Demon

Director: Heinz Emigholz    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Born in 1948 near Bremen in Germany, Heinz Emigholz trained first as a draftsman before studying philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer and producer in Germany and the USA. In 1974 he started his encyclopaedic drawing series The Basis of Make-Up . He looks back on numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures and publications. In 1984 he started his film series Photography and beyond. He has held a professorship in Experimental Filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 1993, and co-founded the Institute for Time-based Media and the program Art and Media, there. In 2003 Filmgalerie 451 started an edition of all his films on DVD. Publications a.o.: Krieg der Augen, Kreuz der Sinne (War of Eyes, Cross of Senses), Seit Freud gesagt hat, der Künstler heile seine Neurose selbst, heilen die Künstler ihre Neurosen selbst (Since Freud Said That the Artist Heals His Neuroses Himself, Artists Have Been Healing Their Neuroses Themselves), Normalsatz – Siebzehn Filme (Ordinary Sentence – Seventeen Films) and Das schwarze Schamquadrat (The Black Sqare of Shame) (all four books at Verlag Martin Schmitz); Die Basis des Make-Up (I) and (II), Der Begnadete Meier (Grace Jones), Kleine Enzyklopädie der Photographie (Little Encyclopaedia of Photography) and Die Basis des Make-Up (III) (in Die Republik No. 68-71, 76-78, 89-91, 94-97 and 123-125); Sense of Architecture with more than 600 photographs.

Country: West Germany

Year: 1976, 1977

Synopsis: The Translation of Stéphane Mallarmé´s ›The Demon of Analogy‹ Dedicated to Arthur Gordon Pym. "The particular kind of disjunction that Emigholz effects in his work comes about in trying to represent a space, or a shape, through film, greater in its dimensions than film´s linear format allows. In trying to show various sides of a thing at once, like a poem in three simultaneous versions, you end up with a schematicization of this shape, like a 3-D projection constructed co-ordinate after co-ordinate, that is shot after shot. Hovering over many of Emigholz´s films is that ghost of a 3-D shape, complex and beautiful, that the film itself is wishing towards. What he did with one poem, the synonyms in three different languages moving further and further away from one another as the translations diverge, he does with one landscape panorama in other films. To grasp more than the presence, the shadow of this thing is not the point. The skewed associations that you are guided to make instead as the film burgeons out of your grasp - the errors in perception, for example, which of course are only human, which is what makes them so interesting to observe - become the point. These are not films about film, but films about brainwork. DEMON is about that part of brainwork known broadly as language comprehension, and in particular about the chemistry of words. Incidentally, the more languages you know the more there is to witness in yourself coming to terms with the words you are given." Marcia Bronstein

Language: German, English, French

Forum participation year: 1979, 2010

Forum catalogue PDF: Download

Tags: Experimental film