About Time. With Helga Fanderl

First up, they are always presented by me personally, which has to do with the small film format which, like a brush or a pencil, gives me the liberty to work the way I want to. Because I don’t use a cinema format, I have developed the practice of screening the films myself – making a virtue of necessity, as it were, or owing to the medium’s conditions. And I always do this from within the audience space. The luminosity of Super 8 projectors was intended for small spaces, and the distance from a projection booth would be too great.

These days, things are streamed digitally everywhere. Even in the smallest of movie theaters, there are digital projections and huge screens. Film has a quite different feel to it, in terms of the colors, the rhythm, the filmic image. So I first have to try out on location, such as in this specific space, what sort of structure I need to create the best possible projection situation. The advantage is that the audience is thus truly confronted by the medium. It’s not like that imperceptible device hidden away in the booth that projects images – not to mention the digital, numerical sequences, the zeros and ones; it’s impossible to imagine them. The film, by contrast, is an occurrence inscribed in light. A real event that takes place on a medium. The presence of the projector, the presence of the person handling the projector, and so forth: It becomes a kind of live event.

Yes, exactly. Today, I find that, too, a very good thing. And the fact that things have developed that way is truly thanks to the medium. I notice nowadays that it is precisely young people, having grown up with digital devices only, who find the medium’s presence utterly compelling. They are really touched by it. In my films I always capture the moment, which is essentially a paradox. In filmic repetition the moment’s presence is actually recreated.

It didn’t happen quickly. It started with a workshop at Künstlerhaus Frankfurt – “Super 8 as an artistic medium”. I didn’t actually take part because of the title, but rather to help a friend to get one more paying participant. Back then, you could shoot a film one day, take it to the lab, and get it developed. That was where I first came into contact with a filmic language that was neither documentary nor narrative. At the end of the workshop, I was more than happy to go outside with the camera and film stuff. But it took a while until I got my roll of film back and thought: Yes, I’ve really managed to create a piece of poetry, poetry in the sense of a creative language. My heart started racing. My boyfriend at the time, who was a fine artist, also immediately felt good about it. So I kept going, but I was still a long way off considering film as my medium.

Acquaintances had recommended I simply go and try out what it was like in Peter Kubelka’s film class. Initially it actually put me off, as he was pretty rigorous in only working with 16-millimeter material. I’d just fallen in love with Super 8 as a format, which was a completely different way of working. At some point I mustered the courage to ask whether I could take part as an informal guest student. “Yes, you may,” he said, “but only on the condition that you also show something here.” At that time, I was already 40 years old and surrounded by young students. I was kind of out of place.

At some point, I then showed pieces I had produced but not the first one “See” (Lake), which meant so much to me. I didn’t dare do that yet. “You have a filmic eye,” Kubelka said, which was great to hear, of course. That’s when I realized how good it was to work with someone who handled the medium of film as consciously as he did. I was allowed to return the next semester, and so it was that I eventually showed the film that was so close to my heart. He suggested I become his student. Actually, the status of an informal guest student was fine by me, I was still teaching part-time. But bit by bit I then became a student; I spent a year in New York as an exchange student, and it then became clear that this was now my artistic work.

That’s something I can only hope, not know. In truth, it was only by walking out into the world with a camera that I discovered I have a very intense visual relationship with the world. I simply go out with a completely open mind. Naturally, I hope that something appeals to me, but there’s no guarantee. That mindset, being open to an encounter, still forms the very heart of my work. Part of that is being taken or surprised by something – meaning that I don’t have some pre-premonition. At that very moment, I go for my camera, look through the small viewfinder, and see an image. Then I have to ask myself: Is that suitable for a film, or is it just an image? Can that be part of a film, a melody, a duration? Be it an effect of the light, a shadow, or an occurrence: What is it and how do I want to turn that into a piece of film? So I respond to something that offers itself to me, and ask myself: Dare I risk filming it now? In my case, the film arises completely in my head, before my inner eye, and through my work with the camera. A state of immense concentration, in which decision, choice of stylistic means, and feeling converge. A little bit Zen-like.

Let me mention the one before last: I was in Montréal, Canada, and went out onto the balcony of my host’s apartment. A really strong wind was blowing, and the washing hanging out to dry was billowing – all sorts of different fabrics and colors, the layers of different pieces of laundry that repeatedly regrouped. That was a good filmic situation.

I think it somehow just evolved and I accepted it and grew to appreciate it. When I started, I didn’t have a clue what exactly I was doing – and so I edited directly on-camera. But that was without any vision of my own. Gradually I came to understand what I was doing. Luckily, Kubelka spotted that at an early date and gave me good advice: Just practice without any film in order to familiarize yourself with the instrument. So that I would know how to use it correctly in the decisive moment. I don’t have some predefined, stylistic notion in my work, but of course there’s the wish to shape the image that I see. That always happens at the moment when I start filming.
Starting there, I developed the practice of not presenting my films in terms of how new they were but showing relationships between the changing works. All of that resulted from the logic of grasping and understanding my medium. Not at some conceptual level.

Well, needless to say, Super 8 still has all the connotations of family movies and the like. I myself have never experienced that, have never had a nostalgic relationship to the material. It was simply one way of working, like with a pencil – and it’s not old-fashioned either, although it’s now existed for ages. For me it was a new discovery, and it’s constantly a new artistic approach to things. Comparisons don’t work. But for me there’s something of a drawing about it: that moment of transposing the perception of an object onto the way you grasp and represent it, the way the creation occurs in the here and now. I would say that’s my artistic practice.

Yes, that’s still the case! If we can find a good space, a date, and a projector, gladly.