Birgit Hein

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…

Dedicated to Dieter Meier. voice-over by Gregory Markopoulos, reading an excerpt in English translation of Paul Valéry’s L’Homme et la nuit (Man and the Night).

A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)

The KALI-FILME are a compilation of 8 single short found footage films, which were composed of Hollywood war-, horror- and women in prison B-pictures, historical war documentaries and porno films. In the trivial films we find images of our own subconscious instincts, which are tabu in the official high culture. KALI is a mother goddess of the Hindu mythology. She is the birth giving mother and at the same time the killing and castrating woman. Since primeval times men do fear her power.

The series of portrait films that the Heins made between 1970-73 attest to their deepening interest in the movement generated solely through cinematic processes of reproduction. [...] Portraits (1970) is a collection of three of these films, Manson, Biggs, and Wilhelm Hein, that each underwent distinct processes of development so as to highlight different perceptual and aesthetic effects.

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For nine months German filmmakers and performance artists, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein lived in New York. LOVE STINKS is a very personal, deeply disturbing and often shocking record of their visit. "For many people it will perhaps be depressing at first sight, but it was created from a tremendous strength"

The film includes sections which explore the illusion of movement within the frame, the movement created by the filming and projection equipment, of movement suggested by camera manipulation (e.g. zoom, re-focus, etc.). Structural Studies exemplified the Hein’s central project of elaborating the central process of the cinema, situating those processes equally in terms of artistic production and mechanical reproduction.

With WEISSFILM (White Film) the Heins ended a ten-year period of producing structural films: works that drew attention to the mediating presence and function of the film material itself. This comparatively short film consists of strips of transparent and semi-transparent film leader, which are roughly spliced together. There is no negative; the film only exists in this one original print. Neither copies on film or video, nor a conversion into a digital format were ever made. With each screening that adds dust and scratches to the material, Weissfilm changes its entity (Florian Wuest)

One of the most important structural films of the period, Rohfilm demonstrates a radical anti-representational approach, destroying the figurative image and bringing attention back to the ‘raw’ photographic material, particularly its physical form. Resisting a stable reference point, the film is a multi-layered onslaught of blurred impressions, shifting surfaces and grating sounds that activates a form of sensuous viewing. In the making of the film, the Heins employed just about every technique of defamiliarization, including direct intervention on the surface of the film strip, rephotography, remediation, and different kinds of mechanical interruption and destruction. It is a striking example of a truly handmade approach. (Kim Knowles)

"This film is a found footage montage of war coverage since World War II. The clips are taken from television documentaries from Arte to CNN. The images show aestheticized fireworks from Dresden to Bagdad, where people only appear as shadows. The sound is also a collage with Liszt's 'Prelude' as the pathetic announcement of the nazi news to the fanfare of the CNN. Only in the last sequences death becomes real. The images of operational missions comes from amateur videos of the American soldiers who have posted them on the net, accompanied by rock music." - Birgit Hein.

For their 35mm Materialfilme (1976), the Heins randomly spliced together a mix of colour and black and white material taken from the header and footer of commercial films. The scratches, scribbles, hand-written and commercially printed numbers and dots that adorn such footage rush past the eye until they are replaced by images consisting only of washed-out colours or scratched black and white frames.

Using minimal means, Materialfilme is conversely one of the absolutely maximal experiences possible in cinema. It's a masterpiece revealing film as a toxic material, an industrial material—a material that corrodes, that wears, that fractures and most of all, a material that can be purposefully manipulated. Extraordinarily active as a filmmaker, film collector and catalyst since the 1960s, Wilhelm Hein is one of film's true individualists; still absolutely dedicated to the moving image as a means of provocation, subversion and documentation of the most intimate type.

Short film by Birgit Hein with paintings and texts by Gabriele Kutz.

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

Birgit and Wilhelm Hein

Diary Film by Birgit Hein in Cuba.

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.

‘625' operates with changing blurs of TV screen rasters, filmed off the TV set and negatively reproduced, and made up of 625 lines. The sound is derived from the light levels of the individual picture elements via a photoresistor.

"Since the beginning of history women have also been perpetrators. They have been as courageous and brave as men. They can be equally brutal and criminal and of course just as horny. Nevertheless, to this day, there exists the feminine ideal of "non-aggressiveness – peacefulness – asexuality“ with which women have been surpessed for centuries. This film shows women as soldiers, partisans, watchmen, criminals, as well as child-bearing, drunk, masturbating strong femals but also as circumsized, dismembered victims, who must pay for the fear that women cause within men. Scenes from old and recent documentaries, from trivial films and my own stagend sequences are mounted to a collage of images. These are sup-plemented by a collage of sounds and a montage of quotes and my own texts. It’s also about me about my fears and my fighting to be able to live my own strength." - Birgit Hein

"Since the beginning of history women have also been perpetrators. They have been as courageous and brave as men. They can be equally brutal and criminal and of course just as horny. Nevertheless, to this day, there exists the feminine ideal of "non-aggressiveness – peacefulness – asexuality“ with which women have been surpessed for centuries. This film shows women as soldiers, partisans, watchmen, criminals, as well as child-bearing, drunk, masturbating strong femals but also as circumsized, dismembered victims, who must pay for the fear that women cause within men. Scenes from old and recent documentaries, from trivial films and my own stagend sequences are mounted to a collage of images. These are sup-plemented by a collage of sounds and a montage of quotes and my own texts. It’s also about me about my fears and my fighting to be able to live my own strength." - Birgit Hein

"Since the beginning of history women have also been perpetrators. They have been as courageous and brave as men. They can be equally brutal and criminal and of course just as horny. Nevertheless, to this day, there exists the feminine ideal of "non-aggressiveness – peacefulness – asexuality“ with which women have been surpessed for centuries. This film shows women as soldiers, partisans, watchmen, criminals, as well as child-bearing, drunk, masturbating strong femals but also as circumsized, dismembered victims, who must pay for the fear that women cause within men. Scenes from old and recent documentaries, from trivial films and my own stagend sequences are mounted to a collage of images. These are sup-plemented by a collage of sounds and a montage of quotes and my own texts. It’s also about me about my fears and my fighting to be able to live my own strength." - Birgit Hein

A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)

A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)