Florian Zeyfang
SPLICEFILM, 2013, Homage to Birgit and Wilhelm Hein's WEISSFILM, 1977 (2013)
SPLICEFILM consists of photographs taken from Birgit and Wilhelm Hein’s WEISSFILM (1977), cut by cut, including perforation and framed through the background. WEISSFILM was the last material film by the Hein’s and it consists of numerous snippets of 16mm material that is white or black or partially exposed, but never exposed. In addition, the film constantly tears and collects dust and scratches. WEISSFILM has never been digitized and there is only one copy. The “homage” is much slower, ten times as long as the original, which is about five minutes. In SPLICEFILM, one only sees the cuts and not the material in between. The film is deliberately shown in a typical digital format, HD 16:9 and the landscape format additionally highlights the cuts. The sound is developed from the original, where the optical sound recorder receives its signals from all kind of things, but not from a sound track.
SPLICEFILM (2013) is symptomatic of the shift from film material to the digital, of employing retrospect and delay. SPLICEFILM is not a digitization of the original but a translation. One can recognize in it the possibility of a dialectical reading, and parallel narratives arise. It starts with the entirely different way of viewing: the length of the video and the impression of a zoom – even if we are still in fact watching 16mm film material. One immediately discerns how colorful so-called WHITE FILM is. But the story time of this non-narrative is perforated by the image time of these anti-images, by means of single frames and delay. This “delayed cinema” may achieve what WEISSFILM once did in 1977, namely, the images themselves take on a dimension “potentially able to challenge patterns of time”, through a contemporary, formal-political response to the digital image and its consequences based on this retrospective view to an avant-garde film.
For theatrical screenings, random outtakes of SPLICEFILM are screened in different lengths, and will be titled (for example) Splice 181 to Splice 243 of SPLICEFILM, 2013, Homage to Birgit and Wilhelm Hein's WEISSFILM, 1977.