Film Ist., Gustav Deutsch

“It is, in a word, glorious…. what I feel is the inherent power and mystery of such material, the arrangement of these images and sounds into a definition of cinema constitutes one of the greatest pedagogic films I have seen…. my main reaction is to have my socks knocked off.” (Tom Gunning)

As homage to Gustav Deutsch (1952−2019) Jasper Rigole selects Film Ist., a tableau film on the phenomenology of the medium of film. Deutsch started appropriating and re-contextualising found footage in the late 1970s. Film Ist. is a feature film made without a camera. It is a collage, which combines archaic film material from the margins of the history of cinema, collected from the archives of several film institutes. The result is exhilarating, intriguing, funny and beautiful.

Film Ist. 1 – 6 (1998) is a collage of scientific and pedagogic films. These first six chapters are dedicated to the scientific laboratory as the site from which film originated.

Film Ist. 7 – 12 (2002) focuses on the first three decades of cinema, exploring this new medium as an art form, and less as a technological innovation.