Metropolis of Recklessness starts out with a trip that becomes a journey into film itself. After the appearance of some self-referential and sexy china girls, some people feel animated to have intercourse, but remain completely out of focus. Intercourse leads to cell-sectioning & birthgiving and a release into space. Being born one may ask "what should I become" (in the german original: was soll ich werden, written on a wheel), the filmmakers answer that pretty realistically with someone blowing his head away. The hit of the bullet in the head triggers beautiful visual effects, which as well refer to death and decay, and therefore justify the decision. The film then shows various oportunities of how someone could spend his life. But somehow all efforts seem to be in vain and everything is running empty...
2000 16mm color/sound, 12 minutes $40 Rental
(in collaboration with STELLA FRIEDRI )
The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in
this case pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images
are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the
pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide
range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in
the 1930s (invisible woman) until the end of the 1980s.
"A punchy, satirical ride that mixed food, sex, and violence in
perverse Kuleshevian suggestions, all with great comedic timing. A
great example of film giving birth to itself in hybrid, mutated
forms."
-Genevieve Yue, What the Eye Sees: A Report on the International
Experimental Cinema, 2003.
"A pulsating montage of porn and found footage, accompanied by Hindi
pop."
-Chicago Reader
"They are hunters of a lost treasure - numberless archives and
flee-markets have been browsed by Thomas Draschan and Stella
Friedrichs, to find material for their experimental film. With found
footage they composed "To the Happy Few" - enormously musical,
virtuoso and with an apparent passion for the media film. The "magic
machine" cinema is allowed to demonstrate, what she is able to - to
entertain and to make sense - and the directors also show, how she is
working, they celebrate rhythm and material. Toads croaking,
turntables rotating, windows opening, drawing the guns, in between a
little bit of porno, Bollywood signs for the melody. All that is in
an intelligent, amusing and in a speedy manner made."
-André Goetz, Hessian Filmboard.
"...A kind of reprise of post-Conner found footage films, with their
fast-paced, fine-cut, rhythmically and graphically matched images
from feature films, documentaries, industrials, educational films,
cartoons, TV ads, pornography, etc. As the first film of the first
program, To the Happy Few no doubt made everyone in the audience
("the happy few"?) feel right at home—that's how "established" Found
Footage films have become."
-Fred Camper
2003, 16mm color/sound, 4 minutes $20