Michael Brynntrup | film video etc

International Media Art Festival Chiangmai 28. März - 15. April 2003 March 28th - April 15th, 2003 Aktueller Deutscher Experimentalfilm [beim IMAF] Recent German Experimental Film [at IMAF] (curated by Michael Brynntrup)

Programm 2 | program 2

Werkschau Michael Brynntrup | Portrait
(10 film/video/media-art-projects | 82 min + x | 1990 - 2002)

Michael Brynntrup has been a vital and very active part of the German underground over 15 years, having completed numerous experimental features (including the Super8 feature »Jesus - der Film«...) and an incredibly strong body of short personal works. Working from a decidedly queer bent, Brynntrup often integrates a personal diaristic strategy, using humour and pathos to subvert and stimulate while creating films which are both intimate and visually stunning.
(The Blinding Light!!, program notes, Vancouver, Fall 1999 - Alex MacKenzie) [more] [deutsch]

DIE STATIK DER ESELSBRÜCKEN
THE STATICS - Engineering Memory Bridges
21 Min. | 1990 | 16mm | bw | sound [MBCFILM#32]
(Filmpuzzle) | (puzzle film)

Rests and tests from the inquiry into prototypes.
Formal proofs through pregnant experiments on one's own body.
{Information sheet of the film, 1990}

Test cards, doodlings, film techniques and visual experiments - the mechanics of film itself form the narrative of »Die Statik der Eselsbrücken«. And again, the result is hypnotic.
(headpress Manchester, 3/91 - David Kerekes)

Safe sex in the 70ies. Bigger than life in 35mm. All you can eat in 5 minutes.
{Information sheet of the film, 1993}

Using found footage from the early 70s porn films, Michael Brynntrup creates a humorous and titillating moving collage of mediated erotic imagery - one that keeps promising the viewer always anticipated cum shot, as well as asking the question, "How 'graphic' does an image have to be before it comes pornographic?"
(Mix '95 New York, Festival Catalogue)

»All You Can Eat« by Michael Brynntrup takes the 'cum-shot' to new heights with a montage of some of the wildest, orgasmic, facial expressions ever composed to a mellow, easy listening sound track.
(Boys On Film No.6, cover text, dangerous to know 1996)

Photographer Jürgen Baldiga (1959-1993) and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup, - privat discourses and personal investigations of how to deal with images of life and death.
{Information sheet of the film, 1995}

»Aide Mémoire«, a 16-minute short, is decidedly not a documentary about Baldiga's life and work. Twice Brynntrup visits his friend at home, who is sick with AIDS, to ask a few informal questions and to get him on tape. This "Gay Document for Remembering" ("Schwules Gedächtnisprotokoll"), as Brynntrup subtitles the film, is full of gaps: it reproduces few of Baldiga's photographs and mentions only a couple of dates from his life, one of which is his death in December 1993. This reticence, even omission, makes the photographer's life seem all the more transient and the loss that much more poignant.
(Alice Kuzniar, "The Queer German Cinema", Stanford University Press, July 2000)

HERZSOFORT.SETZUNG II (autogene Manipulationen)
HEART.INSTANT/IATION II (Autogenous Manipulations)
7:15 Min. | 1996 | BetaSP + 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#50]

A medium is not an abbreviation that brings one thing to another, but rather a third added to two. A medium is not static, not a bridge, but develops a life of its own whenever activated. The ECG of metempsychosis (from the genes to the zodiac). Electrographics of the 4th Dimension.
{Information sheet of the film, 1996}

»Herzsofort.Setzung« is under no cirumstances a mindless rehearsal of various mediaforms. In spite of different forms like Super8, CD-Rom, VHS-Video, colour copy or computer print, that are presented sometimes in an absurd manner, the single generation of the pictures are linked by the pleasure lying in - the uncertainty of the process, also in the formulation of the question. What remains from the transformed man after his bath in the media?
(Filmwinter, Festival Catalogue 1996 - Ulrich Wegenast)

TABU V (wovon man nicht sprechen kann)
TABU V (About Which One Cannot Speak)
13 Min. | 1998 | 16mm | col | sound [MBCFILM#52]
(Tagebuchfilm) | (film diary)

About which one cannot speak, one must make films.
(loosely based on Ludwig Wittgenstein)
{Information sheet of the film, 1998}

TABU V plays with the medium of film in a light-hearted and inquisitive manner; a concentrated, intelligent and multilayered film in which wit is juxtaposed assuredly with profound, searching analysis.
(New York Film Academy Award - Best Short Film, Panorama 1998)

One film - two originals: the internet version in online quality (www.brynntrup.de/nofilm) and the 35mm version: coming soon to a film festival near you! - "Film is no longer what it should have been." (Rhythm in the age of its digital producability, - an oscilloscope loosely based on Eadweard Muybridge).
{Information sheet of the film, 2000}

Brynntrup's film that actually is not a film (and therefore on 35mm) reproduces the motions of the human body, alluding to 100 years of filmmaking. Now follows -apocalyptically spoken- the odyssey as a computer-controlled dream.
(catalogue Circles-Of-Confusion, Berlin 2001 - Thomas Kliche)

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
(Immanuel Kant, Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, opening sentence)
Born in the body (...and in time...)
{Information sheet of the film, 2001}

Certainly even today some viewers will be affected by this work. Respect for the true art of filmmaking demanded that even the closeup be kept in, where a razor slices through an eye.
(Warning introduction to the German archival copy of UN CHIEN ANDALOU)

TV-X-PERM. (mein Schwulsein als Auftragsarbeit)
TV-X-perm. (Being Queer As A Commission)
3:20 Min. | 2002 | DV | col | sound [MBCFILM#57]
(TV Portraitfilm) | (TV film portrait)

My Gay Self-Portrait For Arte TV. Being queer as a commission. Elastic Reality[TM] as program.
{Information sheet of the film, 2002}

Cela dit, il existe aujourd'hui outre-Rhin des cinéastes gays qui, vu l'évolution des m&brkbar;urs, n'hésitent plus à se référer à leur sexualité dans leur travail cinématographique.
Court-circuit a donné carte blanche aux trois cinéaste allemands Michael Brynntrup, Ades Zabel et Philip Brüning, qui thématisent leur homosexualité sous des facettes très différentes.
(http://www.arte-tv.com/emission/emission.jsp?node=27207&lang=fr - June 2002)

--- PAUSE --- | --- INTERACTIVE WORK ---

From still photography to moving pictures, from silent film to sound film, from celluloid to internet - "It's the viewers who make the pictures." (Marcel Duchamp).
{Information sheet of the film, 2002}

Preis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart für Neue Medien (ex aequo) »Stummfilm für Gehörlose« (Deutschland 2002) - Die didaktischen Tendenzen dieser Arbeit strukturieren Sprache und Humor um. Das Werk, einfach in Form und Botschaft, hat das Interesse und die Aufmerksamkeit der Jury am meisten gefesselt. Indem auf einen zu komplexen Gebrauch von Technik verzichtet wurde, macht diese Arbeit vielen anderen technologisch sehr determinierten Arbeiten, die heute produziert werden, einen Strich durch die Rechnung."
(Internationaler Wettbewerb Filmwinter - Festival For Expanded Media 2003, Begründung der Jury: Joseph Delappe, Ulrike Gabriel, Johannes Milla)

A visit to an interactive curio cabinet - the film artist's own private internet. - "I have been gathering (and gathered myself into digits)." (Michael Brynntrup)
{Information sheet of the CD-ROM, 2000}

»NETC.ETERA (der Film zum Film)« is an interactive visit to the studio of filmmaker Michael Brynntrup. Brynntrup sends the visitors on a quest through his absurdist Wunderkammer, his "personal internet." The work is a private archive that consists of film fragments, interviews, and other characteristic documents of his ego.
(catalogue IMPAKT Festival Utrecht, October 2001)

Michael Brynntrup
Short-Biography

Born in Münster, Germany, 1959. Studied in Freiburg, Rome and Berlin. Master degree Fine Arts at the Braunschweig School of Art in 1991. Experimental poems, texts, paintings, fotography, fotocopies, performances, installations and exhibitions since 1977. Over 50 experimental short films and videos since 1981, two feature films. Digital art in interactive media since 1995 (CD-ROM and internet).

Film exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York (1987, 1992 and 1999). Numerous international exhibitions and film awards. Organisation of avantgarde and gay film events for museums, institutions and international film festivals. Publications on Super8 and Off-Off-Cinemas. Since 1990, guest lectures workshops, project advising and apprenticeship counselling in the area of media production. Currently guest lecturer at Artschool Braunschweig and at Merz Akademie Stuttgart. - The artist lives and works.

Personal notice: As an independant 'experimental' film-maker who sees his task in particular in a medial self-reflection (film as metafilm) I try to lead films in all its different forms to contextual and technical borders. (And naturally I make the viewers come along to these borders). I comprehend film in its essence not as a mass media but as an individual experience which takes place in the head of each viewer.

Michael Brynntrup
Kurz-Biografie

Geboren 1959 in Münster/Westfalen, Studium Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie in Freiburg und Rom. Seit 1982 in Berlin, 1987-91 Studium Freie Kunst (Filmklasse der HBK Braunschweig), 1991 Meisterschüler. Diverse Künste und Copyart seit 1977. Über 50 Filme und Video (davon zwei Langfilme) seit 1981. Digitale Künste in interaktiven Medien seit 1995 (CD-ROM und internet).

'Film exhibition' im Museum of Modern Art New York (1987, 1992 und 1999). Zahlreiche Werkschauen, viele Filmpreise, Organisation und Präsentation von Experimentalfilm-Reihen im In- und Ausland. Stipendiat des Kunstfonds e.V. Bonn (1993) und des Kulturfonds Berlin (2002). Publikationen zu den Themen Super-Acht und berliner Off-Off-Kinos. Seit 1990 Workshops, Lehraufträge, Projektbetreuung und Ausbildertätigkeit im Bereich Medienproduktion. Zur Zeit: Gastdozent an der HBK Braunschweig und an der Merz Akademie Stuttgart. Der Künstler lebt und arbeitet.

Persönliche Anmerkung: Als unabhängiger 'experimenteller' Filmemacher, der seine Aufgabe vor allem in einer medialen Selbstreflektion sieht (Film als Metafilm), versuche ich, Film in allen seinen Erscheinungsformen an dessen inhaltliche und technische Grenzen zu führen. (Und selbstverständlich nehme ich den Zuschauer immer mit an diese Grenzen). - Ich begreife Film in seinem Wesenskern nicht als Massenmedium, sondern als individuelles Erlebnis, das sich vor allem in den Köpfen jedes einzelnen Zuschauers abspielt.