Klaus Wyborny

The year was 1972. A commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals set adrift in space in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Based on Herbst's 1974 animated sci-fi film DIE PHANTASTISCHE WELT DES MATTHEW MADSON.

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.

The story of a group that has a difficult time near Bialystok at dawn on July 19, 1944.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

30 minutes of images with music by Anthony Moore

The year was 1972. A commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals set adrift in space in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Based on Herbst's 1974 animated sci-fi film DIE PHANTASTISCHE WELT DES MATTHEW MADSON.

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.

The story of a group that has a difficult time near Bialystok at dawn on July 19, 1944.

30 minutes of images with music by Anthony Moore

The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

Astronaut Mulligan sets out to find a mysterious planet.

A dozen narrative poems by Durs Grünbein, interpreted in sounds and images. Wyborny treats the texts as sounding boards for his own casual observations about the places Grünbein discusses, at times presenting what the writer saw and at others moving in a completely different direction.

A dozen narrative poems by Durs Grünbein, interpreted in sounds and images. Wyborny treats the texts as sounding boards for his own casual observations about the places Grünbein discusses, at times presenting what the writer saw and at others moving in a completely different direction.

The fourth of five parts of Klaus Wyborny's "Lieder der Erde" / "Song of the Earth" cycle of films, whose theme is "the emergence of modern European civilization." The series comprises five large parts, which are in turn divided into various selections or short films.

A short film

A short film

A German TV movie

A German TV movie

A German TV movie

The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During its screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".

The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During its screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".

The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During its screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".

Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”

Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”

Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”

A society is described in which everyone only has six days to live. The film follows two of these people through their existence. People are born by appearing, they die by disappearing. When all the people appearing in the film died in a more or less natural way, large telegraph poles announce their work on earth.

A short film

Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema.

Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema.

A silent film

"In the early 1970s I filmed compact versions of a series of films that came on television and interested me, which should lead to revealing at least essential parts of their structure. In 1974, 30 of those experiments were mounted in sequence - so more or less chronologically - forming a film entitled Elementary Filmhistory. This film was intended to make a broad reading of the direction in which the cinema grew from 1960." (Klaus Wyborny)

Part 1 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein" (for Laurence Rickels)

... Klaus Wyborny's "Six little Pieces on Film" is the type of work that one is more accustomed to see in Sohos's showcases. Its a Structural film comprised of five or six sequences. Within each there are a set number of shots or kinds of shots which are repeated with variations in camera speed, shot length and processing. Wyborny's subjects include a harbor, a house, an urban street and industrial sites. At tiomes the images fly by so fast that we struggle to recognize them. When the cutting slows down, we can begin to get a sense of place but then the editing will speed up again and the images are turned into elaborate rhythmic patterns. The kinds of perceptual experiences the film affords are characteristic of the Structural genre rather than innovative, but pleasurable nonetheless. ....

No synopsis available yet.

Woman with American accent reads German phrases and words from a study book on manipulated and degraded film stock.

A meeting with Werner Schroeter. An sequence originally featured in Wyborny's Das letzte Jahr extended here to its own short film.

A silent film

The story of a man who never attended Sarah Lawrence College but still made some impact.

One of the most complete of the preserved image programs of the Middle Ages, at the same time abstract and full of touching details. The creation story, which begins with the big bang, has perhaps not been recorded more precisely anywhere. Also ingenious is the mosaic of the Alypius portal, in which the transfer of the bones of St. Mark to the building in front of which the viewer stands is depicted. A wonderful archive of the development of European art between 1100 and 1290, in which the Romanesque image is increasingly supplemented by vivid backgrounds and in the “Dream of Moses” a whole landscape is already presented under a romantically lying crescent moon. In addition, you can see in the circular compositions of the domes (with partly already framed picture fields) not only an early form of cinema that reminds of the movement experiments by Marey and Muybridge, but also the prototypes of our DVDs today, a round disc with image storage in mosaic -Pixels. - K. Wyborny

"Wyborny trained as a mathematician, worked as a cameraman on Werner Herzog's Kasper Hauser. He first attracted the attention of the New York and London avant-gardes … for his elliptical narratives, Dallas Texas - After The Gold Rush (1971) and The Birth of a Nation (1973). Their plots, 'collapsed' by the optical transformation and repetition of individual shots, move from anecdotal narrative to an examination of narrative construction itself. His method was analogous, in a way, to that of novelists like Robbe-Grillet (e.g. Jealousy), though Wyborny was far more interested in the actual materials of film than were the french 'new novelists' when they turned to cinema. His work was further characterised by a romantic appreciation for desolate, ruined vistas." - J. Hoberman

An audio-visual film by Klaus Wyborny that focuses on various houses, their patterns and structures.