Tito-Material

Found material: film images which show Tito in diverse contexts, at public affairs, with the Partisans, in "private" while shaving, etc. Place of discovery: a destroyed cinema in Mostar, Bosnia in 1996. The film construction, created at the optical printer, is of course also a counter concept to the more narrative models: the marks of war are not primarily made visible on the representational level, but more through the damage done to the film material itself from rubble and dampness, but also through the film´s editing.

(Birgit Flos)

More Texts

Thomas Korschil about Tito-Material

Elke Groen salvaged fragments of a film from the rubble of a cinema in war-torn Mostar. It was called
Tito from close up and dated from around 1978. The weathered film, riddled with traces of time and history
shows Tito at public events, together with partisans and "in private". The material is in the process of
decay. Holes gapes through the emulsion. Some passages have become completely abstract and only consist
of shapes and colours. Groen investigated this strip of film, felt its scuffs, tears and folds and
photographed the fluctuating colours as well as the accumulated dirt. She doesn't force the fragment
into a unified...

Thomas Korschil zu Tito-Material dt

Aus dem Schutt eines im Krieg zerstörten Kinos in Mostar barg Elke Groen Fragmente eines mit Tito
hautnah überschriebenen Films (zirca 1978). Die verwitterten, mit Spuren von Zeit und Geschichte
übersäten Stückchen zeigen Tito bei öffentlichen Auftritten, bei den Partisanen und "privat". Das
Material befindet sich in Auflösung. Löcher klaffen in der Emulsion. Manche Passagen sind völlig
abstrakt geworden, sind nur mehr Farbe und Form. Diese Streifen untersucht Groen, tastet ihre Schrammen,
Risse und Falten ab, fotografiert
die fluktuierenden Farben und auch den akkumulierten Schmutz. Dabei zwingt sie die Fragmente nicht
in eine durchgängige Struktur, sondern probiert verschiedenes aus in ihrer übertragung. Sie geht
ins Detail, vergrößert Bildausschnitte...

Seven Instances of the Austrian Avant-Garde, by Ed Halter

Thomas Bernhard tells the story of two professors at the University of Graz who move themselves and their families into a single house together for the purpose of continuing an entrenched, decades-long philosophical argument. After embroiling a third colleague in the dispute, they invite him over to their shared home, then blow up the buildingthus ending the discussion. They had spent all the money they had left, Bernhard writes, on the dynamite necessary for the purpose.

Imagine this tale as a parable of the distinctive paradoxes of avant-garde cinema. Exceedingly erudite conceptual structures and complex aesthetic systems achieve realization through collisions...