Film ist. A Girl & a Gun

Gustav Deutsch / AT, 2009 / 93 min.

Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch has been successful in bringing forgotten and mouldering film images back to life. And he’s done it again with FILM IST. a girl & a gun, the third instalment of the long-running project Film ist, which Deutsch has worked on for more than 20 years. The presentation will be accompanied live by Michel Banabila and Machinefabriek. The screening is on the occasion of the premiere of Deutsch’s newest project, Shirley – Visions of Reality, his first feature film.

Deutsch has been called a “filmmaker without a camera” and a “juggler of found footage”. Like an archaeologist of film, he offers the audience a perspective on film history, rearranged according to his own rules. Documentaries, slapstick, amateur recordings, drama, scientific films and commercials all find their place in Deutsch”s remix of the cinema that results in a sensual experience of film.

Deutsch brings together fragments from war films, pornography and dramas about the battle of the sexes. The form is that of a “musical in five acts”; the leitmotif is mythologies about the relationship between men and women (Sappho, Plato); the effect is that of alienation. Removed from their original context, the reassembled images seem to hold a whole new attraction, especially with live accompaniment by avant-garde musicians Michel Banabila and Machinefabriek , who will perform a new score they have written.

CineSonic is a live cinema platform. The live screening of FILM IST. a girl & a gun is in anticipation of a CineSonic programme on the theme of found footage in Trouw Amsterdam that will take place during the second half of 2014, in cooperation with EYE and LIMA.

The evening is a joint collaboration with CineSonic and is made possible in part with support from the Goethe-Institut Amsterdam.