Matthias Müller

Combining close-ups of redundant technology gleaned from 60s US sci-fi television series with a female voice of a 40s Hollywood melodrama, Manual makes absolute detachment clash with magnified emotion. When its record of the minutae of endless buttons, switches and control panels Manual reduces the notion of any manageability of life to a sheer absurdity.

Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.

Matthias Müller's short is based on the poems to childhood by famed Austrian lyrical aertist Ernst Jandl who tried to write these poems in a language used by children, including nursery rhymes and prayers. Müller uses found footage and amateur films from his own childhood to create a visual equivalent to these poems. (M.M).

“A study of light.” (Christoph Girardet/Matthias Müller)

Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.

This one is a collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc. In the montage, the movements and gestures of the actresses – stars like Lana Turner, Tippi Hedren, and Grace Kelly– seem choreographed and planned for each other. The soundtrack supports this effect with connecting passages of sound that imitate the stereotypes of the genre. The treatment concentrates the dramatic shift from the familiar to the eerie and shows how women become the victims of the voyeuristic glance of film.

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself.

A short feature about an optical experiment.

A young boy peers through a wall in dreamlike sequences; silhouette dancers, industrial motifs and doubled visuals form a narrative of childhood’s abrupt end.

Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and lips, juxtaposed against the sensual application of assorted foams, lotions, waxes, and creams, these carefully constructed, plastic images begin to fade, speckle, crack, distort, and burn with the material deterioration of the celluloid itself, before being reduced to the stark whiteness - and unadulterated purity - of an empty projection. At once idealized and grotesque, the disintegrating images become an integral reflection of the title's double entendre of hide as both an organic surface that inherently decays with time, and the deliberate act of concealing its irreversible plasticity

The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city symphony, disaster movie and media trauma therapy become one.

Muller/Girardet short

The film comprises edited excerpts from 40 Hitchcock films in six chapters, each focusing on a different motif that reveals some of Hitchcock’s dark obsessions and techniques.

The film creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters.

Matthias Müller’s films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema. They exaggerate the unreality and clinical perfection of the Hollywood studio films of the 1950s, quoting its sets and colours (Home Stories, 1990; Pensão Globo, 1997) or even reconstructing them in minute detail (Alpsee, 1994). But, at the same time, these attributes, known in film jargon as the production values, are exposed to decay – a decay which on closer inspection proves to include wilful acts of creation. As his own lab technician, Müller is responsible not only for subsequent wear and tear, but also for the initial developing of his own film material.

As a couple awakens and rituals of breakfast unfold, war news headlines and radio radio broadcasts emerge in layers.

2001 film by Muller

About blind people in Hollywood films

An early Super 8 collage experiment by Müller using found film reels and home‑movie fragments.

There's a reason why many consider Iggy Pop the godfather of punk - every single punk band of the past and present has either knowingly or unknowingly borrowed a thing or two from Pop and his late-'60s/early-'70s band, the Stooges, who reunited in 2003 and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. We welcome this outstanding artist, who is known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics, at the Baloise Session.