Richard James Havis
Ask Gustav Deutsch to answer the question 'what is cinema?', and he might well reply 'montage'. In FILM IST. 7-12, the second part of his continually evolving quest to uncover the secrets of the moving image, Deutsch has collected around a hundred film clips from the late 1890s to the late 1920s and cut them together into themed sections. Richard James Havis talked to him about the lay of the cinematic land.
The result is both mesmerising and educational. One sequence shows a man breaking into a woman's room, followed by the woman rushing out. The narrative progresses logically enough - even though the man and woman are played by different performers in each shot. In fact, the sequence is composed of shots of similar actions taken from different films. Even though the inconsistency of the shots is obvious from the start, the viewer still reads the sequence as a complete cinematic unit.
‘That is how film works, you accept that sequences which follow on from one another come from the same film, from the same camera. That is what you are used to seeing and, even though it doesn't happen in this movie, the mind assumes that it does.‘ As Buñuel demonstrated in THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, our minds are so conditioned to expect continuity in movies, they will even condone different actors playing the same role. ‘In my film, there's a sequence where three different women appear, one after the other. The viewer accepts them as the same woman', says Deutsch. Deutsch creates worlds that could not come into existence without the editing room - geographies which could only exist in cinema and, perhaps, literature. 'Cinema creates its own space', says Deutsch. 'That is what you have to play with as a filmmaker - different photographic spaces. The first real cut in film history was a scene in the film which a train enters a tunnel. There was another shot, made in the studio, of two people kissing each other in the tunnel. They put the two shots together. It was the first time that two different spatial situations were combined to create a single one. I haven't discovered who the director was, I just know he was an American.'
Deutsch has also constructed a DVD installation to show clips from FILM IST. 1-6 and 7-12 in a walk-in environment. The installation can be viewed at the Schouwburg in Rotterdam. Here, standing inside a shell designed to look like a giant zoetrope, viewers can see seven simultaneously projected clips from the films. 'The possibilities of this installation arise from the fact that it's not linear, so images start to speak to each other. I wanted to have the chance to watch a sequence on its own and then see it together with the other sequences. It gives the viewers more chance to use their imagination. It's like being right inside the image - a new kind of experience for the viewer.'
GUSTAV DEUTSCH
Bibliografie thematical
