Hannes Schüpbach:
Instants, Essais, InterventionsHannes Schüpbach’s film «Instants» (2012) opens with a moment of standstill that aims at the heart of the medium of film: neither sound nor motion; a forest – but where’s the rustle? – a young girl mid-jump, captured in the air. In between: black intervals. And then – we’re in the cinema, after all! – the release: flowing water, a hand moving into the image, into the cool water, before it disappears from the frame again.
«Stills and Movies» was the title of Schüpbach’s first major Swiss solo show at Kunsthalle Basel in 2009. A movie, as the term tells us, is a medium of movement. Whether something moves within the recorded image, or whether the film itself is played forward or backward doesn’t matter: the time of our perception progresses. As the American avantgarde filmmaker Hollis Frampton writes: «Time is our name for an irreducible condition of our perception of phenomena … Therefore, statements that would separate the notion of time from some object or direct perception are meaningless» (on Eadweard Muybridge in «Circles of Confusion»). Standstill and black screen, interrupted motion, repetitions with slight variations – these are the moments of irritation in the aesthetic pleasure afforded by Schüpbach’s films, which elicit a conscious, sensual perception of his art.
There is no perception without time: an insight that French philosopher Henri Bergson elaborated in his 1889 dissertation even before the birth of the medium of film. Apart from «le temps», time as a measurable interval, for instance of 16 minutes of film, Bergson was especially interested in what he called «la durée», the duration. Duration does not progress in a linear fashion like time but is defined in processual terms as part of the relationship between time and space. Schüpbach’s films, whose «images are liberated from linear time by black transitions», as the artist himself writes, draw on this concept of duration. «The qualitative heterogeneity of our successive perceptions of the universe results from the fact that each, in itself, extends over a certain depth of duration, and that memory condenses in each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations which appear to us all at once, although they are successive», as Bergson explains in «Matter and Memory».
Music and language are characterized by the same mechanism of compression, of interaction between past, present, and future; just like film, they can only be experienced through duration. Thus, Schüpbach’s films, though soundless, are anything but silent. If we listen while watching, music and language always resonate in the form of his films. This interdisciplinary component, the dissolving of boundaries between artistic disciplines, is central for Schüpbach: in addition to filmmaking, he also creates installations, he writes and translates. These affinities between film, music, language, and thought processes come to life in Kurzfilmtage’s presentation of two of Schüpbach’s work in a performative intervention: the films «Instants» and «Essais» are framed by a short reading of poems by his companions Joël-Claude Meffre und Werner von Mutzenbecher. Schüpbach has invited two guests to join him for the evening: cellist Flurin Cuonz (the protagonist of «Essais») and artist Werner von Mutzenbecher, a pioneer of artist’s films, who was Schüpbach’s teacher in Basel.
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von: 
