SYNOPSIS

CYCLES

Appropriation of the QATSI Trilogy

‘That is really expanded cinema, explaining cinema as a direct theory for the eye.’
Pip Chodorov, Director of The Film Gallery, Paris after watching the project's silent version

24 fps - Deconstructing Movies was the title of an exhibition that opened on December 24, 2015 in Beijing/China. The exhibition was dedicated to the idea of making each and every individual frame of a given movie visible, in this case it was Zhang Yimou’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ that had been translated into a digital filmscroll first before being printed on wallpaper that meandered more than 40 meters in length and three meters in height along the gallery walls. More cinematographic examinations were to follow, resulting in the series Untitled Filmscrolls.

The climax seemed to be reached, though, with the digital translation of Godfrey Reggio’s QATSI Trilogy, renamed CYCLES (CYCLE OF DISRUPTION - CYCLE OF WAR - CYCLE OF CHANGE), making hundreds of thousands of frames visible, the DNA of a film. The excessive use of experimental film techniques in the original films (time lapse, jump cuts, use of color etc) revealed the most fascinating visual meta levels of the cinematic language, translating into an endless image-flow of caleidoscopic patterns no one may have been aware of existed. As in real life, viewers of a film are locked into the unfolding process of time being part of time. Looking at a scroll is like looking at time from the outside, past, presence and future happen simultaneously, transcending the usual timeline.

The soundtrack by Tom Fleischhauer (2024) uses as guide line for its composition the center piece of the installation 'Cycle of War'.

After 86 minutes and two of the three screens gone black, it ends. With one screen left (Cycle of Change) the last 10 minutes remain silent, a tribute to Godfrey Reggio who spent 14 years of his early adolescent life as monk in a monastery in silence.

Burkhard Philipp Harder

NARBE BERLIN | SCAR BERLIN
(new acoustic-visual interpretation)

FIVE ELEMENTS

IN NIETZSCHE's HEAD

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