Paul and Menno doing their performance LUX at the 26th European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück on 26 April 2012 twice to a packed house – to coincide with the release of our newest DVD featuring the duo.

(Photo: Angela von Brill)

Total DVD running time: 181 mins

Paul de Nooijer (* 1943) has been making films for 40 years now – an incredible achievement in a field not exactly showered by public interest and funding. His reputation is solidly based on works displaying mostly ‘illusionism’ – the interdependency of film and photography. Since son Menno (*1967) joined in this ‘family business of art’ as a full-fledged partner in 1989, the films became faster and more colourful. But more importantly, the focus of their artistic efforts slightly shifted from just photography and film to a combination with theatre and performance. De Nooijer consciously opted for a blend of traditional disciplines based on the ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Oscar Schlemmer’s interdisciplinary Bauhaus theatre. In this concept photography and film formed part of a larger, total event.

De Nooijer love to pay tribute in their incredibly varied work. And they do this more often than not tongue-in-cheek. Tribute to prominent works of art history – directly (like in Birth to Michelangelo) or slightly more hidden (like in Touring Holland by Bicycle to van Gogh). Tribute to pieces of Popular Culture (Tarzan & Jane) or tribute to traditional culture (Stripshow 1850). Tribute to other film makers (e.g. Frans Zwartjes by stressing pixilation in black& white and artificially recreating time-flow) or tribute to the essence of the photographic process (I Should See; A Fortified City). Yet they always remained true to their own art as the sad but likewise funny episode with Bill Gates exposes.

De Nooijer have consistently probed the visual possibilities of the photographic medium – analogue and digital – in relation to film, theatre and visual art in general. The results are always a pleasure to watch. This compilation aims to provide just this.

Titles included in the DVD (in running order):

1. Birth, 2010, 2 mins
2. The Pie, 1975, 12 mins
3. Transformation by Holding Time, 1976, 4 mins
4. Tarzan and Jane, 1977, 3.5 mins
5. Touring Holland By Bicycle, 1981, 4 mins
6. Black & White Bathroom, 1982, 4 mins
7. I Should See, 1990, 2 mins
8. A Fortified City, 1990, 9 mins
9. Creation, 1991, 2.5 mins
10. Stripshow 1850, 2006, 11 mins
11. Oer, 2007, 4 mins
12. Around Walcheren in 8000 Stills, 2008, 10.5 mins
13. Ukelele, 2010, 2 mins
14. In Heaven, 2010, 1 mins

Running time: 72 mins

The titles for this compilation were chosen by Paul. It compliments the DVD available from Moskwood. Thanks to EYE Film Institute Netherlands for their invaluable help and generous assistance by supplying files from their archive.

In addition to the running time of 72 mins of original work, the DVD contains the following documentary-type bonus material:

1. Time Transformed (by Ingo Petzke and Christian Männer), 2010, 87 mins
2. Interview (by Ladislav Galeta), 2001, 22 mins

Originally A$45.00 – Amazon offers for US$83.00 – our price €35.00 incl VAT + postage!

Outside our “normal” line of products we offer this authorised biography of Australian-born Hollywood director Phillip Noyce – his only biography so far. The book was never published outside Australia – we offer while our limited stocks – brand new – last.

This is how the publisher PanMacmillan advertised the book:

Phillip Noyce is one of the world’s most successful film directors and an Australian icon. His directing credits cover the film-making spectrum from Hollywood blockbusters to prize-winning films that show-case the art of the director.

Biographer Ingo Petzke gained unprecedented access to Noyce and the legends who have worked with him to write Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood.

Each subsequent chapter of this biography offers a riveting behind-the-scenes account of Noyce’s major projects from Backroads and the award-winning Newsfront onto directing films that launched his international career and established his status as an A-league Hollywood director including Dead Calm, Blind Fury, Clear and Present Danger, Sliver, The Saint and The Bone Collector. The book offers an entertaining insider’s view of Noyce’s major projects, the art of filmmaking, and the complexities of working in one of the most powerful and intriguing industries.

Petzke includes just enough outrageous off-screen antics to appeal to lovers of gossip and film fans alike. He paints a portrait of Noyce as a creative, dynamic, inspired, obsessive, inquisitive, practical and gifted filmmaker, who always acknowledges the contribution of each member of his cast and crew.

The book comes with a CD-ROM packed with hundreds of film stills, storyboards, an additional chapter on Noyce’s US television work and Petzke’s Hollywood diary.

The book covers all his films up until and including The Quiet American (so nothing on Catch A Fire and Salt).

German with English subtitles. Produced with generous assistance of Nordmedia Hannover

Though the Bauhaus wasn’t directly involved in all art forms, it definitely exerted interesting impulses nevertheless. A particular point in case is Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s 1922 Reflektorische Farblichtspiele [Reflecting Colour-Light-Play]. Originally conceived as a play for one of the famous Bauhaus Lantern Festivals, it premiered at the Kandinsky home and kind of revolutionised the spatial aspect of 20th century sculpture. At the same time it equals the German abstract films of the early 1920s and is a predecessor of performance art, light shows and expanded cinema. Consequently, the Play was re-discovered and re-staged in the 1960s and has been in demand ever since.

This DVD for the first time includes both the re-staged 1966 performance (no recordings of the 1922/23 ones exist) and a short documentary about the apparatus used for the Play.

One of Schwerdtfeger’s predicaments for his full acceptance into art history’s “Hall of Fame” to this day is the fact that Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, also a Bauhaus student, staged a similar Play that for several reasons overshadowed Schwerdtfeger’s pioneering achievements early on. Still today even serious Bauhaus publications omit Schwerdtfeger altogether or at least diminish his merits by denouncing him a collaborator to Hirschfeld-Mack – in all likelihood by simply copying older writings without doing own research. In 1964 Schwerdtfeger stated in a letter “A couple of weeks before the Bauhaus Week [1923, one year after his own premiere], Hirschfeld-Mack grouped with some Bauhaus students and developed his play. I was refused access to these. Rehearsals went very secretively. At a ball during the Bauhaus Week the group premiered their version. The involvement of several people made it more complex than mine. That’s when I left the Bauhaus because I felt deceived.” Even skeptics will have to admit, though, that the official first Bauhaus Book, covering the years 1919 – 1922, contains two pictures of Schwerdtfeger’s Play and none of Hirschfeld-Mack’s as the latter’s didn’t exist as yet. After he left the Bauhaus, based on his high merits as a student, he was immediately appointed Professor for Sculpture at the Stettin Academy. Unable to exhibit during the Nazi years, he educated budding teachers in the arts in Alfeld/Hildesheim until his death in 1966, just days before the re-staging of his Play at the Hannover Arts Society.

The DVD includes a lengthy Talking Backgrounds documentary featuring Kurt’s son Stefan – who was instrumental in setting up the 1966 re-staging and a Professor for Architecture and an artist in his own right – and Michael Stoeber, renown German arts critic. (English subtitles)

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1. Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (1968), 18 min
2. Making Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (1968), 5 min
3. Talking Backgrounds (2009), 50 min

Total running time: 73 mins

The Art of Personal Filmmaking

BC: My name is Bastian Clevé. I was born in Munich on January 1st, 1950. I received my artistic and filmic schooling both in Hamburg and at the San Francisco Art Institute. Since 1979, I have been living and working in Los Angeles. [until 1993]

Q: You have made over 30 experimental films. Is there a fundamental difference in approach to this manner of filmmaking?

BC: Yes. Basically, there are two distinct avenues by which I approach my own work. I may begin with an idea for a film without having a clear vision of what the resultant piece will look like. Thus, I explore the medium and test its limits as a means of articulating my own thoughts and the experience of making the film. In the film Echo, for example, I move and operate the camera very quickly, while journeying through a room to a landscape in order to obscure the identity of passing objects. In such filming situations, I do not know in advance what the character of the images will be.

In other instances, I am quite scientific in my approach. I begin with a theory or concept and accordingly apply those techniques appropriate to the creation of those previsualized images which fill my mind. If there is no known technique to produce the desired results, then I experiment and often build my own equipment in order to achieve my objective. This approach is often elaborate, laborious and slow. Pieces which involve single-frame printing are especially time consuming. The film Kaskaden is a product of this particular method: I began with a normal tilt up a tree; and later I manipulated the location footage through the use of an optical printer, employing a variety of possible techniques -slow motion, multiple exposures, colored filter changes, mirroring, manual movement of the filmstrip, etc. – to accomplish those images which were dwelling in my mind’s eye.

Q: You exhibit basic elements of the filmstrip itself, such as sprocket holes. Do you want to foreground the basic elements of filmmaking?

BC: Yes, and I use these elements of filmmaking in an alternative manner – not to reproduce reality, but to create a new, purely filmic reality. In the film Zenith, basic material aspects of the filmstrip function as ‘actors’. I try to create visual music and establish a sense of purity, that is why I left the film silent. There are, of course, other films in which I emphasize the materiality of film. In Empor, I was interested in the physical effect which is engendered at the very end of the film.

Q: Audiences expect to be shocked and challenged by experimental films. What is your position on this?

BC: I am not very interested in shocking the audience. I regard my films as a form of entertainment. Entertainment defined as an intellectual and sensitive form of stimulation. Despite the fact that Götterdämmerung created quite a controversy with its premiere at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1974, I had intended only to create a film about the beauty of rhythm, dance and music. The film plays with the letters of the filmic alphabet, such as the interplay between a point of focus and a point of imperceptibility or the interplay between different focal lengths, the passage from a fade-in to a fade-out or the layering effect of a multiple-exposure.

In the film Fatehpur Sikri ,I try to express my impressions of a journey through India and Nepal. The technique of the travelling matte allows me to combine images of a classical Indian dance and contemporary every- day life in India. The superimposed window of Fatehpur Sikri is placed between these two building block images. In a sense this brings me to another thought on the need of the filmmaker to discover those filmic techniques which will appropriately articulate a particular theme. In the case of Fatehpur Sikri, the technique used enhances and underlines the content of the images, the essence of their interchange and the governing idea which I wished to express.

Q: Most of your films are concerned with formal principles. Do you use any of these techniques to also tell a story, to narrate?

BC: Yes, I am currently moving in that direction. I am convinced that traditional stories can be told in a much more stimulating and dynamic way through the use and application of new visual methods and expressions. These [alternative devices] would allow the audience to be more imaginative itself. In fact, I attempt to create such a narrative in the feature-length film San Francisco Zephyr, which tells the story of a three-month journey through the United States and Canada. I use images from a rodeo, from Niagara Falls, from the Rocky Mountains and from a Fourth of July parade in San Francisco. The jazz musician, Eberhard Weber, created the soundtrack while watching the film. For him, the same principle of exploration and adventure governed his composition as it did for me -we both reacted to things which we had not seen before and created spontaneously.

Q: Why do you use simple and everyday images?

BC: Basically I am interested in creating images and films which I have not encountered previously. By using everyday images and subsequently transforming them into something beautiful and poetic, I can explore new aspects of reality – a reality which was previously perceived as a known factor by both myself and the spectator.

In addition, in Winterlandschaft I want to create a 3-D like effect in my work I accomplish this by using the color-negative filmstrip itself … that is as itself. Also, I place materials between the camera, projector and screen in order to achieve a spatial impression.

Q: Are there similarities between your work and the artistic methods and approaches apparent in other fields?

BC: Yes. I can understand that some of my work may be perceived as painting with light. I react to light as one reacts to music and thus compose with light. The process of filmmaking, for me, is similar to musical composition. I do everything by myself -beginning with the idea of the film, designing the lighting plan and executing the shoot, as well as the final edit. My works are, therefore, very personal.

The last film, Lichtblick, is like an optical poem; one of the objects – the Museum of Fine Arts in Hamburg – implies that artistic self-understanding resides within the context of the other arts. The musician, Klaus Schulze, composed the soundtrack for this film.

AV02 / Region Code 0 / SlimCase / € 24.90 incl. postage & handling
(Europe only – for other countries add € 3.00)

“What lies beyond  reality? Are there ways to take different approaches? Can I visualize things which do not exist in the material world? Can I create visual music and compose with light, imagery, color and shapes which are not animated but are to be found in reality? Can I create imagery the way musical composers create symphonies? Those were the questions I asked myself once I had seen enough “Hollywood”-type movies.

I felt the desire to create something new and personal, something beyond stories and plotlines known to mankind ever since the start-of-times in both theatre and drama. My own stories in a personal style bearing no similarity to other artists or filmmakers. – As an artist I am interested in creating images previously never seen, as a professional I aim at perfection in the craft of filmmaking” (Bastian Clevé)

The focus of Clevé‘s artistic filmmaking lies in the manipulation of real-live imagery using sophisticated in-camera-editing and optical printing.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastian_Clev%C3%A9)

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1. Schau ins Land (1976)
   
   16mm, colour, 10:06 mins. Music by Klaus Schulze
2. Nachtwache (1976)
   
   16mm, colour, 9:39 mins. Music by Klaus Schulze
3. Lichtblick (1976)
   
   16mm, colour, 13:04 mins. Music by Klaus Schulze
   BMI-Award 1976
4. Die Reise (1977)
   
   16mm, colour, silent, 9:55 mins
5. Empor (1977)
   
   16mm, colour, silent, 9:47 mins.
   German Film Award 1978
6. Nach Bluff (1977)
   
   16mm, colour, silent, 10:07 mins.
   German Film Award 1979
7. Fatehpur Sikri (1980)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 9:09 mins.
   Bronze Award – Houston Film Festival USA
   Special Merit Award – Athens Film Festival USA
8. The Art of Personal Filmmaking (1983)
   
   Bonus Documentary, 29 mins.
   Read the interview with Bastian Clevé online.

Produced in 1983 and running for 29:25 mins, Clevé talks about his early films and their making in an interview situation. The interview is conducted in German but dubbed over in English spoken by Clevé himself. We will upload the precise English wording of the interview for your convenience to this web site at a later stage.

Unfortunately, the source is a VHS tape [sorry – Blue Ray quality nowhere on the horizon in those days…] but as far as known this is the only existing tape of its kind. A substantial part of the tape shows excerpts of his films. The ones featured are (in order of appearance): Echo (1983) / Kaskaden (1983) / Zenith (1981) / Empor (1977) / Götterdämmerung (1974) / Fatehpur Sikri (1981) / San Francisco Zephyr [medley] (1978) / Winterlandschaft (1983) / Lichtblick (1976)

See also Bastian Clevé: Journeys

For private home use only! For other uses, please, get in contact.

AV01 / Region Code 0 / SlimCase / 24.90 € incl. postage & handling
(Europe only – for other countries add € 3.00)

“Filmmaking has always been a journey into the unknown for me. Each new film demands its own trajectory. I might start with a particuliar idea and than after the first 100 feet of exposed film comes back, the imagines tell me which way to go or not to go.

There is always a kind of pull between me and the material photographed, something opens up. If everything works out fine and the imagines connect to me and i can almost hear the sound they want, it is one hell of elation running through jour body and mind, unbelievable. To sum up:my approach to filmmaking is primarily an organic one. The films are a synthesis of the intellect and emotion all filtered through the plastic material of film. I try to let imagines flow freely to the surface”

(Paul Winkler).

These images are clearly marked by the use of devices to create them. Winkler may briefly show the unaltered image in the beginning of a film. But inevitably processing will occur, and Winkler’s “low-tech invention pushes the possibilities of comparatively simple mechanics and long-known camera devices to their outer limits and beyond” (Ingo Petzke). Mostly, these are still and moving mattes and the optical printer but also some inventions of his own. They always result in refreshingly new images full of sensual impressions.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Winkler)

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1. Sydney Harbour Bridge (1977)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 13mins
   Gold Award – Best Experimental, Australian Film Awards 1979
2. Bondi (1979)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 15mins
   Silver Award – Experimental, Australian Film Awards 1979
3. Ayers Rock (1981)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 21mins
   (produced by CINE PRO, Germany)
   Price money, Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA 1983
4. Time out for Sport (1996)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 17mins
   Best Editing, Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA 1996
   Finalist – Dendy Awards Sydney Film Festival 1996
5. Rotation (1998)
   
   16mm, colour, sound, 17mins
   Directors Choice Award, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, Jersey City, USA 2000
   Best Experimental Film, Melbourne Film Festival 1999
   Finalist, Dendy Award, Sydney Film Festival 1998
   Honorable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA 1999
6. Bonus: © Paul Winkler (2005)
   
   MiniDV, colour, sound, 11 mins
   Portraitfilm by Mark Daley, Nicole Reid and Dominik Muench
   Produced in “Avant-garde Film” at Bond University, Australia

Total running time 94 mins

We are producing and distributing experimental films on DVD – worldwide and at reasonable prices.

We aim to provide DVD editions of exceptional films not to be found anywhere else – films literally as rare as red avocados. We release DVDs by a wide range of internationally acknowledged filmmakers and spanning decades of inspired work.

First releases will be:

AV01 Paul Winkler (Australia): Australian Icons (1977-1998)
AV02 Bastian Clevé (Germany/USA): Journeys (1976-1980)
AV03 Ingo Petzke (Germany): Northern Lights (1975-1984)
AV04 Christoph Janetzko (Germany/USA): Early Masters (1979-1986)

All prices quoted are for private home use only! For other uses , please, get in contact.