Born Vienna 1952. Drawings since 1962. Music since 1964. Photography since 1967. Architecture since 1970. Videos since 1977. Films since 1981. Sounds since 1981. Performances since 1983. In Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg, England, Morocco, Greece and Turkey.
Member of MEDIENWERKSTATT WIEN from 1980-1983. Member of DER BLAUE KOPRESSOR Floating & Stomping Company since 1983. Member of SIXPACK FILM since 1996.
"What is very convincing in Gustav Deutsch's cinema is the energy of a project which has been rigorously accomplished. But there is even more. Warm sight which is able to generate curiosity and contact, and then politically irreducible and consequent, which emerges from that rigorously prearranged system of vision. A theorem of classicism drawn out by means of an inexorable and unblurred experimental cinema." - Allesandro Rais, Límmagine leggera, Palermo
"Many of Gustav Deutsch's works are dominated by a gesture of pause, of all-around and general view. Without hesitation he puts, where he does not work with found footage, himself into the centre. As well behind, as in front of the camera, he focuses in his work on a phenomenology of gestures and performances, not unlike the text miniatures of Vilem Flusser." - Bert Rebhandl, Der Standard, Vienna
"Gustav Deutsch - an archaeologist of the cinema, studying the choreography of banality: a view on the subtle, hidden dancing steps of daily life." - Stefan Grissemann, Die Presse, Vienna
"A collection of countless holiday films filled with clichés. The material dates from the fifties and sixties when holiday filming was rather [more] common than now. Gustav Deutsch's approach was simple and effective: He ordered the clichés systematically, and edited them into small series." - Rotterdam Film Festival, Catalogue 1994
1 Still observations 1.1 Still images - Signes 1.2 Moving Images - The sea 1.3 Happenings 2 Records of Movements 2.1 from cars 2.2 from bikes 2.3 from ships 3 Descriptions 3.1 from left to right 3.2 from right to left 3.3 upwards 3.4 downwards 3.5 searching 3.6 chasing 4 Reactions 4.1 Mimicry, gesture 4.2 Walking 4.3 Performances 4.4 Looks 5 Extern influences 5.1 Film numbers
1990, 16mm, b&w/color/si, 35m, $105
In cooperation with Mostafa Tabbou / Morocco.
An authentic film-experiment in 600 takes, three seconds each. A European's private images in Africa and an African's in Europe. A mutual perception of the one's and the other's native place.
As a child I pictured an oasis to myself as a small lake surrounded by palms, with nothing but sand dunes around it. Only when I first visited an oasis ten years ago, did I have to realise that my picture was wrong. In a similar way this happened to me with almost all those exotic pictures of travel lust impressed upon my mind by children's books, travel folders and motives on bank notes. I was quite surprised when I discovered pictures of snowscaped mountains in many caf�s in North Africa. Pictures, like my own of the oasis, immediately exposed to me such false identities one people establishes of another country, another culture, another people, and which are maintained as scenery for foreigners all over the world, to avoid "dis"-illusions. Precisely these "dis"-illusions opened my eyes.
1993, 16mm, color/so, 33m, $100
39 fragments of an Indian feature film with French and Arabic subtitles were found on Boulevard Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah in Casablanca. 21 were used to (re)construct a one-minute story comprising four thematic areas: 1 love, 2 jealousy, 3 crime, 4 business. Each of the four headings has a colour and a word assigned with it. 1 orange/Film, 2 turquoise/Speaks, 3 violet/Many, 4 blue/Languages.
"The painter Jackson Pollack was of the opinion that emotion was to be found in the material, in the colour itself, to which Coppola quipped with regard to film - 'the emotion is the emulsion.' Cinema is necessarily bound by its material parameters. The staccato coloured inserts in this film are not the only things to demonstrate this proposition. The found film pictures themselves reveal the plasticity of celluloid. Not even the perforations and soundtrack forming the side boundaries of the frame manage to detract from the unexpected and alien character of the image. A one-minute piece of colour, material, emotions, market and cultural cross-over." - Elisabeth Büttner
1995, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
100 Elements of repetition in Life and Film. Rhythmically repeated movements were a presupposition for the origin of our life. From our first breathing on rhythmically repeated movements of hearts and lungs regulate our blood circulation and respiration. Because of rhythmically repeated motions we are able to move. The repetition of everyday rituals sets our daily course. Repetition determines our working life and characterizes sports. Music and dance, poetry and rhetoric are based upon repetition.
"With the POCKET CINEMA project I want to trace the repetitions in life and film as an attempt at the essential elements of film - motion and time." - Gustav Deutsch
"'Attempt' implies foremost the shared experience of a test battery that has achieved an accumulation of a further, productive unknowingness. It is about strangeness in the acquainted." - Der Standard
"Gustav Deutsch assumes the role of the ethnologist of daily life, who reduces versatility to the common denomination of a general pattern." - Salzburger Nachrichten
1996, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
1 movement and time 2 light and darkness 3 an instrument 4 material 5 a blink of an eye 6 a mirror
A Tableau-Film, to be continued.
"However - my work has been in the direction of scientific research. I have never engaged in what is termed 'production'," said Louis Lumiere in his last interview in 1948. Like him, other pioneers of film, like Georges D�meny and Etienne-Jules Marey, developed and used their inventions as instruments for their scientific investigations. Starting from their first chronophotographic series, upcoming scientists of our century have used film, exploiting all kinematographic possibilities, and including other, parallel to film developed methods for the production of images, like the x-ray technique, as an instrument for the exploration of the world. The film-images produced within this process have not only changed our perception of the world, but our imagination of life and death as well.
1998, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 60m, $180