New Artist Member: Markus Maicher
Posted October 25th, 2021 in New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome the Vienna-based filmmaker Markus Maicher to the collection!
Markus Maicher (b. 1984) is an Austrian-born experimental filmmaker and media artist. His artistic practice is centered around a fascination with the cinematic dispositiv and the poetry of analog film’s materiality. In his PhD at the University of Applied Arts Vienna he investigates the specificity of analog and digital media; he also works as a projectionist at the Austrian Filmmuseum and is part of the artist-run film lab filmkoop wien. His films and installations have been shown at numerous international festivals and cinemas.
Three of Maicher’s films are now available for rent from Canyon:
Into the Wild (2020, 4 minutes, color/b&w, silent, digital file)
Images, harvested on a farm in Mount Forest, Canada, captured with a hand-cranked Bolex on 16mm sound stock. Hand-processed in buckets, in shimmering red light down by the old stables. A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees, and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles, and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.
Mountain View (2018, 3 minutes, color, silent, digital file)
Mountain View thinks about framing, movement, surface, and depth. The film consists of three continuous zooms towards a landscape that are deconstructed into a discontinuous sequence of single frames. Movement is exposed as an illusion of 24 static frames per second, the organic movement of the hand dissolved into structural variation. The world seen through the window frame appears as an image, a phantasmatic reality that is becoming more and more unstable the closer we get, until it disappears.
I am not there (2017, 3 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
In I am not there personal memories and family recordings of the past are haunting the present. Video8 fragments of a day as a child are superimposed with images thirty years later, the look through the viewfinder onto the empty spaces of the present collide with the look of the father through the viewfinder back then. The instability of the film’s manual development process hints at the instability of the spatial and temporal coordinates of our existence, the absence of a negative at the transience of memory.
