Perhaps the best film for one to work through such an entanglement is »Die Statik der Eselsbrücken«, a 21-minute piece paradigmatic for a postmodern leveling of differences between original and simulacrum, authenticity and parody, depth and surface, text and image. After the initial disclaimer that actions and characters are fictitious and all resemblence to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, Brynntrup appears holding up a false hand and wearing a striped skull or bathing cap, while he elaborates to the camera: "even I look completely different." At times Brynntrup dons a blond dustmop reminiscent of Warhol, and in the sections where he applauds himself with shouts of "Bravo" he puts on an immense Baroque wig. Clearly this rendition of selfhoods is ironically executed, albeit with delicate humor, never heavy-handedly. In voice-over Brynntrup narrates his curriculum vitae, starting with his birth in 1959 which is simultaneously a death, his identical twin being stillborn, a loss which seems to haunt Brynntrup's preoccuption with doubling and demise. Brynntrup skimpily rehearses various stages in his life: among others, trip to Italy, schooling, a jaw operation, the date of conception and funding for »Statik«, while refraining to offer any visual glimpses of his past. In »Tabu I-IV«, this recapitulation is conducted via shots of pages from Brynntrup's diaries, while a pellmell of voices reads simultaneously from it, making its content incomprehensible. In »Statik« the "Lebenslauf" (German for curriculum vitae) is rendered literally as an image of Brynntrup in a bathing suit running on the spot, i. e., not getting anywhere, a loudspeaker in hand. Again, Brynntrup performs the course of his life, teasing our curiosity, yet, as the loudspeaker ironically comments, proclaiming very little. Moreover the image swims due to the double projection onto an opaque glass of both the positively and negatively developed film. In a slip of the tongue, Brynntrup correctly gauges the effect of this coy evasiveness on his audience, his "sehr genervtes Publikum."

As in other works, Brynntrup plays with the leader countdown and the clapper (in »Aide Mémoire« [1995] he turns his butt to the camera and smacks it), pointing out the arbitrariness of beginnings. In fact, the rhythm of Statik seems to be that of renewed false starts, a series of tests that perpetually recommence. The "Eselsbrücken," the memory bridges that are supposed to trigger recollection are indeed static, ushering in deadends - unless, of course, their function resides in the impish verbal and visual punning that characterizes this film. The tests (synchronicity, focus, vision, genetics, AIDS), announced, as in a silent film, in hand-written intertitles, are a series of extended prolegomena - a synchronicity test, although nothing is synchronized in the film, or a focus test and vision test to ironically comment on our "blind spot" (another intertitle) or our "optical disillusion" (the subtitle, playing on the German word for illusion "Täuschung"). Like the beginnings of his films, the endings too are halting. (...) In »Statik the ending is likewise self-conscious, as a hand comes to cover the lens of the camera.

(...)

Hands are everywhere in Brynntrup's films: as the date and copyright appear in the penultimate shot of »Statik«, Brynntrup signs his name - the signature ("Unterschrift") always executed by hand ("Handschrift"). The scribbled intertitles also attest to the intervention of the hand, a metonym for bodily presence, as if Brynntrup were trying to intervene against the mechanisms of technical reproduction. Each finger, of course, has its own, very different print. And each palm traces a unique lifeline (Brynntrup has a woman reading his aloud in the film). But when Brynntrup repeatedly reproduces his finger print on the page, photographs, and enlarges it, or in »Handfest« photocopies his hands and displays their negatives and X-rays, he suggests that the singularity of the signature dissolves.

(...)

Because each scribbling ends up being just as ephemeral as the other images in Brynntrup's fast-paced film, he then tries to write on the body. A little skeleton is tatooed on his arm: but does thie "Tätowierung" reveal "Identität," as his wordplay might desire? Is this epidermal inscribing a successful attempt at marking individuality, now expressed not by reference to one's interiority but on the exterior of one's skin? Does the tatoo signify that writing which cannot be erased? But even the tatoo etched into the skin was first traced from a former drawing onto Brynntrup's arm. It too marks the temporal succession of the copy and punctuates additional deterritorializing alterations to Brynntrup's appearance. His body becomes yet again the surface, the screen on which to project other pictures, a process that he takes to prodigious heights in »Herzsofort«, where he alters and superimposes images of himself at dizzying speeds. At such a tempo, the act of viewing becomes one of forgetting rather than recording the transformations of the visage. And if written or photographic language cannot stay or define the self, neither can the spoken word. The subject only stammers its signification in the translingual pun of "me, me" in the name "Michael" (from »Handfest«) or "ei, ei" (meaning "egg" or designating an exclamation of surprise, but which sounds like the English "I, I"). It is no wonder, then, that Brynntrup here creates, in the self-descriptive words of the film, an "anatomy of phantoms," the skeletal drawings and fleeting doubly projected and negatively developed shots of himself that flicker and dissolve across the screen: the phantoms thereby gain their own "autonomy."

(...)

Part of Brynntrup's drag is to stage his body as strange to itself. This move is most clearly illustrated when he sets the camera before his bed at night in »Statik«, displaying the sleeping body as it can never see itself, with all its restless twitches. Although one might assume that the camera stands in here for the eye, gratifying an otherwise unfullfillable autoscopic desire, Brynntrup's body, laid bare, actually becomes vulnerable and exposed, like that of a child or even embryo. Indeed, for all his defiance, Brynntrup appears as shy before the camera, as someone who realizes that his physique and visage are still an enigma. Paradoxically, it is insofar as Brynntrup renders this body strange to itself and situates the ego outside itself, that he speaks as truthfully as possible. He eschews thereby any false or deceptive sense of authenticity. In other words, the filmmaker recognizes, as did Lacan, the méconnaissance latent in specularity. Moreover, his body surfaces throughout as the supplement or disruption to his written and spoken commentaries, not vice versa, for his self-images never explicate or illustrate the verbal text: the body appears in its inexplicable surplus. Failed attempts to read homosexuality from the body also preserve its secret and unmanagability. In »Statik«, in the film's sole mention of homosexuality, Brynntrup parodies pseudo-scientific, biological explanations for homosexuality by citing a theory that, according to tests on rats, prenatal stress could be its cause. He thereby presents his gayness as viewed by others from the outside, and thus refuses to respond to societal expectations that gays should confess their sexuality or that a public coming out belongs in even the mock autobiographical mode.

(Alice Kuzniar, "The Queer German Cinema", Stanford University Press, July 2000)