"Compelling visual feasts, dense, compacted cinema. Müller weaves a kinetic spell of motion and vitality with seemingly the simplest of means. This is maximalism - sorely needed in our movie going venues." - Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco, 1990
"In total independence Müller has succeeded in creating one of the most unique and exciting contributions to world cinema of the last years. His oeuvre is as fascinating as a secret garden, although everyone can find access to it." - Bref, Paris, 1995
"Müller's films belong to the most exciting German cinema produced throughout the last decade." - EPD Film, Frankfurt, 1996 "That his empathy with his subjects is so perfectly borne into the apparatus of a materialist film practice, makes Müller one of the fringe's most powerful and most perfect makers." - Millennium Film Journal, 1998
"In Müller's cinema of confrontation, original and found footage mingle in most diverse manners. The filmmaker's analytic view helps him separate and combine the footage according to his ever-changing intentions. The dream-like quality of these films is intensified by the use of double-exposures and superimpositions as well as the soundtracks with their pervasive basses and slow, hypnotic rhythms. By connecting the most diverse genres with one another in a great verve, Müller throws a light on what is conventionally considered private or even queer. His oeuvre is one of the most convincing of today's cinema and it powerfully renews the way homosexuality has been represented so far." - Art Press, Paris, 1993
"Müller exploits Super 8 as the medium of individual memory and the stuff of handmade manipulation. The emphasis is on found footage, especially home movies, as the source for images which the filmmaker fuses and transforms. The medium is used to express the essence of personal relationships in FINAL CUT, where the filmmaker literally has the 'final cut' with regard to his father's home movies." - Barbara Scharres, Chicago Film Center Gazette
"Restlessly inventive, Müller's image-rich films deal with the intersection of the private and public spheres .... His films evince a technical sophistication (multi-screen-reprojection, dying/hand processing) that belie North American notions of Super 8's rough and ready aesthetic. His deeply felt and elegantly constructed work mark him as one of the most important filmmakers of his generation." - Mike Hoolboom, Independent Eye
"FINAL CUT is a ritual in surveillance, animate and inanimate." - Anthony Foot, L'Eight
Awards: Festival International du Film Super 8 et Video, Montreal, 1987; Verden Short Film Festival, 1987.
1986, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 12m, $35
"EPILOGUE is a masterfully constructed symphony in decaying, dissolving, multiple-screen, burned and colored imagery. An eyelid flutter in a children's hide-and-go-seek game sets off an extremely emotional voyage into a painful, metallic, destructive system, transforming human emotions into the grain of pure function." - Andreas Wildfang, Hallwalls, Buffalo
"EPILOGUE effects a manipulation of the retina of a very special kind. The film is almost impossible to describe: it is a mixture of abstract art, archeology, childhood memories and the landing on the moon." - Alexandra Jacobson, Neue Westfaelische
"EPILOGUE is an abundance of images; a murky history pours from screen and speakers and our senses grab these fragments and paste them down into a collage of meanings. Footage degenerates as it is refilmed; an entire drama of composition lies within the decomposing material awaiting to be exhumed by the thoughtful microphone, the patient camera." - Owen O'Toole, Independent Eye
Awards: First Bielefeld Script Award, 1986; Hamburg No Budget Film Festival, 1987; Bonn Experi, 1987; American Federation of Arts Experimental Film Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1989.
1986-1987, S8mm, color/so, 16m, $45
Originally Super 8.
"Müller's virtuosic rephotography, editing and hand processing techniques are hurled into an erotic maelstrom, remaking the divisions of the Word in a continual flux of inside and out, container and contained. Learned in the tradition of Eisenstein, Genet, Anger and Jarman, THE MEMO BOOK seeks to remake the male body in a celebratory flow of communion and despair, mythos and logos. One of the great erotic works of German cinema." - Mike Hoolboom, Independent Eye
"Few films invite the viewer so quickly into the dream-labyrinth. THE MEMO BOOK begins with an avalanche, a burial, and then the rest of the film involves digging through all that debris: through rooms of memory, memories of a friend so young but dead of AIDS. Taking up the West Coast style of Hindle and Baillie, Müller orchestrates a poliphony of superimpositions." - Owen O'Toole, Notes on Europe
"One of the most beautiful and original of recent experimental films. A tender, magical and melancholy love poem by an important new talent." - John Gianvito, Dreams of Life
"Generally, this excellent piece of work encompasses everything and anything that one wants out of a cinematic experience and can't be too highly recommended. It is maximalism - sorely needed in our movie-going venues." - Warren Sonbert, Bay Area Reporter
Awards: Distinction "highly recommended" by the Wiesbaden Commission of Valuation; Oberhausen Int'l Short Film Festival, 1990; Verden Short Film Festival, 1990; Audience Award as best German Film at Experi, Bonn, 1989; SF Int'l Film Festival, 1991.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
"She screams. She falls silent. The expectation of terror makes her terror. But what she faces is nothing but the observer's view. She is the observed. Cliches of melodrama unite into a drama of stereotypes. The brillian montage of cases in point reveals the mechanism of voyeurism in HOME STORIES by Matthias Müller." - German Association of Film Critics
Award: Best German Short Film, German Film Critics Association, 1991
1991, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. "
We see huge ocean liners under steam docked in the harbours; constant fade-ins and fade-outs make the screen breathe heavily, open up and close again.
"Circular stops associate openings of the human body ....
"But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour." - Peter Tscherkassky
Awards: Distinction "Highly Recommended" by the German Commission of Valuation
Exhibition: London Film Festival; NY Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival.
1993, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
"ALPSEE is a brilliant autobiographical essay on childhood, family and memory. It is an exceedingly complex work revealing new layers every time you watch it. In Alpsee, terror has taken on a harder-edged shape compared to previous films by Matthias Müller; this nightmare has something alluring about it. I could not take my eyes off the mellow colors of this film. In the end, the blue of the skies is falling down and turning into red. This part appears almost Dionysian to me, sensuous and liberating, as if the cyclical structure of ALPSEE had to be blown up in the end by a final intimate moment." - Christian Cargnelli
"This tidy doll's house is filled with the fetid air of the Fifties and Sixties. But Müller does not play the indictor's part: ALPSEE has a mellow, refined humor and keeps an ironical distance to its subject matter." - Alexandra Jacobson
Awards and Exhibition: Distinction, "Recommended" by the German Commission of Valuation; Berlin Film Festival; Main Prize, 41st Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Wellington Film Festival; First Prize, Filmothek of Youth.
1994, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $65
Heavenly bodies explode. Stars scatter. The after-glow of a physical encounter.
"Against a pitch-black night-time sky, splendid fireworks explode. From a different darkness, gleaming male body parts light up. Meticulous editing and solarisation make the fireworks seem to emerge from the very center of the human bodies." - Rotterdam Film Festival
Exhibition: Impakt Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival; Oberhausen Short Film Festival and others.
1994, 16mm, b&w/so, 2m, $20
Producer, Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Matthias Müller; Sound/Music: Dirk Schaefer; Voice-over: Mike Hoolboom; Postproduction: Raimond Goebel; Set Design: Heiko Dupke, Matthias Müller; Costumes: Martin Scheibe; Cast: Heiko Dupke, Bavo Defurne, Ariana Mirza.
Ein Mann bereitet sich auf seinen bevorstehenden Tod vor.
Er tritt eine Reise an, von der er annimmt, daß es sich um seine
letzte handelt.
Sie führt ihn in die PENSÃO GLOBO in Lissabon, von der er zu
ziellosen
Exkursionen/durch die Stadt aufbricht.
Der Film erz�hlt von einem Leben im Übergang:
"Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of
myself."
A man faces his approaching death.
He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the "Pensão
Globo" in Lisbon,
where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city.
The film depicts a life in a state of transition.
"Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself."
Un homme fait face à sa mort prochaine.
Il part pour ce qu'il consid?re comme son dernier voyage et se
retrouve à Lisbonne
au "Pensão Globo," d'ou il erre sans but au coeur de la ville.
Le film dépeint une vie en état de transition.
"Parfois c'est homme si j'étais déjà parti,
devenue un fant(tm)me de moi-même."
Awards: First Prize, Association of German Film Critics; Best German Short Film and Interfilm-Jury Prize, Oberhausen Int'l Short Film Festival, 1997.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $65
Brasilia, the "city of hope," "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" (Umberto Eco), is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a location as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in VACANCY is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.
1998, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $60
Made with Christoph Girardet
A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object. In Mirror, frozen tableaux are animated by light alone, which creates connections but also isolates the figures and separates them from the surrounding space. Like the axis of a mirror, a tear runs through the centre of the image, separating the two halves but uniting them into a single motif at the same time.Mirror creates an atmospheric image of the 'in between', the nameless sphere between belonging and isolation.
“The characters in a tragedy, the air they breathe, the settings, are sometimes more absorbing than the tragedy itself, as are the moments before and afterwards, when the plot is at a standstill and the dialogue is silenced.” (Michelangelo Antonioni)
“Mirror might seem to be the opposite of the Phoenix Tapes in that it uses no found footage and contains not a single moment of high drama. Or so it seems. This time the artists have devoted themselves to the moments in a movie before and after a crucial speech or event: the time, as it were, in between times. They have considered a phrase from Antonioni – 'The characters in a tragedy, the air they breathe, the settings, are sometimes more absorbing than the tragedy itself, as are the moments when the plot is at a standstill, the dialogue is silenced' – and turned it into a visual truth. They have, in effect, made a movie out of the hiatus, the pause... the caesura.
“A woman, a man, both in evening dress; at some sort of gathering, or the ruins of a party. Isolated, unspeaking, rarely in the same shot, the froideur between them is palpable. It seems like the end of a love affair, or the revelation of betrayal, or at the very least a sudden surge of mistrust. Except that these are not the routine questions that this film inspires.
“The tableaux in which the figures stand like statues are animated by light alone. A light that glimmers, or suffuses a room like smoke, or crackles and fizzes from overhead lamps in long corridors. It polishes a grand piano, soothes the cheek of the pensive woman, surrounds the man with glassy halations and then makes him vanish, as if his part was over, before the room in which he stands disappears. It describes separation, illuminates solitude, removes these figures from their surroundings.
“This sense of disassociation is increased, moreover, by a mysterious division – as it were between reality and reflection – in the film. You hardly notice it at first, but there is a vertical fissure running down the centre of the image. It turns out there are not one but two images, separate halves projected through separate lenses that unite to create one motif. Without a centre, a meeting point, the figures are forced even further to the edges. And the effect is extraordinarily subtle and rich. Fragility made tangible, beautiful, beguiling. Paralysis made unexpectedly dramatic. The more you watch, the more you wonder not about what has been said or done by these people but at the terrible distance between them, how sealed and impenetrable each has become to the other: glacial as a mirror image.” —Laura Cummings, The Observer, London, May 9, 2004
“Presented as a highly formalized series of three separate character tableaus whose but interrelation with - or disjunction from - each other is intrinsically (and systematically) transformed at each instance of flashing light solely through variations in setting (not in the position or pose of the characters), Mirror is an ingeniously conceived and elegantly crafted experiment on the subtle effects of modulation of mise-en-scène as well as a fascinating corollary to Kuleshov-like visual association of images and significance.” —http://www.filmref.com/journal.html, October 2004
“The elegant protagonists flit enigmatically in and out of view, but the real star of the show is the light. Sumptuous, formally composed cinematic images, all surface and suggestion, convey the split in a couple’s connection through patterns of light that isolate and separate them. It’s a haunting piece.” —Tina Jackson, The Guardian, London, September 13, 2004
“For Mirror, a twin-screen installation, Girardet and Müller take their inspiration from the subtle psychological reflections and the social alienations to be found in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. A shifting light animates frozen tableaux in which a love affair appears to disintegrate.” —Guardian Guide, London, September 4, 2004
“The absent other in Christoph Girardet’s and Matthias Müller’s two-screen DVD projection Mirror, 2003, is (…) the non-existent greater portion of a feature film – or, perhaps, the active part of a life. We’re in a hotel, or a large private house, where the artificial lights sputter like candles – though less through dodgy wiring than a desire to evoke narrative drama – and plunged into a succession of reflective pauses between missing flashpoints of action. (…) But there’s a clear theme here, one familiar to viewers of Antonioni’s films (which the artists claim as an influence; there’s a dash of Robbe-Grillet in there too): that of individuals unable to propel their own narratives.” —Martin Herbert, Art Monthly, no.10, 2004
2003 35mm CinemaScope, color, sound (Dolby), 8:10 min, $75