found footage video, 2010, 6 min
A film collage for the exhibition „Robot Dreams" for Kunsthaus Graz and Museum Tinguely, Basel.
concept & direction: Virgil Widrich
Editing & sound design: Oleg Prodeus

Multimedia artist, filmmaker and director Virgil Widrich is known for his conceptual and meticulously crafted film montages. His filmography is a long one, reaching back to his teenage years.
The first work for which he achieved widespread acclaim, Heller als der Mond (Brighter than the Moon, 2000), recalls with its carefully composed minimalist images episodes from Jim Jarmusch films and takes a dryly humorous look at what it's like to be a foreigner. Probably his most well known work is the experimental short film Copy Shop (2001), which explores the possibilities of reproduction in film as in real life; it has received 35 international awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Its subtitle, "An original copy film", hints at the unusual method by which it was made: Widrich assembled 18,000 digital frames taken from various original films, photocopied and then filmed them with a 35mm camera, and finally animated the results. In 2003 he used a similar technique to make Fast Film, a rapid chase through cinematic chase scenes. After premiering in Cannes, the film went on to collect over 30 awards. For the exhibition "Robot Dreams" Widrich worked together with film critic and author Joachim Schätz to select key scenes from the history of science fiction cinema, which he then compiled into a surreal montage to create a unique epic of the changing public image of the robot. This work functions within the exhibition both as historical basis and reference point, just as does Widrich's entire film oeuvre, the undisputed autonomy of which lies in the precision and narrative power of his visual compositions.

Katrin Bucher Trantow, from the catalogue "Roboterträume"/"Robot Dreams", Kunsthaus Graz 2010

• Category

  Film & Animation

• License

  Standard YouTube License