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The last edition of the International Film Festival of Gijón devoted a retrospective to the german experimental filmmakers Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, an artistic tandem that, in most of their work, use the found footage technique to unravel the male dominant ideology underlying in classical cinema. This interview for Blogs&Docs is the result of a brief chat during the festival and extended later by email.
When did you start working together?
Matthias: Christoph and I were both studying at the Braunschweig School of Art in the late 80s. This was one of the epicenters of experimental film and video production in Germany then, a place where film artists from all over the country gathered. Christoph and I were already interested in the exploration of found footage then. While Christoph was mostly working in video, I was still working in an analog fashion at the editing bench. Our methods and styles were quite different from one another, but our main interests obviously were connected. However, we did not co-operate and it took another nine years until we started producing our first mutual work, the Phoenix Tapes. It was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and included in the 1999 exhibition Notorious that dealt with the influence of Alfred Hitchcock on contemporary art. This invitation made us work together for the first time.
How do you develop your work? Are you both involved in all areas of the work such as investigation, editing, and script writing?
Christoph: In our joint projects we decide everything together, and we do so in a non-hierarchical, egalitarian way, from the very beginnings of our research to the final moment of postproduction. For a film like Mirror that is exclusively made of original footage, we also developed script and storyboard together. When our found footage projects require an elaborate process of collecting and selecting shots, we share this time-consuming task. All artistic choices are made together though.
Matthias: No matter how similar our interests may be, we bring quite different qualities into our common work. Finding solutions that are fine for the both of us demands a lot of discussion.
Mirror (Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet, 2003)
There are a lot of similarities between your individual bodies of work and the films both of you make together, but what about the differences? I have the impression that there is more humor in your common works.
Matthias: We are more used to people stating that our compositions are quite refined, and that the work is rather calculated and controlled. Formal decisions are crucial. But they are made in order to enhance the energy, the liveliness and the emotional quality of our work, not to exorcise them. A film such as Why Don’t You Love Me?, for example, is dynamic and hilarious because of the very fact that it is rigorously choreographed. On the other hand, producing this film belongs to the most playful of our common activities. During the long processes of developing our works, there are phases of an almost anarchic lack of restraint and phases of analysis and thorough examination. Luckily, our shared authorship does not reduce one's own impact: all of our joint projects are 100% Christoph and 100% me. They acually add something to what our individual signatures stand for.
Christoph: Collaborating helps us not to get encapsulated in our own worlds. The process of generating these works is an unpredictable one. One of us may come up with a new idea out of the blue, and we then have to discuss this idea and possibly modify our initial concept according to it. Things might be stricter, more conceptual, if we were an artists couple. But we aren’t.
Matthias: Yes, this is quite an uncommon constellation. The major challenge is to keep the work as personal and distinctive as possible, no matter how different our individual lives may appear.
Another difference I find in the montage, but I don't know if this has to do with the fact that you, Christoph, are an editor or maybe with the digital technology that has changed the editing of film and video a lot.
Christoph: Working mostly with found images since the early 90s, editing belongs to the most crucial skills needed for what I want to achieve artistically. My early works were always attempts to transform the ephemeral cinematic reality to a more immediate continuum. I do not consider myself an editor. I have been used to working with a smaller amount of material than Matthias, and to treating it in a more rigid way. Sometimes I work with just one shot or a couple of shots. My way of reorganizing this footage may appear more mechanical than the editing techniques in Matthias' work that are more smooth. There is a balance of these two different styles in our mutual projects now.
Matthias: When I started working digitally, back in 1999, Christoph had already gained extraordinary technical skills. He was able to work at a rather high pace, whereas I was used to taking my time in that darkened film editing suite. Digital editing helps to easily try out new ideas and then possibly go back to the previous version the moment you realize it does not work. In film, there is a stronger demand for some kind of master plan. In digital media, on the other hand, you must try hard not to get lost in the broad variety of options.
For me, your work is very important because of its political implications. Your feminist point of view reminds me of the work of Mark Rappaport. In some of your common works, in Kristall and in Bedroom (an episode from the Phoenix Tapes) for example, I've recognized Laura Mulvey's idea of sadism demanding a story. I think that you explore this not by telling a story, but through more elemental or superficial aspects of the movies, such as your use of highly ritualized gestures.
Christoph: Some of our films may be close to certain research results of feminist film theory, but mostly we start with simple conclusions. Take Kristall, for instance: Celebrity cult is based on the extensive reproduction of movie-star images, so film scenes of famous actors in mirrors are literally doubling the viewer's desire. However, Kristall may be considered an audiovisual example of gender studies as well. Working on this film we made the observation that quite often when a woman can be seen in mainstream cinema facing a mirror, her reflection gives evidence of the fact that someone is missing. In conventional narratives, this usually is the male counterpart of the female protagonist. The staging of male characters facing a mirror is remarkably different: here, somebody is actually facing his physical self, his fear of disappearence, his mortality.
Matthias: The way women are being represented in front of a mirror may be understood as a comment on their allegedly inherent narcissism. In the movies quoted by us, women are preparing themselves, painting their faces, brushing their hair and controlling their image in the mirror in order to meet a man.
Christoph: Women are imagining the missing man, whereas men are facing death.
Matthias: We came to this conclusion after watching numerous films and during editing our own one. We actually had not been aware of this before.
Kristall (Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet, 2006)
In his book Ways of Seeing John Berger points this idea which I quote: "The mirror was used as a sign of women's vanity. Nevertheless, there is an essential hypocrisy in this moralizing attitude. You paint a woman naked because you enjoy yourself looking at her. If later, you put a mirror in her hand and title the painting Vanity, you are morally condemning this woman, whose nakedness has represented for your own pleasure. (...) But the real function of the mirror was really other. It was made for the woman to accept treating herself mainly as an spectacle." And this idea of women "to-be-looked-at-ness" is especially powerful in Kristall. The first shot shows a diamond necklace, a very revealing variation of your leitmotifs of glass and crystal in this film.
Matthias: In each and every shot of Kristall there is a mirror, sometimes more obvious, sometimes more marginal, but you can also see (and hear) jewellery in this film. In the opening shot, a woman is virtually been tied up, chained by a man who is giving a necklace to her. This is the very moment when melodrama starts to unfold. In a way, this opening shot might be interpreted as an emblem for the way a movie industry dominated by men has been adjusting women to its alleged needs over and over again. John Berger is perfectly right in explaining that other arts have done that, too.
Christoph: The mirror was considered a very powerful tool of female control in ancient cultures already. It is interesting to compare the scenes showing the destruction of mirrors. When a man destroys a mirror, he is mostly alone and driven by rage while facing his loneliness, or sometimes his monstrosity. When the mirror is demolished by a woman, which is only happening when her sphere was entered by a man, it is an expression of despair about the outcome of the before desired relation. One might read it as an escape from the constraints of her visual representation, but by destroying the mirror as her most important tool this happens at the cost of self-sacrifice. We are always interested in dismantling such more or less visible subtexts.
Matthias: There is one crucial shot in Kristall taken from a 60s B movie, Portrait in Black. In this movie, Anthony Quinn’s aggression is not directly targeted at Lana Turner, but at her mirror image that is brutally smashed by him.
Christoph: He switched to the female perspective, so to say. In fact, this image was the starting point for our project. Even after a long research we were unable to find that motif elsewhere.
