Projekte

»In ROPE - A DEAD MAN’S DREAM there is an exploration of the history and development of the photographic media. The reconstruction of the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce is the basis for the adaptation, supplemented with the research work on chronophotography by Étienne-Jules Marey. The principle of chronophotography, which permitted the recording of movement sequences in phase images and made processes visible that had remained hidden to the human eye up to then, was transferred to the digital image-in-image montage in the enacted photo work Rope.

The stratigraphic method of the chronophotographers was taken up by us and recorded using the digital 'stacking process', then layered in the montage by compositing. In this way, movement sequences can be visualised à la Marey, or individual images stacked on one another can show how the illusion of movement à la Muybridge is created. Movement and space are addressed thematically in ROPE - A DEAD MAN’S DREAM in that directions of movement open up the space, or panoramas (taken on the battlefields of the American Civil War) are set in motion through methods inspired by Zoetropes.

All these techniques served to explore the nature or condition of the image in a cinematographic context. From this, one can recognise that images are neither still nor moving.

In ROPE - A DEAD MAN’S DREAM we attempted to comprehend the stratigraphic quality of the film image as something to be grasped in its depth. Playing with time and space expands our memories and powers of recall, and sharpens our “third sense” for a cinema of the future, one in which we consciously design and structure the meaning of movement in the image. […].«

Gusztáv Hámos: Think Future Cinema - With Photofilm as Its Basis, in: The Real of Reality: The Realist Turn in Contemporary Film Theory, editors Christine Reeh-Peters, Stefan W.Schmidt and Peter Weibel, 2021