Self
In conversations with his friends and colleagues, among them Bernd Upnmoor, Helmut Herbst, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Wyborny, Daniel Kothenschulte and Helge Schneider, Ulrike Pfeiffer takes us on a journey into the broad expanse of Nekes' cabinet of wonder and his cinematic works. At the same time, this documentary provides an insight into the history of experimental film in Germany.
Director of Photography
In 2010, Klaus Wyborny filmed the world premiere of his cinematic work STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES (STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST), 2010 in Vienna’s (meanwhile closed) Stadtkino at Schwarzenbergplatz. He liked the images from the dark movie theater, only partly lit by the film, so much that he did the same at later screenings, presented between Portugal and the United States, in order to weave these images into a fabric of places and times – into a vision of cinema gliding over continents through the light of the projector.What’s celebrated here is a practice that has to be defended for its inherent democratic spirit. In CINÉMA VÉRITÉ, Wyborny has now condensed this cinematic utopia into trailer length, to manifesto density. Cinema, as Wyborny understands it and as the Viennale practices it, is a constant departure into reality.
Director
In 2010, Klaus Wyborny filmed the world premiere of his cinematic work STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES (STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST), 2010 in Vienna’s (meanwhile closed) Stadtkino at Schwarzenbergplatz. He liked the images from the dark movie theater, only partly lit by the film, so much that he did the same at later screenings, presented between Portugal and the United States, in order to weave these images into a fabric of places and times – into a vision of cinema gliding over continents through the light of the projector.What’s celebrated here is a practice that has to be defended for its inherent democratic spirit. In CINÉMA VÉRITÉ, Wyborny has now condensed this cinematic utopia into trailer length, to manifesto density. Cinema, as Wyborny understands it and as the Viennale practices it, is a constant departure into reality.
Director of Photography
Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.
Editor
Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.
Director
Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.
Editor
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.”
Producer
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.”
Director of Photography
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.”
Writer
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.”
Director
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.”
Director of Photography
There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.
Editor
There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.
Producer
There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.
Writer
There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.
Director
There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.
Writer
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.
Director of Photography
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.
Editor
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.
Director
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.
Director
Original Music Composer
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.
Writer
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.
Director of Photography
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.
Editor
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.
Director
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.
Director
Klaus Wyborny's Das letzte Jahr is a take on Ovid's "Fasti" in three parts. Yet, "a character as confused as our protagonist hardly would have been able to write the first three. For that it needs a clearer head, and thus one essentially would have to be even more confused. In this respect, the fourth book would have to be about me, my humble self."
Director
A meeting with Werner Schroeter. An sequence originally featured in Wyborny's Das letzte Jahr extended here to its own short film.
Director
The film begins with a visualization of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, and Wyborny nearly misses the first movement. Yes, the "savage and bare fire" (Kaiser) of this tempestuous last piece of Beethoven nearly tears him apart. He who, while the aggressive Allegro explodes (when the sonata has begun to spread out with a deliberately "false" address in the old French overture rhythm), gets wrapped up in every pause and every peak; he who absolutely wants to work on these dialectical poles of tension in the finest agogic gradations, to shape the contrasts of the tempo in an angular way, will be torn apart. Wyborny escapes from the abyss, Beethoven would have done the same in an emergency, improvising on his own. Many spectators probably did not notice the drama. Others noticed it, were shocked, pulled themselves together, took a breath - and then were overwhelmed by the ingenious solution.
Director of Photography
Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan's Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends--cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz--simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.
Director
Film footage from The Birth of a Nation, Die Abenteuer des Mister West im Lande der Bolschewiki, The Docks of New York, Tabu, Morocco, Citizen Kane, Kiss of Death, Johnny Guitar, Das Rote Frauen-Bataillon, Fireworks, Rabbitt's Moon, Eaux d'Artifice and Invocation of my Demon Brother.
Director
The second 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.
Writer
The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.
Editor
The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.
Director of Photography
The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.
Director
The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.
Himself
A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.
Director
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
Director
Film insert for the second part of the Comédie Artistique "United".
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
Third part of a cycle of five films titled SONGS OF THE EARTH, whose theme is the emergence of European civilization.
After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.
Director
This is the first 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."
Director
The fifth 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.
Director
2084 – mankind is about to go for the stars. Humans with XY-chromosomes live in individual cells having no contact with each other. They are considered to be extremely dangerous for society. They are kept alive because some still believe, that they might harbour some original creativity. To stay alive they have to produce a yearly "survival-permit-panorama" (SPP) that gets fed into the public media net
Director
Part 2 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein"
Director
Combines three short films: Richard, The Blanket of Life, Elementary Editing Theory
Director
Part 3 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein"
Director
Part 1 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein" (for Laurence Rickels)
Director
Silent film of scenes taken in the industrial areas of the Rhine and Ruhr river regions.
Director
A silent film
Director
UNREACHABLE HOMELESS is particularly lost on the eye, at times changing color, focal length, or focus with every other frame. Its staccato rhythms are not unlike those of Paul Sharit's flicker films, though the use of continually recognizable imagery creates compelling effects within the picture's deep space as well. Wyborny's shots are brief but filled with interior motion. He varies his exposure so that background areas suddenly materialize, or uses single framing to scurry occasional cars or barges across the screen.
Director of Photography
A German TV movie
Producer
A German TV movie
Writer
A German TV movie
Director
A German TV movie
Director
A silent film
Director
... 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. ....
Director
Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.
Director
La sintaxis alemana.
Director
An audio-visual film by Klaus Wyborny that focuses on various houses, their patterns and structures.
Director
For 50 minutes or so Pictures presents a series of static, or gently swaying images which are sometimes bucolic landscapes but more often industrial ones (sludgy harbours, power lines, abandoned railway stations or deserted factories). The interplay between the two sets of imagery is not simple. Wyborny photographs his modern ruins at their most ravishing – at dawn or sunset, partially reflected in the water or glimpsed through the trees. Shots recur throughout, optically printed into brilliant colours or else, given the washed out quality of fifth generation Xeroxes. As there are few people shown, one’s impression is of a planet that is populated mainly by cows, barges and hydraulic drills.
Director
A silent film
Director
A silent film made by Klaus Wyborny, while he traveled on an aeroplane from San Fransisco to New York.
Second Unit
Alemania, principios del siglo XIX. Kaspar es un enigmático muchacho que ha pasado toda la vida encerrado y aislado en una cueva: no conoce, pues, el lenguaje ni tiene capacidad para relacionarse con los demás. Cuando, en 1828, alguien lo abandona en Nuremberg con una carta para las autoridades locales, se convierte primero en una especie de atracción de feria y después en una curiosidad científica y social.
Animated feature by Helmut Herbst.
Writer
Animated feature by Helmut Herbst.
Largometraje dividido en cinco episodios: Sun-a-Mul, Alternatim, Kantilene, Moto y Hynningen, Diwan es una película puertas afuera con gente. Con gente que no es ni más ni menos que una parte de la preciosa y exquisitamente fotografiada naturaleza que la rodea. Lo que Nekes logra con paisajes, en un medio que avanza en el tiempo -cómo derrota a un tiempo que modifica las cosas al emplearlo para modificar el paisaje, cómo perturba o destruye las leyes de la cronología a través del mecanismo de rebobinado de la cámara- es un proyecto experimental cautivante.
Director
"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)
Director
I began to develop a high level of mistrust of the so-called logical structures, which is why I turned my back on mathematics and turned to film.
Director of Photography
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.
Writer
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.
Narrator
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.
Director
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.
Director
A silent film
Director
30 minutes of images with music by Anthony Moore
Director
"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
Editor
The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".
Cinematography
The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".
Producer
The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".
Writer
The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".
Director
The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".
Sound
Before a figure skating championship, a television announcement reminds young girls about the emancipation of women.
Director
Using his original 8mm films, but blowing them up to 16mm, he created a collage of images that became his four-part film DÄMONISCHE LEINWAND (The Haunted Screen, 1969), quoting Lotte Eisner’s famous study of Weimar cinema in its title.
Director
A short film
Director
A short film
Director
"At a time which is not ours, this film was found on a heap of scrap metal, close to Nanterre. It tells of the desparate attempt of a group of people to adjust to the rules others have imposed upon them."
Director
A short film
Director
A short film
Director
Dedicated to the Soviet-Astronauts
Director
"When it had come that far, I set out for the green hills of my homeland. The first obstacles I took without difficulties, later it became strained. Finally after many efforts, I made it, exhausted but not without expectations."
Director
Dedicated to Wenzel Lüdecke
Klammer auf Klammer zu is the story of a young man who decides to leave the country after the 1965 West German parliamentary elections. He hitchhikes out of Hamburg, but makes it only as far as the Lüneburg Heath. There, he meets a woman driving a Jaguar, protects her from an “attack” by a light sport airplane and then helps her sell her car to a shepherd. When doubts arise about the buyer’s solvency, the man and woman take the train back to Hamburg …
