It?s Perfect! The expression on Matthias?s face is a mixture of mock horror and concern. Both hands flutter north to cover his mouth, his eyes widening. ?I can?t believe it.? It is a gesture, learned and relearned, but each time he invents it anew. He does it again, for the first time. I?ve just told him that I?ve only been on the beach twice in my life. Matthias has learned the cost of being a mother (the mark is everywhere in his work) so before taking me to the beach he insists we buy an oversized umbrella in a shop filled with Jesus replicas. Like the avant garde in art, every religion has its kitsch. He walks us past the assembly line Christs (the word is made flesh, and then plaster), flaunts superstition by opening the umbrella in the shop and says it will have to do. We?re on our way. The Jesus image (the body flayed and nailed, in the hours before death, in John?s words ?and he in us?) reminds that the healthy tans of one generation are cancer in the next (have to be careful on the beach). But when we get there we find Christoph already sprawled across a choice bit of cool sand, determined to overlay his northern European pallour with a baste of Portugese high noon. Like Matthias, Christoph is a graduate of the Braunschweig Art Academy, schooled in the take-no-prisoner critiques of Birgit Hein, herself one half of the primal couple of the German fringe. Five years back, Matthias got a call from the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford to produce a little something for a Hitchcock exhibition. Matthias promptly rang up Christoph and together they set off on a picture journey that has already produced half a dozen picture perfects which have raised the stakes of the found footage genre. The clarity and precision of their movies is nearly unbearable, founded on acts of rigorous collection and rhyming gestures. A duet of exacting attention and beauty. Like the classic artists of centuries past, they are concerned first of all with making a portrait. What does it look like? What does this face tell us, which has already glimpsed its own end, and returned? But they are not engaged in life drawing, or plein air pursuits, instead they render a picture of the pictures which surround us. They allow us to see these Hollywood excerpts, and the Euro faces which have haunted the imaginary of a continent, which have been reproduced in a line that has made a vanishing point of our faces. They bring these phantoms to life so that we can see them again, for the first time. The furniture is a picture. These hands are pictures of hands. This look reminds me that my look is also a picture, I bought it for eight dollars in an all night flick marathon, and watched the heroine crumble when every hope she ever had walked out the door. I didn?t watch her, I swallowed that look, it?s my look now, my face. These pictures have become my face. Imagine the wedding bells: Matthias the lyric nitrate poet and Christoph the digital surgeon. I knew Christoph from his King Kong excerpt Release, Fay Wray roped up and c-c-c-c-convulsing, the body heaving in a virtuoso machine display he enacted via hundreds of micro-looped samples drawn from just four shots. (Who says there will be no pleasure in the new order, though at what cost?) What would this uber VJ bring to Matthias?s childhood reveries, his pair of AIDS laments (one a psychodrama of doubled bodies shot in Portugal, the other a hand-processed diary opus grieving a lost friend), his dreamy sailor erotics (shot through, like all good sex, with terror), who had found in Brasilia an image of an exhausted utopia every inch his own, emptying his tank out into one last masterpiece before slumping exhausted across the festival carpet to receive his just rewards. Most artists continue to fill frames long after their moment has passed, but habit impels them to generate new pictures, shadows of giants, which only appear large, in the right light, looked at kindly by friends. Matthias finds a way past all that, he cheats in other words, it should be over for him, he?s been up on the wire for too long already, drinking from the deep place these high fine pictures come from. Now it?s time for him to come down or develop unhealthy pharmaceutical dependencies. But he?s clever, this small-town cosmopolitan, and through hard work he manages to generate, in semi-regular intervals, bouts of good fortune. A chance phone call arrives from Oxford with an offer for a bigger stage and some money to buy time. Another call follows quickly to Christoph and the engagement is on. They set to work carving up Hitchcock?s fourty films into six densely packed chapters. Somehow, in just 45 minutes, they manage to leave nothing behind. Now that the spectacles of years past have been shrunk to fit home screens, cinema?s déjà vu is increasingly available for personal review. After the corpse, the morticians arrive to reassemble the body. Matthias and Christoph delight in their work, who could trust a surgeon that doesn?t like to cut? That doesn?t feel each incision into the body as if it were his own, and smile? They are grave diggers, necrophiliacs and lovers. The way they touch these pictures makes me feel (and I revel in it) like a voyeur. Sometimes bluntly with the back of the hand, sometimes so lightly that only the slightest alteration of the picture plane occurs as it passes through them. This is how they caress her sleeping face, a lost ticket, an oncoming train. When the artist is finished, I get to stand in their place, trying not to feel that I?ve come too late. They arrange the view, or rather: they put me in my place. They place me. In Play, the dynamic duo gather pictures of audiences, reaction shots to a scene which never materializes, except in the theatre or the art gallery, where it is clear these faces are looking back at us. We are granted an image of ourselves. How do we look? And he in us. Play (so named because all the audiences we see are attending one) attaches itself to the mystery of the third person, the crowd. Not I like but we like. Not I see but we see. The cinema, at least on one side of the screen, always shows a crowd scene. Both makers are German. Have I mentioned that already? Have I ever stopped mentioning it? Their grandparents? generation was part of the Reich, it?s that close, close enough to touch almost, and the Reich?s mass hysteria verges behind every Cary Grant close-up here. What is the relation of the many and the one (Godard; ?The state dreams of one, the individual of two?)? The urgency behind this question is particularly German, which renders the cutting here precise without being tidy, the surgeons feel every cut. We see a crowd in wait, gripped with dis-ease, what they need is that one of their number tear themselves away from the undifferentiated mass, that someone declare themselves, perform themselves, and so allow the crowd to unify in cheer (or derision), to allow the crowd to become itself, the individual must be asserted. What is commonly held in contradiction (the individual versus the crowd) turn out to be two sides of the same coin, part of the same play. The crowd makes the individual (the star) necessary. In the language of cinema: first the long shot, then the close-up. What is left in the end but to applaud the crowd which makes the individual possible? First: we are. And only then: I am. The road is sunny and bright and the four of us push along easily, Esma and I, and Matthias and Christoph. I never see them apart here, putting their hearts into leisure with the same dedication that they bring to their computer homes. We pass the abandoned arcades of Vila do Conde, a town both old and new, host to the world?s big easy film festival, where the movies don?t begin until the afternoon, giving us some serious beach time. We?ve had our perfect breakfast, our good morning America blow job, now it?s time for the beach. Christoph Girardet. I?d heard about him before of course, even spent a few huddled moments at some German festival swallowing beer and cigarettes before racing back to catch more of the new as it hurried its way into the past. But this was the first time we could sit for a reliable chat. Like anyone whose heart is broken, who is deeply and profoundly sad, he clowns all the time. He is a speedbag of punchlines. And curiously, just like Matthias, he looks like he has just stepped out of an American movie made in the 1950s. Neither would play the lead, but somewhere in the posse of hard boiled (and soft hearted) detectives they might be found, breaking the law in order to keep it. I shrink underneath the umbrella, trying not to let an errant ray strike, riding Christoph?s laugh until he pauses for pronouncement on Matthias?s work BC (before Christoph), that celebrated string of fringe hits. He turns to me with all doubt left behind, the words of the oracle are waiting, ?Matthias?s earlier movies had mistakes in them, you know.? Matthias, listening off his shoulder, nods in agreement. Yes, the tribunal has decided, there were ?mistakes? made. Only a German could say something like this. The merciless scrutiny of their own work (their own emotional lives, their own small fragile hopes) allows them to dream of a past with ?mistakes? which can be identified, and no doubt corrected. Of course the secret dream each of them holds, unable even to confess it to one another, is to produce that most German of all art manufactures: the perfect art piece. I love it, it?s perfect! Their genius (or good luck, it?s the same in the end) is that their happy sadness erases each other?s blind spots, while at the same time they save each other from the dream of perfection. The next year I come back to the beach at Vila alone, looking for a trace of where we stood and talked but there?s nothing, no matter how long I look. This relieves me more than it should. Mike Hoolboom