creates a humorous and titillating moving collage of mediated erotic imagery - one that keeps promising the viewer always anticipated cum shot, as well as asking the question, "How 'graphic' does an image have to be before it comes pornographic?"
(Mix '95 New York, Festival Catalogue)

»All You Can Eat« by Michael Brynntrup takes the 'cum-shot' to new heights with a montage of some of the wildest, orgasmic, facial expressions ever composed to a mellow, easy listening sound track.
(Boys On Film No.6, cover text, dangerous to know 1996)

KAIN UND ABEL - eine Moritat
CAIN AND ABEL - A Moral
10 min | 1994 | 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#45]
(Lehrstück) | (instructional play)

A queerly provocative retelling of the Bible story about a man's bloodlust for his brother.
(Mix '95 New York, Festival Catalogue)

Taking imitation to profane heights, Brynntrup even has the male character Abel, played by Ichgola Androgyn, give birth to a baby (doll) out of his anus. Here all recourse to notions of biology and gender specificity is abandoned.
(Alice Kuzniar, "The Queer German Cinema", Stanford University Press, July 2000)

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)

NY 'NY 'n why not
NY 'NY 'n why not
4 min | 1999 | 35mm | col | stereo [MBCFILM#53]
(Musikfilm) | (music film)

WALK / DON'T WALK / WALK. The rhythm of the nineties.
A music stroll along Christopher Street.
{Information sheet of the film, 1999}
The Jury Award is in recognition of the exceptional quality and diversity of gay and lesbian German films in this year´s Berlinale. Beginning with the inspiring selection of »AIMÉE & JAGUAR«, the first lesbian film to open the Berlinale; to (...) »NY 'NY 'N WHY NOT«, these five German films brilliantly represent the gay and lesbian community and the talent of German film-makers on the world stage.
(Special TEDDY Award 1999, International Berlin Film Festival PANORAMA)

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
(Immanuel Kant, Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, opening sentence)
Born in the body (...and in time...)
{Information sheet of the film, 2001}

Certainly even today some viewers will be affected by this work. Respect for the true art of filmmaking demanded that even the closeup be kept in, where a razor slices through an eye.
(Warning introduction to the German archival copy of UN CHIEN ANDALOU)

Dank | thanks:

Die Publikation des 'SUPER 8' Buchs wurde realisiert mit freundlicher Unterstützung durch:
The publication of the 'SUPER 8' Book has been made possible with the generous support of:

Besonderer Dank auch an:
Special thanks also to: