Part 6# of PHOENIX TAPES which show re-edited excerpts from 40 films by Alfred Hitchcock. The six chapters focus on a personal selection of various leitmotifs in Hitchcock's movies. "The consequence of this is not only to highlight Hitchcock's obsessions with certain types of repetitive movements and highly loaded visual signifiers, but to suggest that these actions are part of a universal language of gesture that encompasses both cinematic and everyday modes of communication." (John Tozer, "Notorious. Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art," Camera Austria, Vienna 1999, p.79)

Audience at the movies. In PLAY, the onscreen action is can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. In sequences of analogous reactions, individual behavior condenses into collective behavior. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama.

A study of light. (world premiere)

(new work made for this exhibition in world premiere)

(new work made for this exhibition in world premiere)

The first shot is a still one of actress Ellen Schwiers looking into the film camera as she holds a small camera in front of her. In the original German B-movie, this section only lasts about two seconds, but the editing here sets it almost unnoticeably into an apparently endless movement. As a moving picture, however, the woman seems to remain paralyzed, frozen in focus by the film camera and in the gaze of the viewer. At the same time, the viewer is at the mercy of the woman's hypnotizing gaze. The relationship between observation and photographic equipment is reversed. Every three and a half minutes, the camera flash turns the image into a white surface.

In slow dissolves, loops of images of enacted absence are projected in white light. Most of the images come from the black-and-white film series "The Invisible Man," dating from the 1930s to '60s. The presence of an invisible actor seems to influence minimal cinematic events on theatrical sets. These events combine to become an enigma regarding the phenomenon of disappearance.

Sixty images of watches and clocks; sixty cinematic situations. Linear time, deconstructed space. ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG, 2002

Codes: oil portraits of women always appear in films whenever the woman in the portrait is physically absent in the narrative afterward. The (male) observation of the portrait reflects an emotional pattern: exaggerated loss, transfigured memory, paralysis. Editing PORTRAIT in short, repetitive units of time allows for the establishment of a series of characters that represent the observer viewing the image. Their limited movements make them seem practically frozen, like the portraits themselves. On the sound level, loops of quiet, monotonous electronic sounds correspond to the only material that seems alive: the noise of the film grain.

PHANTOM seems to come straight from the realm of the spirits; it's a blood-red coloured fantasy about what lies beyond the curtains that apparently separate the living from the dead. Again, it seems as if these are the figures that wander unredeemed through film, without our noticing them. Projecting these images on a curtain intensifies the notion that a breath of air would be enough to scatter them all to the four winds. Michael Althen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2002

PICTURES is most clearly a combination of the two media of film and photography; a third medium is the female figure wandering like a ghost through both worlds. The frontal view of a woman watching us is a contrast to the back views shown to us by Caspar David Friedrich, for instance. These figures are like our proxys, luring our view towards the depth of the picture, towards the painter's reality. Müller?s figure, on the other hand, drives us out of the illusionary paradise of 'film'. It marks the borderline, not just between interior and exterior, but also between us ? the viewers ? and the viewed. Christiane Heuwinkel, Die Phantome des Filmemachers, Bielefeld, 2002

PROMISES is based on a selection of sixteen prints from my collection of old wedding photographs. The video pulses violently from one bouquet of red roses to another, focusing on their unifying similarities. Animating still photography into moving images, PROMISES zooms into the very centre of the images ? single buds ? in a nervous, flickering rhythm, as if it were searching for a message hidden deep under the surface. Aggressive irruptions in the editing seem to make the meticulously arranged bouquets explode.

ALBUM is nurtured by my personal arsenal of memories. Numerous moving images, collected by me over the years without any particular purpose in mind, are the visual source of this collage: flotsam and jetsam floating down a river, a plastic bag swirling around a wire, a shirt hanging in an open window. These motifs encounter each other, as do pictures in a photo album. Inserted texts revolve around processes of memory, appropriation and loss. Their recurring themes stay fragments ? like single sentences lifted from a diary. They accompany and temporarily possess the images, only to ultimately leave them as they are: open, ambiguous and autonomous.