Eight years after his elegiac AUS DER FERNE, Müller revisits Lisbon, the city of fate, of longing and decay and divisible selves. Shadowing his protagonist from a hotel cell into labyrinthine streets, the film contemplates dissolution and the permeable boundaries between life and death in sanguinary colours and swimming superimpositions. The New York Film Festival, cat., 1997

Photographed with an exquisite eye for interiors and a restless invention, ALPSEE stages a boy?s coming of age, that painful rend between infant dependency and mature individuation. Nearly wordless, Müller proceeds by analogy and synecdoche, gathering up precisely framed moments within the home and collecting them as evidence. Its gorgeous chromatic scheme and high key lighting mark a significant departure from Müller?s narrow gauge efforts of the 80s. Mike Hoolboom, Millenium Film Journal, New York, 1997

Record players and gramophones from various color and black-and-white films. The original soundtracks have been replaced by the scratching sound heard at the end of records. Single rotations of the records are repeated over and over, and the barely perceptible editing create skips on the records (which do not appear in the original films). The almost identical number of rotations of each record player creates a rhythmic structure with the average length of a song ? 4?45??.

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, BEACON sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object. MIRROR creates an atmospheric image of the 'in between', the nameless sphere between belonging and isolation. ?The characters in a tragedy, the air they breathe, the settings, are sometimes more absorbing than the tragedy itself, as are the moments before and afterwards, when the plot is at a standstill and the dialogue is silenced.? (Michelangelo Antonioni)

Female protagonists in chains, taken from horror films of the fifties and sixties, are deprived of the narrative trappings of their film roles. Technicolor. Red lips, fingernails digging in, a bosom rising and falling with the rhythm of the woman's breath. The serial collage turns ironic. A dialogue between manacled female objects begins. The communication, which at first occurred only in the form of glances, becomes increasingly intense. As the result of the accelerated montage, the women's cries grow into a final orgy of screams.

Combining close-ups of redundant technology gleaned from 1960s US sci-fi television series with a female voice of a '40s Hollywood melodrama, ?Manual? makes absolute detachment clash with magnified emotion. With its record of the minutiae of endless buttons, switches and control panels and its choreography of a machine-like body language, ?Manual? reduces the notion of any manageability of life to sheer absurdity.

The PHOENIX TAPES 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