Haunted Gürtelwald
Country: Turkey
Year: 2003
Synopsis: "HAUNTED GÜRTELWALD [was] created within the context of Zeyfang’s working visit in Istanbul in 2003. The edit (…) condenses the mixing, montage, and alienation of various shots:
After a brief phase of accustoming oneself to the images, one recognizes at the beginning scenes of a light-flooded forest, families dispersed among the trees as if they were on an outing, while fragments of lively performed speeches are simultaneously heard. The images are obstructed by fluttering, fuzzy, vertical stripes that – without following a discernable logic – repeatedly spread across the image.
This principle of making anonymous is continued in the following scenes of a peace march on the brink of escalation, which was held in Istanbul when the war in Iraq broke out, and of a May demonstration. As one can see during the further course of the clip, these stripes are prolonged in "reality" in the installation, where real, thin tree trunks are situated outside the video projection area. The "obstruction" within the image can be understood as a bow to the Surrealist scepticism about the reality of images and language – Magritte’s "Carte Blanche" (1965) may come to mind, the picture of a horsewoman in the woods who, inconsistent as regards the logic of the image, can be seen alternately in front of and behind the surrounding trees. Here, we already encounter a moment of distancing with the video-equivalent recourse to the displayed "flatness" of modernist painting, something which can also be observed in the following clips. The irritation that arises – in the interplay with the musique-concrète-like soundtrack – lends the edited loops of the different source materials a persuasive power. The title, declaring the forest belt around Istanbul a haunted ghost zone of a superficially indefinable reality, does the rest to add to the structure of the installation, which promises conceptual simplicity, a kind of doubtfulness of rationality. So it is not only together with the real continuation outside the image space that a prevailing mood of association is created, encouraging one to shift what is viewed into the context of a more general statement on filmed reality."
(from: Clemens Krümmel, "Film and Drawing on a Tape of Florian Zeyfang", in: Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy, Frankfurt 2004)
After a brief phase of accustoming oneself to the images, one recognizes at the beginning scenes of a light-flooded forest, families dispersed among the trees as if they were on an outing, while fragments of lively performed speeches are simultaneously heard. The images are obstructed by fluttering, fuzzy, vertical stripes that – without following a discernable logic – repeatedly spread across the image.
This principle of making anonymous is continued in the following scenes of a peace march on the brink of escalation, which was held in Istanbul when the war in Iraq broke out, and of a May demonstration. As one can see during the further course of the clip, these stripes are prolonged in "reality" in the installation, where real, thin tree trunks are situated outside the video projection area. The "obstruction" within the image can be understood as a bow to the Surrealist scepticism about the reality of images and language – Magritte’s "Carte Blanche" (1965) may come to mind, the picture of a horsewoman in the woods who, inconsistent as regards the logic of the image, can be seen alternately in front of and behind the surrounding trees. Here, we already encounter a moment of distancing with the video-equivalent recourse to the displayed "flatness" of modernist painting, something which can also be observed in the following clips. The irritation that arises – in the interplay with the musique-concrète-like soundtrack – lends the edited loops of the different source materials a persuasive power. The title, declaring the forest belt around Istanbul a haunted ghost zone of a superficially indefinable reality, does the rest to add to the structure of the installation, which promises conceptual simplicity, a kind of doubtfulness of rationality. So it is not only together with the real continuation outside the image space that a prevailing mood of association is created, encouraging one to shift what is viewed into the context of a more general statement on filmed reality."
(from: Clemens Krümmel, "Film and Drawing on a Tape of Florian Zeyfang", in: Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy, Frankfurt 2004)
Tags: Video Installation, Loop
Technical Attributes
Rental status: rental upon request
Version: original language version
Running time (minutes): 8
Color: color