Experimental Cinema and the Crystals of Time: Matthias Müller's Visual Poems

Few artistic oeuvres exemplify the myriad facets of avant-garde filmmaking more comprehensively than the work of Matthias Muller.1 The reason, as critics and theorists of Mullers work have pointed out, is Mullers profound cinephilia.2 At once facilitating and representing the return to a scene that has lastingly structured the ways we experience and relate to the world, the cinema, as it permeates Mullers films, shapes our subjecthoods between affect and intellect, across solitude and sociality. It is capable of articulating subjectivity between private and public, present and past, desire and memory. As is typical for the avant-garde, many of Mullers films are autobiographical. Whether he uses found footage or original material, whether he shares his work with festival audiences or gallery visitors, the artist makes films to express what has held central meaning in his own life. For Muller, this includes being raised in the prosperous yet stifling cold war climate of 1960s West-Germany, coming of age sexually in the post-Stonewall era, and becoming a filmmaker during the age of AIDS, when the universe of artistic possibilities that unfolded for him became instantly shaped by fear, uncertainty, and loss. These experiences are indelibly inscribed into Mullers films of the 1990s, which rank among the avant-gardes richest, most stunningly beautiful poems about memory and human affect. And Mullers post-millennial work, although marked by a shift to digital video and a move from film festivals to biennials and gallery spaces, constitutes an ongoing engagement with - and in many cases a formal troping of - loss, memory, melancholia, and the fragility and ephemerality of human experience.Mullers education as a filmmaker is equal parts academic and auto-didactic. He received formal training from German experimental filmmaker and theorist Birgit Hein at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig, where he spent much of his time catching up on film history. But even before going to Braunschweig, Muller, together with his friend Christiane Heuwinkel and six other aspiring filmmakers, co-founded the Super 8 cooperative, Alte Kinder (Old Children), whose members repurposed their living quarters, many of which were located in public housing, as film studios (Schulte Strathaus; 2005, 12). As is well known, this mode of production was characteristic of American underground cinema, but it also defined the artistic approach of the queer German avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 70s. Some of its members, Rosa von Praunheim and Werner Schroeter, had become exposed to the work of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, and others at the historic 1967 film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. While this parallel offers but one entry for placing Muller into a tradition of queer German avant-garde filmmaking, it should be noted that while von Praunheim and Schroeter would soon turn to making feature-length films for television or commercial distribution, Muller to this day remains committed to the short film. For Mullers shorts Super 8 would remain a central source medium next to video, 16mm (his main exhibition medium in the 1990s), 35mm, and digital video (his main exhibition medium in the new millennium, even as his 16mm films continue to be distributed by Canyon Cinema).Mullers fluid, synergistic use of these formats constitutes the creative richness of his oeuvre, and is central to his signature as a queer filmmaker. This is perhaps most impressively on display in Mullers first two major works, Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book (1989) and Home Stories (1990), each of which, after its respective release, became a cause celebre on the festival circuit. Using filmed letters, photographs, and footage from old Hollywood films taped off a television monitor - all of which Muller hand-processed and then blew up to 16mm - The Memo Book is a complexly structured, densely layered poem about the memories of a man who has died of AIDS, the memory of a love with all its subtending ambivalences and complexities. …