Rotterdam Focus on Heinz Emigholz in Signals: Regained

Heinz Emigholz focus

Heinz Emigholz (1948) is an eminent German experimental filmmaker and artist whose monumental body of work stretches from film to drawing to literature. He dedicated the past fifteen years to completing the documentary series Architecture as Autobiography, focusing on visionary 20th century architects such as Luis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, Adolf Loos and August Perret. At the occasion of the conclusion of this series, IFFR and The New Institute join forces to present highlights of the series encompassing fifteen titles of various formats including an installation. The focus is part of Signals: Regained.

Signals: Regained

Regained shows innovative works using cinema’s history as a main ingredient. Many filmmakers and artists choose to deal directly with images, sounds, themes or texts from cinema’s rich legacy. These works are all new, but they are not quite ‘contemporary.’ They create a particular sense of cinematic experience, as they merge the present with the past.

A typical example is the documentary Tresspassing Bergman, that leads us to the remote house of the late Ingmar Bergman, with its surprising viewing room full of curious VHS-tapes. Another time-warp experience is delivered by British artist Jamie Shovlin, reconstructing the illustrious seventies B-movie Hiker Meat with his Rough Cut.

Regained does not only deal with the tradition of the narrative feature film. There is the much delayed European premiere of a recently restored experimental portrait film, Tiger Morse, shot by Andy Warhol himself. Two major projects revive home-movies in a unique way. Yaël André presents the world premiere of a Super-8 film compilation, Quand je serai dictateur. Through a very inspired voice-over the anonymous footage is transformed into a deeply personal story. With his No More Road Trips? Rick Prelinger on the contrary requests the audience to deliver their own voice-over, just like one comments on home movies.

Nowadays, the language of cinema is used in many contexts outside of the conventional cinema. The exhibition POST SCRIPT unites seven artists who have created important new work by revisiting, re-editing or otherwise recycling older, classic films. The media they use vary from film posters to Photoshop-animation and from vinyl records to light-boxes. If anything, this year’s harvest of Regained works demonstrates that also in cinematic terms, ecological thinking can be one of the most adventurous contemporary attitudes.