Jürgen Reble
Birth : , Düsseldorf, Germany
History
Jürgen Reble (born 1956 in Düsseldorf) is a German experimental filmmaker. In the late 1970s and 80s he was a member of the film ensemble Schmelzdahin. In the early 1980s he began making his own work in film, performance and installation often rooted in manual processing of film footage using mechanic and chemical influences and reconstruction of the cinematographic apparatus. Since 1992 he works together with the sound artist Thomas Köner in the fields of film, installation and performance. His works have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Auditorium of the Louvre, Paris; Filmmuseum Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 1997 he got a scholarship from the Kunstfond in Bonn. In 2009 he made his first HD digital work, Materia Obscura, using footage from his earlier film Instabile Materie (1995). Reble lives and works in Bonn, Germany.
Director
Part one starts with an overview of the prehistory of moving images in the 19th Century: Zoetrope, Phenakistiscope, Chronophotagraphy etc. until the invention of the Cinematograph and Kinetograph/Kinetoscope. The second part will be devoted to the Brothers Lumiere following 20 of their amazing documentaries between 1895 to 1905. The third part is a new interpretation of A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, San Francisco 1906.
Director
Around a water scoop are ordered images of old, expressionistic films and archaic evolutionary motives. Inbetween, like a veil, are embeded chemical substances which were not washed out during the developing process. The narration dissolves more and more in the abstract metric of the materials. (Jürgen Reble)
Director
Some documentary material shot in the surroundings of Bonn is superimposed with found footage from Timbuktu. By chemical influences during the developing process the material gets an painterly quality evoking an atmosphere somewhere between dream and reality.
Director
In september 2008 I shot with a photo camera some passers-by at a tram station in Zagreb. I made 132 single frames in an interval of 4 seconds over a period of 8 minutes. With the support of a special algorithm I rendered the estimated and missing inbetween frames on a computer. The rendered images were transferred on a 16mm film and processed with special chemicals. During this procedure some agressive substances disaggregated the silver based image and transformed it drop by drop into its molecules. Succeeding the dried film was digitized frame by frame in high definition. The final editing was done on a computer. On the soundtrack I added fragments of the original sound recording which were atomized by electronic device and reorganized to a kind of sound cloud created of dust.
Director
This final digital version is based on the performance TABULA SMARAGDINA which I played together with the musician Thomas Köner between 1997 and 2004. For more information look at Performances. - In 2008 I started to digitize the 16 mm originals frame by frame in high definition just to reorganize the materials and give them after all a form for a linear progression. Contents are cristallized salts and dyes wich are changing rhythm and structure constantly between moving images. Inside the chemical elements of the film appears the bizarre richness of its materiality. (Jürgen Reble)
Director
This work is based on some excerpts of the film "Instabile Materie" which I realized in 1995. Sorce material were handprocessed 16mm film stripes which I covered with chemicals. In this so called "chemograms" the used substances mostly salts became moulding shapes. Years later I digitized parts of the film frame by frame in high resolution and started with the computer to slow down the speed just to analyse the sequence of events. So arose a morphology of the film emulsion with the embeded substances and a bizarre, strange world full of magic revealed. (Jürgen Reble)
Director
Video images, shot from the Yamanote train that follows its route around the city of Tokyo have been transferred to black & white 16mm film in order to treat them by hand with chemicals and create a soundtrack using grains. - A dark journey through a world made up of cloudy, lost grains of film in a microscopic dimension.
Director
Arktis is a poetic approach to the bizarre landscape of ice, rock, and water; a journey to the arctic ocean and surroundings, with images and sounds. Seventy one-second scenes of the arctic serve as the original material, which is then transformed in its texture, time lapse, color and light qualities to create a material reminiscent of landscape painting. The sound collage uses fragments from sounds of nature and samples from a piece of music for violin and song, which are also transformed in a manner similar to that of the visual pictures. (Jürgen Reble)
Director
A 1997 live recording of Thomas Köner & Jürgen Reble's collaborative film. A separate final version was released as a digital recording in 2010.
Director
This film was provoked by a trip on the overhead railway through the centre of Chicago in 1991. I filmed a twelve minute piece facing forwards in the direction we were driving. Three years later I came across the film material once more. The memory of it had faded, and its images were just as vague. So I worked on the material using a bleaching bath. The complex, cuboid-like architecture of the city came out in a test of the substantial and then sank back into the minority - dissolving to a lump of cosmic dust. I was first able to identify a projection of the experienced, within the undercurrent of disintegration. (Jurgen Reble)
Director
This film is made by some beautiful and unique alchemical transformations of the film material itself. It is a visual expedition into the world of matter, which shows the bizarre richness of the smallest particles floating in the film emulsion. The crystals' constantly changing structures, enriched by the textures, bring about an almost tactile experience, a visual expression of its own base matter.(Jürgen Reble)
Director
"I came across an old industrial film by Siemens on computer and their language. To better appreciate the film I first of all cut off the sound, I then took out the colours and reduced the speed. Slowly the very substance of the film emerged and I began to see the deep meditation that was hidden in the film. Finally I made a black and white copy of the material and let the images pulsate in a general breathing rhythm." —Jürgen Reble
Director
The film consists of sequences from what appear to be social documentary, people at a zoo, in a park, in the street in the snow; “nature” films of insects and reptiles; original, found and stock footage with no apparent associative or narrative function, tinged through the filter of Reble’s chemical treatments that gives the images a painterly quality, an arbitrary resonant abstraction. - Senses of Cinema
Director
An old trailer had been in the trees of a garden for months. Now and then it was coated with various chemicals. Through chemical disintegration and weathering the old plot of the film resolved to a great extent. Colours emerged from black and white. Black areas transformed into mountaineous regions.
Director
PASSION is a film diary in which Reble accompanies his unborn child through the year, following the seasons until his birth. Reble's unfamiliar chemistry generates slowly pulsating structures and colors. Micro and macroscopic imagery build a near abstract, hypnotic landscape - an intimate perception of creation.
Director
Based on the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm this montage brings together heterogeneous super 8 Found Footage and own personal shots. By hand developement and chemical influences an interwoven story about the conversion of simple elements to gold came out.
