Christoph Girardet

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

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).

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)

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.

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.

A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object.

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.

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.

Portraits of women, and the men who are spellbound by them. Painted portraits are revenants, omens of absence, metaphors for loss and death, objects of desire and fixation.

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

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.

"With their montage of found footage of audiences, Müller and Girardet shape a captivating dramatic arc. It contains condensed suspense with highs, lows, hesitations, peaks, tension and humour; it's all a bit uncanny, since our imagination can read fathoms deep into the faces." (Anke Groenewold, Neue Westfälische, Bielefeld, 2003)

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.

In 1939, a second unit shot scenes for »Mr. Smith Goes to Washington« in the Lincoln Memorial with a double and extras. The long, orderly planned sequences undermine the classic cinematic narration; the plot seems to stagnate. The neoclassical architecture becomes the setting for a recurring ritual: the inconspicuous protagonist loses himself between the columns and often pauses in front of the monumental Lincoln, as if he himself was becoming a

Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal ?

A short feature about an optical experiment.

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.

This is somebody, nobody, anyone. This is us in the course of time. Persistently, in vain. The self is the need for permanent self-assertion.

Short by Christoph Girardet.