GUSTAV DEUTSCH

Bibliografie thematical

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GUSTAV DEUTSCH

Bibliografie thematical

Jules Marshall

There's a disturbing tendency among the digerati to assume if it ain't made on computer it can't be that interesting. We've tried everything analogue, right? A film festival is a good place to remind ourselves that there are still some pleasures in the low tech, and no better example was to be had at Rotterdam than Taschenkino by Gustav Deutsch, a unique, crazy and fun interactive experience from Austria receiving its international première.
Taschenkino is "an attempt to trace the repetitions in life and film, and thereby come to the essentials elements of film, motion and time," according to its director, cameraman, editor and distributor, Deutsch.
It is also a compelling contemplation of some of the eternalities of human existence, a delayed homage to the forgotten pioneers of moving pictures and an observation of communication in a society of individuals who are isolated, even when sitting together.
One hundred people in a cinema are given a tiny battery-operated 8mm film loop viewer (and an eye patch). After an explanation of what this is all about and how to pass the viewers in the right order, a metronome counts off one minute to see each clip before passing it to one's neighbours. A hundred minutes later, everyone has seen each clip. One hundred clips for 100 people looking at the themes of movie pioneers 100 years after the birth of cinema - could there be a more appropriate celebration?
There's more: the 100 loops are divided into 10 chapters of ten clips, such as the Rhythm of Life (e.g. seeing, treading, grasping), From Eternity (sun, lightening, waterfall), Natural Laws (optics, gravitation), Ritual Acts (from tooth brushing to kissing), sports, work, music, movements and locomotions.
To find out about the roots of this extraordinary one-man labour of love, The Digital Daily caught up with Deutsch after one of his showings.
He begins by saying how he never had the confidence in fine art or film making as a potential living, so he trained - and still practices - as an architect. His interest in film developed in parallel, and in the early 80s he was a participant in one of Austria's first video research projects.
From video he moved on to working with found footage, a process which prefigures much of the conceptual weight in Taschenkino. Adria (1990), which involved editing amateur Super 8 clips shot around the Adriatic Sea between 1954 and 1987, for example. "I wanted to see how people documented themselves," said Deutsch. "It was an important period in film making; Super 8 cameras had for the first time allowed ordinary families to take moving pictures. It was the first time people asked themselves 'what can I do in front of camera' rather than 'how should I pose.'
Deutsch edited the footage according to the direction of camera pan, so all left-right shots were placed end to end, and all right-left. "I was astonished at the aesthetics and themes that emerged from this process," he says. For example, all up-down shots were of architectural features such as pillars.
Five years ago, a friend gave him a tiny, hand-held plastic 8mm film loop viewer, bought from a Hamburg sex shop and featuring an appropriate 30 second clip. He was immediately fascinated, he says, both by the technology, but also "this eternal copulation" theme. "A film loop unites the beginning with the end, creating a self-contained continuum, and the more I thought about this, the more I say parallels in life. We all come from the basic repetition that makes up the sex act, and all our life is lived through further repetitions." He eagerly decided to get more viewers - 100 seemed like a good number for a small cinema - and got hold of another two from the same source, took them apart, put his own found footage in, and began playing with the limited time of a loop ( up to 45 seconds, but working best with 20) to construct mini short stories.
But attempts to track down and buy 100 pocket players took ages. A British company had the sole import right from Hong Kong. He got permission, by which time the factory had moved to China, but eventually 200 players arrived in Austria for $5 a piece (minus film). It took months to shoot all the Hi8 footage and select 100 pieces from the 1000 shot (one piece, of lightning, Deutsch had to wait four months before catching it at 4 am just days before the deadline). The most difficult aspect was getting movements that could be looped, he says. Then each loop had to be edited by hand and manually loaded into the players - three weeks' work in itself.
The centenary of the invention of film was drawing near, and from their new-found profile, it was obvious to Deutsch that the work of the Lumiere brothers' contempories like Thomas Edison, Emile Renault, Skalinowski and Muybridge was largely concerned with the same themes as him - repetition, physical games, movement through time and space.
"We still haven't learned the lessons of those early film makers," says Deutsch. "We can learn from media by watching the image, but also by observing how we use media - and this is not really taught anywhere."
He believes the technical development of film and TV outstripped our ability to protect ourselves from addiction, and fears that new media may only make this worse.
"There's a lot of myths circulating about new media, about how it's possible to communicate and get information. The computer is a good instrument - like TV - but it has to be used cooler, with less enthusiasm. I've been to Internet cafes and find they have no atmosphere. It's like being in a peep show - very depressing. "The beauty of the pocket viewer is it's intimacy - you can lie in bed and watch it alone - that is what it is primarily used for, of course! I don't know if this level of intimacy is possible with an interactive CD-Rom - these are questions for a different generation to answer. In many ways the new media explosion parallels the intense fights over distribution and technical standards of the end of the last century. There were 150 companies slugging it out in the US within 10 years of the Lumieres' invention of screening and copying films. Edison's attempt to create a home player market- essentially he was trying to compete with Pathé News by inventing the TV too soon for content to be provided. "Internet may be the revenge of Thomas Edision," smiles Deutsch. Much of Taschenkino's appeal is the social interaction it engenders. "People immediately fell part of a group when they all have their own viewer," says Deutsch. "They become more communicative as the loops move around. One guy last night even got booed for leaving half way through and 'breaking the chain'."
Another nice thing about the project is its portability - Deutsch carries a single aluminium box for the viewers, making it portable and demonstrable in many environments. Last year in Austria, for example, Deutsch allowed people in a small village to sign for a viewer, take it away and swap them in the streets with people they met for two hours before bringing one - any one - back.
Another project to distribute them in a supermarket that once been Deutsch's favourite cinema was cancelled at the last minute when a new owner became nervous that some sort of anti-supermarket statement might be brewing.

Gustav Deutsch is hoping to show Taschenkino in Paris, a venue in Italy and the Sao Paolo Film Festival this year.