Christoph Girardet

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.

RELEASE stages once again the trivial literary film "topos" of the white woman in front of monster, and does it with relish and with violence (King Kong 1932). But Girardet proceeds in a highly artificial manner. Artificiality, anonymity and fragmentation are elaborated as the characteristics of the subject in a highly dramatic exercise. The image of the subject is defined using precise manipulation as a Dante-like ritual of agonies. His mode of working with its rapid invasion, and editing, which has only become possible in the nineties, means the destruction of the subject. Girardet's formal capacity and artistic moral is documented by the fact that he creates a temporal structure which pushes the presentation of hysteria to its limits (or even beyond them). He starts with the image of the idol and ends by destroying it. (Barbara Alms)

A short story about new bodies, the power of denial, and a state of no sunshine. Two infantile bodies float in a cyberspace ball, connected by two subconscious bodies in the background. The attempt at unification and metamorphosis is interrupted by one part as the other is liberated. A glance over the shoulder means destruction.

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

In slow dissolves, loops of images of enacted absence are projected in white light. Most of the images come from the black-and-white film series The Invisible Man, dating from the 1930s to '60s. The presence of an invisible actor seems to influence minimal cinematic events on theatrical sets. These events combine to become an enigma regarding the phenomenon of disappearance.

Artists from feature films whose lives were invented, fictional artists: who are they, how do they live, how do they work?

Girardet reconstructs a 1950s fashion commercial using only remnants of the original footage, resulting in an intriguing silent pantomime. This montage film is based on surviving prints from a lost commercial about a synthetic tissue. Only the faulty recordings and aborted takes have remained.

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.

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

A short feature about an optical experiment.

A found-footage film in which time ticks away on the watches of the film industry. They do not just function as dramatic signs for expectation and suspense, but also as icons for the limitation of film (and its shelf life).

Muller/Girardet short

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.

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.

Chained up women are deprived of the narrative trappings of their film roles. You see red lips, fingernails digging in, a bosom rising and falling with the rhythm of the woman's breath, in short, all the essentials from horror films of the fifties and sixties and repeated insistently in serial collage.

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

In Phantom, each face, each body appears, like cinema itself, from beneath a curtain that flutters and flickers to reveal haunted silhouettes that never quite take shape.

About blind people in Hollywood films

Short by Christoph Girardet.