Moucle Blackout

This film is a kind of anthology about Vienna, from the invention of film to the present day. The aim is to break down the usual clichéd "image of Vienna" such as that found in the traditional "Vienna Film" by juxtaposing documentary footage, newly shot material and subjective sequences created by various artists. Individual, self-contained sections of the film gain new meaning within the context of historical material. Familiar sites appear estranged when edited together with historical scenes. Other scenes appear like a persiflage or satirical. The film does not incorporate any commentary whatsoever. It is a collage of diverse materials aimed at conveying a distanced image of Vienna to the viewer

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

experimental short film by Moucle Blackout

experimental short film by Moucle Blackout

There is reflection on the passing of time, transience, yesterday and tomorrow, the images show memories from trips in the Canadian wilderness, without the travelers beloved family, the loss of the daughter from her first marriage, a strange new country, strangers passing by, a quarry in Sardinia and the finality of days. Paths of no return. The text runs past without images, the film moves from the end back to the beginning. (Moucle Blackout)

The morning after. The landscape, the environment, leftovers from breakfast, the man. Bruckner´s pathos - all of that upon a rough surface. A woman´s voice says: "ohh - ob - O.B. - ob er..? - Ober - Oberflächen! - Oberfächen-Kontakt... ("Ohh - if - O.B. - if he..? supreme - surfaces! - superficial contact.."), after having previously spelled out the letters, O.B.E.R.F.L.Ä.C.H.E.N. The original material consisted of a S-8 film. It was projected onto the palm of my hand and refilmed with a 16mm camera. The hand is being closed at the end of the film - it opens again at the words "Oberflächen-Kontakt" (superficial contact); frames of film fall out. The surfaces have touched one another but the contact has been superficial. Film on the palm, the touch of an image. To place something in your hand, to feel it, to handle it. The result is part of the whole - single images, splinters of film and thought. O.k., that is the way it is. (Moucle Blackout)

The theme is a wordless but nonetheless critical observation and juxtaposition of the historical and - at the time - modern architecture in Vienna with the decay, destruction and redesign of functional buildings, the beauty and ugliness of an old city and its pathos, and its new outskirts. In the second part of the film, a technique of double exposure, the superimposition of color negative and positive, is used as a kind of transfiguration of the situation. (...) Stoned Vienna was made around the same time as ViennaFilm 1896-1976 by Ernst Schmidt jr. That's why there are a number of parallels that came about by chance. A repeatedly exposed scene, the wax doll Dolly, a symbol of the way Vienna is treated, was made available to Ernst Schmidt jr. as a contribution to his ViennaFilm. (Moucle Blackout)

The basic material consisted of about 30 photos showing some close friends, and a dead pig we had found on a road. The pictures of the pig are used as a symmetric motion-montage. I took proper and left/right-inverted photos which are moved back and forth symmetrically over the central axis. The introduction-scene shows Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” cross-fading the figures at both sides and following the title, also Venus with a symmetrical pig-montage. A detail of B.’s picture appears at the end of the film on a wrapper of a lavoratory-deodorant (snif). Three Beatles songs emphazise the performance with their text. The pig is used as a symbol for the woman as a victim. It also stands for any associations to pig as proverbial: poor swine, filthy pig, greedy pig or it may allude to a pigsty or a pig in a poke, etc. The friends appear as: two dancing women, two lovers, a cock, a sex-changing head, etc. Part of the photos were shot by Marc Adrian. (M.B.)

The product of a collaboration with writer Karin Schöffauer, who reads her own text, the film was made as part of the Text&Film project. An epic language of solitude, mourning and rebellion against it, accompanied by repeated entrances into the uninhabited space. (Moucle Blackout)

The range of symbols is manifold and multi-layered, it is a film that utilises many fades, dissolves and double exposures. The "Galactic Northpole"- a fiction of astronomy, an assertion; Berenice had sacrificed her hair on the alter of a goddess in order to gain her approval. One becomes the victim of others - yet one also becomes a victim of oneself.