Monocle Blink

Director: Franz Wanner    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Franz Wanner, born in 1975, finished his training as a photographer and filmmaker before studying fine arts and media theory at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Academy of Fine Arts, Munich). Texts, photo series, films, and objects have been published under the pseudonym Franz Wanner since 1996. In his book The Presumption (2011) they appear as the plot of a nonlinear screenplay. In 2012 he received the City of Munich’s Scholarship for Fine Arts. Since then he has been working on the narrative cycle Toxin – Antitoxin. Clinical Pictures of a Town, which was shown for the first time in 2013 at the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig. Since 2009, Franz Wanner has lectured at several universities and teaching institutions in the fields of fine art and film.

Director: Babylonia Constantinides

Country: Germany

Year: 2012

Synopsis: Between focusing and dissipation lies a space in which attendance oscillates between illumination and darkening. Focusing and dissipation, illumination and darkening determine expressionist film and film noir: the director Fritz Lang operates between these trends. In Monocle Blink, sequences from motion pictures with or by Fritz Lang are cut out of pictures and assembled auditively. The resulting verbal narration revolves around the question of the extent to which the medium of film is able to provide clarity on the basis of illusion. The audio montage is complemented by images that reveal Lang’s ambivalence toward commercial cinema and seismographic analysis of society. The images flash across the screen like lightning, briefly illuminating the spectators and leaving behind an afterimage before disappearing into darkness.

Language: German, English