Heinz Emigholz

"Emigholz is quite simply one of the best filmmakers in our country", to quote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s biggest daily papers, almost twenty years ago now. In just under 40 years, Berlin-based filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has created an oeuvre that is both diverse and entirely unmistakable due to its fierce consistency: an oeuvre documenting what it shows in a prosaic manner ("The camera shake as symbolic of life, that kind of sob stuff is a last resort") but also opening up visual spaces and freedom for ideas in an essayistic style.

Above all, in his films art and architecture present the material for a reflection on seeing itself, on the character of "the" image and images, and cinematography: "We are the medium of space and all its surfaces; every view with its subtle materiality is an interpretation of one of its possibilities," Emigholz explains. "I believe that every single person perceives space in a different way from everyone else. And these perceptual nuances are what lead to art and design."

Emigholz is completely immune to "typical German" profundity: "The very last thing I want to do is break open the world’s surfaces to discover some sort of secret code behind them. ... Instead, I am convinced that it is these very surfaces that should be speaking to us. The photographic surface that documents something, therefore, also represents the thinking of its constructor – attached to it by the focused gaze. The fact that a 'reading' of surfaces is practiced so little in our supposedly oh so visual culture is not restricted to the phenomenon of 'art', of course." His films, or so the director hopes, could form parts of a new type of thought construct. "These films are verbally silent but they make it possible to think within the space presented."

One formal principle that connects all his works is an impulse to collect, a second is curiosity, which goes along with the capacity to discover things that he has not actually been searching for. In addition, there is Emigholz’s interest in the serial – an interest, however, that is never satisfied in the idea of completeness. Here, order serves clarity but is never an end in itself. On the contrary, in Emigholz’s films, despite their formal stringency, we believe we can also find room for contingencies. Sometimes the titles of the series and cycles overlap, or the author establishes sub-series within them: Architecture as Autobiography, for example, began as part of a series now comprising 20 films, "Photography and Beyond" – but it appears to have become a series in its own right in the meantime.

With his architectural portraits in particular, the filmmaker has attracted more widespread attention recently: in chronological sequence Emigholz’s films show the surviving buildings of 20th century architects, civil engineers and artists often, but not always, and rarely unproblematically linked to the onset of modernism: like Louis Sullivan, Robert Maillart, Bruce Goff, Rudolph Schindler, Adolf Loos, Frederick Kiesler, Pier Luigi Nervi or Auguste Perret, for instance.

Emigholz describes his method in these films – individual buildings are presented and explored in takes that always last four to seven seconds – in the following way: "The intention is that the buildings themselves will tell us something through their heightened presence on film. We should be able to experience these spaces without them being explained or evaluated by a voice from the off, which is usual in architectural features shown on television – exploiting the whole spectrum of dramaturgical attributions of meaning that distract from the real thing. I make hardcore documentaries. I simply want to show something, but in such a way that watching it may lead a person to meditation."

In this context, one film stands out particularly: "D'Annunzios Höhle" ("D’Annunzio’s Cave") from 2005 was shot using four cameras simultaneously, and the effect is that of an overheated trip to the fin de siècle: the intention is to show the inner world of Italian artist-dandy D’Annunzio – the "insanity", in which Emigholz not only recognizes a "precursor" to the lifestyle-fetishism of our times but also sees a presage of today’s celebrity culture.

In his films Emigholz, who always does his own camera work, documents buildings and objects on the one hand; but he also records traces of the autobiographical moment: he began the series of drawings "The Basis of Make-Up" as early as 1974 in New York City. It now comprises hundreds of sheets, which he has transformed through film into an encyclopaedic diary. "I did not come from theater. At the time, I had no interest whatsoever in realizing stories. I was completely alienated by New German Cinema. I found it agonizingly boring. Even now, I don’t understand why it was supposed to have been a revolution."

He is a republican with the republican virtues of curiosity and consistency, who rejects standardizations. For many years his production company Pym Films marketed the superb underground magazine "Die Republik" founded by Uwe Nettelbeck, Emigholz also contributing essays and above all innumerable drawings. Emigholz’s curiosity has led him to other excursions that few would have expected: for instance, he has made appear ances as an actor in films by Joseph Vilsmaier, and in 1980 he translated the comic publication "Breakdowns"  by his friend Art Spiegelman.

To the present day, Emigholz operates at the interface of cinema, fine art and literature. In addition to his filmmaking he is also a fine artist, has written books, and taught Experimental Film Design at the Berlin University of the Arts for 20 years. The film programs for his students, on public showing in the cinema Arsenal, were famous well beyond the city boundaries.

In the past Emigholz did occasionally make feature films as well. But soon that became too risky economically and so first, he omitted the actors and thus found the way to his own special form, the Emigholz-film: "The film has roughly as many takes as a feature film but you don’t notice that. The engine of thought picks up steam slowly while you’re watching the film, but once it starts it is impossible to stop."

Author: Rüdiger Suchsland