Film Ist

Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch is one of contemporary cinema’s pre-eminent avantgarde artists. After several years combing a massive archive of scientific films, Deutsch released ‘Film Ist (1-6)’, a film made up of found footage edited together into extraordinary assemblages of sound and image. The fragments of film traverse a vast range of human experimentation with time, light, motion, and the human form. We see vocal chords at work while we hear a singer rehearsing. As if peering into the suppressed memory of cinema itself, we see an eye being excised from the socket, the slow motion movement of apes, bullets, children and cats, and the world offered back to us as a phantasmagoria of wave forms, wind patterns, lightning flashes and electrical currents. Cinema was born out of scientific endeavour and has since redefined so much of how we understand the physical and temporal properties of the world. ‘Film Ist’ is a remarkable surrealistic report on cinema’s own memory of its mysterious role in the creation of the modern world.