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Installation
About
[Rythmus], 2015
[Rythmus] is a revision of ‘Rythmus 21’ from Hans Richter, one of the proponents of abstract film. The film was originally a 35mm film, to be shown on big screens, in dimly lit rooms, but is presently shown all across the globe in digital format, either on the internet or in museums- mostly on small tv screens. Hans Richter started out as a painter, but, unhappy with the possibilities of the medium, switched to film making in the early twentieth century. With his work ‘Rythmus 21’, Hans Richter wanted to break with the means of reproduction as the main application of the filmic medium. He stated the work should not be repeatable in any other medium, and ‘…should positively avoid any connection with historical, educational, romantic, moral or immoral, geographical or documentary subjects.’ The film should use those qualities which were so characteristic to the medium itself; Light and movement. When you take into consideration the change in medium from its first showing, a third quality comes to mind; the frame. Embracing this change in medium I attempted to work out a fitting alternative to present the work while keeping the original piece mostly intact. [Rythmus] is a videoloop reminiscent of 90’s screensavers, with perspex covering-plates that allow you to manually change the framing, corresponding to newly defined film scenes. 1 1.‘Die schlecht trainierte Seele’ in G – Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung. No. 1. (tr. M. Weaver) in Sitney, P.A. (ed.). The Avantgarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: New York University Press. Translated pp. 22-23 as “The Badly Trained Sensibility” (though I should have preferred to see it called “The Badly Trained Soul”). My quotations in the following section of the text all come from this source.