Paul Winkler
Nascimento : 1939-06-22, Hamburg, Germany
História
Paul Winkler is a German-born Australian filmmaker who lives and works in Sydney. He was associated with Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, Albie Thoms and David Perry in pioneering local experimental film production in the 1960s.
Winkler characterises his films as "a synthesis of intellect and emotion, filtered through the plastic material of film". "I try to let 'imagines' flow freely to the surface". The ideas which he terms ‘imagines’ may reflect Australian icons like Bondi Beach, Ayers Rock/Uluru and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or textures, as in Bark/Rind, Green Canopy, and the bush.
In 1973, Winkler's film Dark identified with the Aboriginal land rights movement, acquiring a spirituality which was also manifested in Chants and Red Church. Later films take contemporary society for their subject, as in Rotation, Time out for Sport and Long Shadows. His early apprenticeship is recalled in Brickwall, Backyard and Brick and Tile.
In 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Sydney Intermedia Network mounted a retrospective screening of 30 of his films. The following year, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, USA screened 30 films in a three-day retrospective. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA holds 15 of his films in their collection.
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Winkler makes his transition from film to digital in this irreverent, amusing and absurd examination of icons from popular culture and the plastic baubles mass-produced in their image.
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A mob of sheep are going into a very uncertain future.
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A lyrical montage of juxtaposed street-art images, set on rotating surfaces and against a percussive soundtrack, to hint at the tribal nature of street art.
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Sydney, a city turning itself upside down to get ready for the year 2000. The Olympic Year.
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A journey into the threshold of pain via a symphonic onslaught of colour and sound.
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The movement of water via capillary action - the phenonema of water flowing uphill is made visible through the artificially induced osmosis of push and pull of dissimilar photographed material. Fountains and trees are the main carrier of images. Finally... an ode to the translucency of water.
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A short piece of found footage is optically reworked as text versus imagery versus the spoken words of a 'narrator' telling the audience a story of a famous golf player.
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“Somewhere I read a headline ‘One million trees will be chopped down’ and I was absolutely horrified. My association with the Bush goes back a long time, and thinking that one day it might not be there tied my stomach in knots. I felt physically sick...like seasick...really off. Images were fermenting in my head, but I couldn’t see how to film what I was feeling. How do you film a blinding headache? A churning premonition? I tried shooting toothpaste glasses, filters, but nothing worked...until I found a way of doing it where I had these household glasses spinning at very fast speed in front of the lens. I didn’t want the film to be didactic, like Scars...more a veiled and brooding warning about impending loss.” (Paul Winkler)
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“Having lived here for so long, enjoying the Sydney coastline, I wanted to pay homage to it. I’d always been intrigued by the intricate natural and artificial shapes of the city’s Eastern harbour (eg the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf and Pyrmont) and its ocean headlands and beaches. I cut out shapes from the Gregory’s Street Directory as mattes, and different filters to heighten and highlight Sydney’s extraordinary beauty. I used a hacksaw blade on the edge of a cymbal as a soundtrack...a kind of metallic sound to connect with the watery surfaces...I literally composed the film as it was running in the projector.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I was fascinated by the distance Australia has travelled in the past 50 years, and by how this evolving complexion continues to be indelibly, almost unconsciously, recorded by simple family and tourist images (today via video camera). History, place, time...and how we feel compelled to endlessly photograph one another. We’re all in a way little ham actors...a wave, a smile, doing a little dance...performing for the camera in front of landscapes and monuments. I worked with some old 16mm home-movie footage I’d been given, shot in the Blue Mountains [a favourite tourist destination and wilderness area close to Sydney]. Through optical printing and camerawork in the field I managed to combine the feel of then and now. [...] I used a prism in front of the lens, which chased the images (including some of me, photographing) ‘round and ‘round...mirroring the way history endlessly repeats itself.” (Paul Winkler)
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“Sydney. Another symphony of the city...inspired by the hectic, rollercoaster times. Buildings were going up left right and centre...‘Money Makes the World Go Round’ came to mind...I developed a little device which carried lenses in front of the camera, with a motor which made the images actually go around...people in the city...people and money going ‘round and ‘round. The soundtrack was pinball machines and muzak. Sydney was showing off its wealth, spreading out and up...Darling Harbour...more and more sparkling glass. A lot of it was the Emperor’s new clothes...many of those ‘buildings’ are still only holes in the ground.” (Paul Winkler)
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“A friend had given me some old footage shot in Germany pre-WWII...during the ‘30s. Among all the images of sport, and people dancing, were images of Hitler making his early speeches. So this film is about the terrible tension of that period...jitterbugging on top of the volcano, the frentic activity to have a good life in the face of the brewing horror of Nazism. I used all kinds of techniques...travelling mattes, optical printer, rotoscoping and hand colouring, and scratching the film. The physical mutilation of the film frame, of Hitler's image...scratching out his eyes, brought fantastic relief. But I'm still not finished with Hitler, because no-one is. History never will be.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I was interested in how people behave at street crossings… particularly at ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’ signs. With a 200mm lens I shot stills of people at traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. The look was flat and harsh. Again I used the matte-box image shifter, to create motion where there was no motion…to create a tension. I wanted to show the frustration you sometimes feel when the damn light doesn’t change. You stand there…in your mind you’re already moving…but you can’t move.” (Paul Winkler)
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“When you walk through the Bush, you hardly ever see any animals—they tend to take cover long before you actually come anywhere near them. Like a lizard, or a wallaby, which sees you and disappears. So I decided to make a film where I’d insert them… from photographs…into footage of the Bush. To make this work physically and filmically I had to invent and construct my matte-box image shifter. I wanted the animals, the sentinels of the Bush, to appear and disappear…the Bush to be living and moving. With the image shifter I matted them in and matted them out…what they now call ‘morphing’. This film was very popular with people who didn’t know much about avant-garde film—it was easy to watch, and they could get a lot of information about the type of flora and fauna in this country.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I made this film in the heyday of the ‘80s... a lot of people spending and making a lot of money in a kind of mad frenzy... advertisements, everywhere, interest rates up to 15%, 17%. Everything was for sale, one way or another... high pressure selling, lending. I figured ‘Good grief, this is all water off a duck's back.’ I used a lot of advertisements cut out of newspapers, and juxtaposed ‘important’ images (the Queen, Jesus, warships) and hectic activity with ducks, swimming around serenely in their ponds... things overwhelmingly important to some, totally unimportant to others. Ducks carry a lot of associations in the English language... ‘ducking for cover’, ‘sitting duck’ and so on.” (Paul Winkler)
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“You can have a weatherboard house, a fibro house, or a brick and tile house. Here in Australia real estate is very strong, and ‘brick and tile’ is what we call a solid house. In this film I experimented with optical printing for the first time [i.e. re-combining images after shooting, rather than in-camera]... pretty much purely for my own aesthetic pleasure. I showed the film at a documentary festival in Germany but the audience were less than impressed when I explained that the film would hopefully assist potential home builders to select their desired brick and tile combination.” (Paul Winkler)
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“Some had given me an iris—a little gadget which opens and closes—they were used a lot in silent movies to indicate the beginning or end of a scene. And that got me thinking about how we actually see, and how, though we barely notice it, every time we blink our own irises close down to black, and then open up again. Black and image. Black and image. I wanted to do something with time…with time as an iris closes and an iris opens. The name Traces refers to the traces we leave in time as, say, we walk across footpath, or traces on buildings, paint peeling off, or windows being dirty and being cleaned again…everything to do with time lagging. To show traces within traces within traces I put irises in many parts of the frame.” (Paul Winkler)
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“For many years I had wanted to visit the Rock, but I had never really had the means. A little funding from Germany finally got me there. I had read a lot about the history and mythology of the Rock and of the Aboriginal people, but I was only too aware that I, as a European, could never hope to get into or feel that mythology. So I decided to make a film about it from my perspective. I cut out all these mythological figures…lizards, emus, wallabies…some of them from drawings in caves on the Rock, and carefully employed them as mattes for footage I shot in real time. In those days hotels were very close to Ayers Rock [now known as Uluru], so I never had to go very far with my camera. I used filters and telephoto lenses to suggest a kind of unknowable aura…to show that there was truly something out there on that flat plain.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I lived in Darlinghurst [central Sydney] at the time. The hustle and the bustle of that section of the city intrigued me. I used a hectic camera, grainy newsreel film, a 75mm lens and a long matte box to create four intersecting segments…a degraded symphony of the city. Building facades, people and traffic variously interlocking and going their separate ways, across the grid of the Square.” (Paul Winkler)
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“The expansion of Sydney and its encroachment on the surrounding Bush. Inverting this imagery so that the Bush is surrounded by the City. Walking through the Bush, with towering city buildings as a (matted) canopy. The notion of buildings literally moving and walking towards the Bush.” (Paul Winkler)
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“A totally artificial city created entirely in camera. There is virtually no sky…just a city gone mad and town planning berserk. Crazy angles created by a tilted camera are mirrored and enhanced by dutifully askew mattes which mock the architectural logic of urban space. Shadows and wind generated by the city’s structures defy pedestrians as the soundtrack (an insistent sine-wave) aggravates and reverberates off heavy geometric facades.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I don’t drive, but I know people who’ll drive 100 metres to go to the shops. Our society is obsessed with the car, with coming and going, getting somewhere. I used very intricate matting, some shaped like knives. I wanted the cars to slice each other in two, creating a kind of hurdy gurdy atmosphere…an abstract rushing to and fro, going nowhere. The first half of the film is silent. The second half, a grainy dupe of the same images, has sound and is far more urgent and aggressive.” (Paul Winkler)
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“A woman stands ironing near a window. You never actually see the ironing, but you experience the repetition and the boredom. You see her from a multiplicity of viewpoints. Finally she opens the bloody window for a breath of fresh air.” (Paul Winkler) [Made for Oberhausen Film Festival, which invited a number of filmmakers to make a three-minute film on the theme of a window.]
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“One day at the beach…a typically Australian day…something I really looked forward to, when I first came here as a migrant (Bondi was the first surfing beach I’d ever seen). In the early ’60s there was hardly a weekend I didn’t go to the beach. But it wasn’t until many, many years later that I was filmically advanced enough to make a film about it. The simplicity of just turning the camera on and letting people do what they wanted to in front of the lends appealed to me…the carefree atmosphere appealed to me…the carefree atmosphere of the beach captured with the innocence of early cinema. I didn’t even look through the lens. Shooting horizontal mattes allowed me to play with the density of what was going on…the surreality of the beach, the waves of water and people, the hot and cold of sun and surf, overexposure…heat rising up, surfers riding waves in the sky and into buildings, seagulls ducking beneath the mattes, then re-appearing.” (Paul Winkler)
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“Tourists, postcards, different views of the same icon. The Bridge is a piece of geometry so I figured the film had to be geometric, too. The matte box allowed me to create postcards within postcards within postcards. It was all done in-camera…very demanding, it took all winter! The matting had to be carefully calculated and each image rewound by hand, then rephotographed, in the right position and at the right exposure. I surrounded the Bridge with a mass of water…vertically and horizontally. The water is by turns soft and then metallic as it reflects in the low winter sun. The movement, the steel and the water create an interplay as harbour sounds, wind chimes, boats…tinkle.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I wanted to make grass grow...to show the life force of a tree. Bark-Rind was shot totally single-frame...each shot exposed three times...close-up, mid shot, long shot. I used the sound of insects, signifying pollination, life...and I tried to make their sound visible. The camera starts on the grass, flowers, then works its way up the trunk, into the crown of the tree, then onto the next tree. The film vibrates...switching from sound/film...film/sound. You wonder whether you're looking at a film image or at the sound itself.” (Paul Winkler)
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“This was my first film using the matte-box. Using images of my own backyard, I found that I could create a kind of mysterious story, an almost supernatural effect. The mystery is never revealed, but there is something there. By photographing tiny vertical slivers through different mattes and lenses, carefully rewinding the film in the camera, then exposing bit by bit, I achieved this ‘corrugated’ effect. All of a sudden you get motion in something where there is no motion.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I wanted to make a sequel to Chants…the gold against black, but I wasn’t quite sure how. One day I went to St Mary’s Cathedral here in Sydney. After looking at the stained glass windows for some time, on the way out I noticed that they were selling slides of the interior…and whoever photographed the stained glass had used a red filter. This was the image I was after…red against black. By simply photographing and rephotographing the slide (up to 200 times, in some cases)…and varying the exposure by changing the distance between the light source and the slide, I was able to give the feeling of looking up…which is what you do in a church…from the knave up to the stained glass up to the ceiling…up to heaven in this red light. The upward motion was layered without visible edits by superimposing strips of the varyingly exposed film, in the lab.” (Paul Winkler)
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“Being a bricklayer, this was one of my most important films. It represents eight hours of work...you start your early morning, you look at the work which is in front of you—then you get stuck into it—you have a morning tea, then you have lunch—and in the afternoon, of course, you knock off. I wanted to construct the 22 minutes of film very much like how I laid bricks in the physical sense—with a trowel and mortar. So I worked out a rhythm for the film—I had 3 frames, 6 frames, 12 frames, and 24 frames, and virtually all of it was done single-frame. For the soundtrack I used myself laying bricks in real time—you lay the trowel, you scrape it, you take off the ‘mud’, etc, and that continues right through the film. Some people refer to this as a ‘structural’ film…rather this is a film by a bricklayer who knows the material very well.” (Paull Winkler)
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“After three very hectic films, I needed something to soothe my nerves. I came across these Coptic crosses in a Greek souvenir shop. and at the time I also heard some Gregorian chants. I thought these cheap plastic crosses looked really beautiful...and I shot them against black velvet so that they appeared to float, emanating something, in a deep space...kind of heavenly images. Nothing much happens...it's really a meditation. Funnily enough I found that the Hare Krishna Movement (which was flourishing at the time) rented the film out a lot to use at their camps. Another time Albie [Thoms] used some of the footage on GTK [ABC TV's youth/pop program], where it looked very odd indeed. I believe that Gregorian chants were in the hit parade only recently. This sort of spirituality touches all kinds of people...” (Paul Winkler)
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“Using footage shot during the first Aboriginal Land Rights demonstrations in Sydney, and when the police tore down the ‘Aboriginal Embassy’ in front of Parliament House in Canberra, Dark juxtaposes this violent struggle with images (taken from a tourist slide) of an old Aboriginal warrior imprisoned, in his mind, in his own country. As an immigrant to Australia I’d understood what it feels like to be a stranger, and had experienced hurtful comments and prejudice (…‘bloody German’). So I thought, this is funny, these people have been here for donkey’s years, and they to go out in the streets to fight for their own land. I used various mechanisms to let this injustice, this anger out…in particular, zooming through a comb onto the image of the old warrior…letting his emotion stream out through the bars.” (Paul Winkler)
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“The destruction of trees in Sydney...chainsaws, the trees really screaming out. Rapid zooming, often close up shooting. In Edgecliff and Paddington, near where I lived, I'd travel around with the council workers as they lopped established trees, made way for progress...power lines, new buildings. On the Cahill Expressway, across from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, huge old Moreton Bay Figs were being butchered. As they were ripping and cutting into the trees, I was ripping into them…very physically, rapid zooming. I wanted a very strong message. It was way over the top, really…screeching chainsaws and woodchip machines. There was no real Green Movement in those days. When I showed the film, people came up to me and said I’d made them feel guilty for lopping down trees in their own yard. The aggression of the film still causes people trouble.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I now knew that I'd found a style to interpret an emotional event filmicly. The unabating atrocities of the Vietnam War, the growing protest movement in Australia, and the ghastly images we witnessed each day in newspapers and on TV formed my material. I wanted to get into the minds of the protesters, into their (my) anger. Protest rallies and the horror of the press were captured with a frantic camera and very fast zooming. The power of sound and image was heightened with often-rapid (sometimes single-frame) montage.” (Paul Winkler)
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“I was in Germany again because my father had died, and I was at his grave. Flashes of terror struck me for fractions of a second, which I immediately tried to forger. I wanted to film my state of mind, my thoughts, my relationship with my father now that he lay below. I wanted to live. Once I conceived the treatment, I shot the film in two days. I wanted the camera to go very loose...off the tripod...I was zooming rapidly and running around the cemetery. I wanted the gravestones to disappear and dance...and I wanted to stay out of there, myself. I began to understand that if you want to interpret feelings you have to look for and create filmic images beyond simple photographing. I used the sounds of the graveyard and sometimes no sound.” (Paul Winkler)
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“By this time we had a Filmmakers' Cinema here in Sydney. I made the film on the spur of the moment...to go over a band. Red and green leader was very cheap—you got it for a cent a foot or something. Scratching and 'injuring' the flat colour of the leader . . . I interspliced it with old 16mm footage, breaking up and creating tension between the shots...you know, a native in Papua New Guinea was shooting an arrow, and just as the arrow leaves, the film cuts back into red and green 'travelling' lines (the scratching on the leader). For quite some time this line is running, then the next minute it stops and you see the arrow actually hitting a target. So it gives the impression the arrow is travelling for a long time, on red leader toward the target. The film was shown with different bands, and each time the film looked different.” (Paul Winkler)
Director
“An impressionistic documentary. Black and white, alcoholics, blind people, wheelchairs...the down and out in Sydney. I was greatly influenced by documentary films I saw at the Workers’ Education Association Film Group. Real images were cut together with footage I’d shot in Waverley Cemetery—a cemetery here in Sydney—in a sort of symbolising where I suppose we all finish up, whether we’re handicapped or not! The film has no narration. Someone said I ought to have a composer write a soundtrack, so I went to great lengths...working with musicians in a studio. It was completely new to me, and I wasn’t really comfortable with it.” (Paul Winkler)
Director
“I was playing with colour, and its emotional effect...green for hope, red for violence, blue for a bit of mystique—a very dark purplish orange blue...but very basic. For instance, the only way I could think to convey jealousy, on film, was by shooting through a blob of yellow. Of course I knew all about Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. I intercut my own footage with old 8mm stuff. I kicked off with an innocent image...just white, then a stuffed toy dog. Later a red colour then an image of a warship coming into Sydney harbour...a primitive metaphor for war. This was some of my first film in a more abstract style, and it was greatly discouraged at the time...everyone was heavily under the influence of British documentary filmmaking. People said, ‘this isn’t really how films ought to be made.’” (Paul Winkler)
