Gustav Deutsch (1952) who passed away in 2019, was a master of the found-footage film genre. Deutsch scoured through film archives all over the world to find the images he wanted for his film collages. He has been called a ‘film-maker without a camera’ and a ‘found footage juggler’. As a cinematographic archaeologist he gave the public a glimpse of film history, which he then rearranged to achieve his own creative ends. Deutsch had a particularly close relationship with Eye and with the Austrian Film Museum. His Film ist.-cycle, is a montage of images from amateur movies, scientific & entertainment productions & silent film fragments, found in film collections around the world. This instalment dates from 2004 (77 min.)

CONTENTS

Consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films. These films are about the acrobatic flights of pigeons, the intelligence testing of apes; about reversed worlds and stereoscopic vision; hurricanes and impact waves in the air. How glass breaks, children walk and how a Mercedes crashes into a stone wall in slow motion. The contempt with which scientific films are received is not directed against the content, but rather against their conventional, unimaginative, ridiculous and commentary-contaminated appearance. Similarly, the fascination with some of the teaching films can be attributed almost exclusively to the power of their images – images which one has never seen, even in the cinema.

Runtime: 77 mins.