Rüdiger Neumann

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

"Wyborny trained as a mathematician, worked as a cameraman on Werner Herzog's Kasper Hauser. He first attracted the attention of the New York and London avant-gardes … for his elliptical narratives, Dallas Texas - After The Gold Rush (1971) and The Birth of a Nation (1973). Their plots, 'collapsed' by the optical transformation and repetition of individual shots, move from anecdotal narrative to an examination of narrative construction itself. His method was analogous, in a way, to that of novelists like Robbe-Grillet (e.g. Jealousy), though Wyborny was far more interested in the actual materials of film than were the french 'new novelists' when they turned to cinema. His work was further characterised by a romantic appreciation for desolate, ruined vistas." - J. Hoberman

A German TV movie

Neumann made this film as a young lecturer with some students in the visual communication department at the Hamburg Art University. A film about the areas of application of the various microphones.

In sequences structured by location, the film initiates a journey characterized not geographically but rather by the landscape's colors.

Out of over 4,000 ordinance survey maps (scale 1:25,000) charting all of West Germany, 88 maps were selected by random generator. Then random intersections of two coordinates were determined. Between March 1979 and February 1980 I visited the places at these coordinates, going from south to north. If the random place was determined by with the help of the survey map in the landscape, then I set up the camera at eye-level and pointed it northwards. This first shot was followed by 23 other shots, with the camera turning 15 degrees to the right for each next shot. The length of the shots follows a simple pattern: in the beginning, the shots are 6-5-4-3-4-5-6-5...and so seconds long. Towards the middle of the film they become progressively shorter, reaching ¼ of a second before becoming longer again at the end of the film.

Europe along the 10th longitude from Carrara to Hirtshals is the subject of this experimental film.

The word and image "Meer" are brought together by young people in a provisional way.

A portrait of Germany.

Two different positions and perspectives develop images and sounds based on the same things and texts. Montage of different places – "Outside the Ocean": North – South, Hamburg – Naples, GDR – Southern Italy, USA – Paestum. The aura of places. In the cockpit of the camera. Seeing the differentiation between things.

“Stein/Licht is a film that wants to make visible by making it possible to look [at]. The opposite of looking [at] is looking for something."