Matthias Müller
Nacimiento : 1961-03-29, Bielefeld, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Historia
Matthias Müller was born in Bielefeld, Germany in 1961. Müller is an artist working in film, video and photography. He is based in Bielefeld and Cologne, Germany. Studied Arts and German Literature at Bielefeld University and Fine Arts at HBK Braunschweig. Master’s degree. Since 2003, Professor in Experimental Film at Academy of Media Arts, KHM, Cologne. Müller organized numerous avant-garde film events such as the "Found Footage Film Festival" (1996 & 1999) and the first German festival of autobiographical films "Ich etc." (1998) and various touring programs. With his films and videos he has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam. His work has also been featured in several group and solo exhibitions. His films and videos are part of the collections of institutions such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Nederlands Film Museum, Amsterdam, Australian Centre For The Moving Image, Melbourne, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Goetz Collection, Munich, the collection of Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître, London, and Tate Modern, London.
Source: Lightcone
Director
The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city symphony, disaster movie and media trauma therapy become one.
Director
“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.
Recording Supervision
Executive Producer
There's a reason why many consider Iggy Pop the godfather of punk - every single punk band of the past and present has either knowingly or unknowingly borrowed a thing or two from Pop and his late-'60s/early-'70s band, the Stooges, who reunited in 2003 and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. We welcome this outstanding artist, who is known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics, at the Baloise Session.
Director
This is somebody, nobody, anyone. This is us in the course of time. Persistently, in vain. The self is the need for permanent self-assertion.
Director
The body as a wound that never heals.
Editor
Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.
Sound Designer
Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.
Producer
Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.
Director
Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy.
Writer
About blind people in Hollywood films
Director
About blind people in Hollywood films
Director
Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and lips, juxtaposed against the sensual application of assorted foams, lotions, waxes, and creams, these carefully constructed, plastic images begin to fade, speckle, crack, distort, and burn with the material deterioration of the celluloid itself, before being reduced to the stark whiteness - and unadulterated purity - of an empty projection. At once idealized and grotesque, the disintegrating images become an integral reflection of the title's double entendre of hide as both an organic surface that inherently decays with time, and the deliberate act of concealing its irreversible plasticity
Editor
The film creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters.
Director
The film creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters.
Director
Muller/Girardet short
Director
“A study of light.” (Christoph Girardet/Matthias Müller)
Director
2004 short by Muller
Director
Album also represents a further step on a path Müller set off on several years ago: away from festivals and toward the art market. Album does not have a linear narrative, but is instead conceived as a loop and is shown primarily in the gallery and museum context. Even though Müller still has one foot in the short film scene, his video works have moved him step by step closer to the world of the fine arts.
Director
Promises is based on a selection of sixteen prints from a collection of vintage wedding photographs. The video pulses violently from one bouquet of red roses to another, focusing on their unifying similarities. Animating still photography into moving images, Promises zooms into the very centre of the images – single buds – in a nervous, flickering rhythm, as if it were searching for a message hidden deep under the surface. By mere means of editing, the meticulously arranged bouquets seem to explode in aggressive eruptions.
Director
A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object.
Director
"With their montage of found footage of audiences, Müller and Girardet shape a captivating dramatic arc. It contains condensed suspense with highs, lows, hesitations, peaks, tension and humour; it's all a bit uncanny, since our imagination can read fathoms deep into the faces."
(Anke Groenewold, Neue Westfälische, Bielefeld, 2003)
Editor
"BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination." (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)
Sound
"BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination." (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)
Director
2002 short by Muller
Director
"BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination." (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)
Director
Combining close-ups of redundant technology gleaned from 60s US sci-fi television series with a female voice of a 40s Hollywood melodrama, Manual makes absolute detachment clash with magnified emotion. When its record of the minutae of endless buttons, switches and control panels Manual reduces the notion of any manageability of life to a sheer absurdity.
Director
2001 film by Muller
Cinematography
In Phantom, each face, each body appears, like cinema itself, from beneath a curtain that flutters and flickers to reveal haunted silhouettes that never quite take shape.
Producer
In Phantom, each face, each body appears, like cinema itself, from beneath a curtain that flutters and flickers to reveal haunted silhouettes that never quite take shape.
Director
In Phantom, each face, each body appears, like cinema itself, from beneath a curtain that flutters and flickers to reveal haunted silhouettes that never quite take shape.
Cinematography
Matthias Müller's short is based on the poems to childhood by famed Austrian lyrical aertist Ernst Jandl who tried to write these poems in a language used by children, including nursery rhymes and prayers. Müller uses found footage and amateur films from his own childhood to create a visual equivalent to these poems. (M.M).
Writer
Matthias Müller's short is based on the poems to childhood by famed Austrian lyrical aertist Ernst Jandl who tried to write these poems in a language used by children, including nursery rhymes and prayers. Müller uses found footage and amateur films from his own childhood to create a visual equivalent to these poems. (M.M).
Director
Matthias Müller's short is based on the poems to childhood by famed Austrian lyrical aertist Ernst Jandl who tried to write these poems in a language used by children, including nursery rhymes and prayers. Müller uses found footage and amateur films from his own childhood to create a visual equivalent to these poems. (M.M).
A teenager is plagued by nightmares ever since his brother disappeared. On his birthday, a couple of buddies come trotting by with weed and booze, and on a trip through the woods, what had been foreshadowed in his imagination happens: a masked killer slaughters one after the other.
Director
The film comprises edited excerpts from 40 Hitchcock films in six chapters, each focusing on a different motif that reveals some of Hitchcock’s dark obsessions and techniques.
Director
Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.
Editor
A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself. (M.M.)
Director of Photography
A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself. (M.M.)
Writer
A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself. (M.M.)
Director
A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself. (M.M.)
Writer
For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.
Director
For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.
Director
"STERNENSCHAUER - SCATTERING STARS is a paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity.» Mike HOOLBOOM
Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour.
Director
Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour.
Director
This one is a collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc. In the montage, the movements and gestures of the actresses – stars like Lana Turner, Tippi Hedren, and Grace Kelly– seem choreographed and planned for each other. The soundtrack supports this effect with connecting passages of sound that imitate the stereotypes of the genre. The treatment concentrates the dramatic shift from the familiar to the eerie and shows how women become the victims of the voyeuristic glance of film.
Director
Matthias Müller’s films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema. They exaggerate the unreality and clinical perfection of the Hollywood studio films of the 1950s, quoting its sets and colours (Home Stories, 1990; Pensão Globo, 1997) or even reconstructing them in minute detail (Alpsee, 1994). But, at the same time, these attributes, known in film jargon as the production values, are exposed to decay – a decay which on closer inspection proves to include wilful acts of creation. As his own lab technician, Müller is responsible not only for subsequent wear and tear, but also for the initial developing of his own film material.
Director
AUS DER FERNE – THE MEMO BOOK (1989) is a reminiscence of a friend who had died of AIDS. His own mourning finds expression in the blending of found and original material, which seems to become one with the film material.
