Fontaine de Vaucluse

Director: Wolfgang Lehmann    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Wolfgang Lehmann was born in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany in 1967. Active in the film club there, Wolfgang Lehmann wrote film critiques and began working for the municipal cinema Freiburg, a post he held till until 2005. As member of the municipal cinema Freiburg, he developed and organised several retrospectives and programmes. He focused on presenting works of the film- and video avant-garde from its beginnings until today. His main contributions have been to unearth little known or forgotten films, as well as explore areas such as “expanded cinema” and multi media works.Wolfgang Lehmann has also displayed interest in the notion of live film performance in terms of a type of staged activity. Concluding his work in Freiburg was the organisation of the Festival Film Forum Freiburg: Expanded Cinema & avant-garde in 2004. His first cinematic efforts were made in 1989. Since 1994 Wolfgang Lehmann has realised and produced his own films, many of which were invited for showings at festivals and museums in Europe, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, USA and South America. Since the beginning of his artistic activity, he has not only been fascinated by film, but music as well. The ECLAT Festival commission, Meer (Sea) (2004), conceived with Telemach Wiesinger as well as with composer Misato Mochizuki, was a further development toward the connection of image and sound. His works can be characterised by an exact and often rhythmic-like montage, as well as extremely short takes that result in overlapping images. After living for a brief period in Berlin, Wolfgang Lehmann has resided in Rümpel (Schleswig-Holstein / Germany) and Stockholm (Sweden) with his wife and his son since 2006.

Director: Florian Krautkrämer

Country: Germany

Year: 2001

Synopsis: "Fontaine de Vaucluse" is a small village in the Provence, in the South of France, near Avignon. There are only a few hundred permanent residents; millions of tourists come every year to view the "fontaine", considered to be one of the most majestic springs in the world. Water emerges from a grotto beneath a more than 100 metre high stone cliff. From there, the water usually flows underground, flowing into the riverbed several metres further on. When the snow thaws, however, more than 200 square metres of water pour out of the spring in a second. The grotto is no longer visible, and the otherwise dry stones at the entry are covered by a waterfall. The making of this film involved taking approximately 270,000 single frame images with two 16 mm cameras and c.84,000 of these images were used to construct the final version of the film. The compelling landscape of varied elements and the play and changes of light on the scene moved us to attempt to capture how the seasons radically alter the view. We subjectively shot what we found on location so that an abstract impression, reflecting nature, can appeal to the viewers' visual, spatial and temporal imagination, as opposed to representing reality. Images became notes, and thus the film, through montage, became a visual composition. No statements are made, neither the residents nor the tourists are interviewed. People are treated like the flowing water, roaring past as a mass. Thomas Gerwin composed a "musique concrète" especially for the film using exclusively sounds recorded on location. These were then digitally manipulated: edited, looped, filtered, layered, comprimised, stretched, reversed and triggered. The effest is sometimes akin to tiny sound particles arranged in a variety of ways in a sampler and mixed to full advantage. The rhythm is based directly on that of the water, the wind and the sounds of human voices. The acoustical composition does not accompany the images; it interacts with the visuals, gives them rhythm, comments on and interprets them. This enables the music to allow to hidden structures to come to the surface, and yet, simultaneously, adds new accents, or in some instances, weaves a thread connecting visual patterns with a musical construction and thereby binding these elements into a self-contained composition. (Wolfgang Lehmann)

Language: German

Tags: Experimental film