Vila do Conde, Girardet e Müller Nuno Rodrigues Vila do Conde Shorts already has a remarkable history of complicity with Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet. It all started in 1994 when the festival was in its second year and provided Müller’s second film with its Portuguese premiere. He was still a young director feeling his way in experimental film and starting to become a regular of film festivals of that kind. The film was “Home Stories”, a mini melodrama made out of excerpts from Hollywood films from the 1950s and `60s, in which the director developed a poetic reflection on fear. The following year Müller visited Vila do Conde for the first time to present “Alpsee” in the international competition. The film appeared to be the confirmation of one of the most promising directors of the 1990s. It was a collage of footage from home movies of the 1960s from which Müller built a narrative that hinted at his childhood memories. This film showed the evolution of a film-maker who had abandoned the structural experiments of his first films and adopted a narrative, disconcerting cinema with frank allusions to Hitchcock and Buñuel. That same year he would be praised by the critics and win the festival’s top prize. I remember an episode which demonstrates the impact the film had at the time. After the end of the session at the Municipal Auditorium where the film was shown, José Álvaro Morais, the director, said that he had just seen a truly surprising master-piece, the highest point of the festival! Episodes like these resulted in the creation of an empathy between the director and the festival and contributed to the organisation of a comprehensive show of Müller’s films in 1996. In Vila do Conde Portuguese audiences saw for the first time the work of a director with a masterful command of editing through the use of found footage. This retrospective was followed by an extension in Lisbon organised with the Goethe Institut. The show featured five films that preceded “Alpsee” including “The Flamethrowers” and “Sleepy Haven”, in which Müller developed a progressive reflection about the possibilities of cinematographic language, namely through its articulation with music. The intense work done with the composer Dirk Schaefer played a significant role in this. The meticulous appropriation of film excerpts and images from the director’s cinematographic world led him into a cinema where the fragment gained fundamental importance in its ability to build new narratives and new sequences capable of giving new meaning to his films, in terms of time frame. 1996 was the year of Müller’s international recognition. This coincided with the increasing recognition of the Vila do Conde Film Festival. The making of his sixth film “Pensão Globo” shown in 1997 contributed to Müller coming to Portugal again to present his films at the festival and at its extensions in Lisbon. The film was a poem about the illusion of desire and its consequences filmed in a hotel room in Lisbon where Müller retrieved some of the visible anxieties of his first film “Aus der ferne”, namely an autobiographical tendency to project his fears about desire and death. “Vacancy”, shown in Vila do Conde in 1999, heightened Müller’s inclination to use the role of the narrator in conjunction with images from home movies of the inaugural day of Brasilia. 2001 saw Matthias Müller back at the festival to present “Nebel”, a film that returned to two themes developed in his previous work: childhood and death. This extremely beautiful short film based on “Poems to childhood” by Ernst Jandl became a sort of ode to childhood, where the director discovered and invented images for Jandl’s words without trying to find a meaning or tell a story. One afternoon during the 9th Vila do Conde Shorts I met Matthias at the Municipal Auditorium café. We talked about the past, his films and our festival and he said he thought the festival was becoming stronger in terms of programming. I told him about some of our ideas for the future, namely our aim of producing some films to go with the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the festival. I mentioned that we wanted him to be one of the directors in our project and he immediately said he was interested adding that he’d like to make the film with an artist he’d started to work with - Christoph Girardet. Some months before he’d sent us his first collaboration with Girardet, “Phoenix Tapes”, a commission from the MOMA-Oxford for an exhibition called "Hitchcock and Contemporary Art". This work demonstrated a laborious encyclopaedic approach which through editing and repetition of gestures and images constructed a true cinematic reflection about Alfred Hitchcock’s world. We took the opportunity given by the invitation made by the Videolisboa Festival to create a programme of videos made by renowned film directors and included “Phoenix Tapes” in that year’s programme This was the beginning of Müller’s partnership with an author connected to video art and the presentation of video installations in galleries and museums: Christoph Girardet. This artist, who at the time was completely unknown to us, had started his career in 1991 and prior to 2000 had developed a series of videos which made use, like Müller’s work, in an almost obsessive way, of film fragments and sequences. He showed the same fascination for cinema, for collecting images, for editing, for fragments and for repetition in the construction of a cinematographic language. This period marked the beginning of an almost permanent partnership by the two artists (between 1999 and 2005) during which they developed a body of remarkable work. They started to develop work that investigated the articulation of two areas, the presentation of films in theatres and the creation of work aimed at galleries and museums. This fusion would enrich the qualities of both artists and allow for the development of a series of works that placed them on the edge of cinema. Around the same time the Vila do Conde Festival made a departure from the conventional language associated with short films that had dominated the 1990s and opened up to a wider concept of cinema, as far as narrative is concerned, becoming more exposed to experimental trends. Thus, in 2002 the festival created a section called Work in Progress and we started to consider new forms of exhibition that didn’t confine themselves to the cinema auditorium. The introduction of video installations by authors connected to the festival allowed for the return of Müller and the debut of Girardet, through the presentation of their individual works, “Phantom” and “Scratch”, respectively. If the first one explored the concepts of mystery and frontier, expressed through a series of sequences from one of Müller’s preferred themes, the curtain, the second, constructed from images of record players, developed one the most remarkable aspects of Girardet’s work, time and repetition in the articulation of editing. This brought about a second mutual empathy, this time between the festival and Christoph Girardet. Still in 2002, in connection with the celebration of the festival’s tenth anniversary , we had one of the most remarkable moments in our relationship with both film-makers: the making of “Beacon”, the film commissioned by the festival as part of the 10 series. “Beacon” is a beautiful assemblage of material filmed in ten different places connected by the sea. One of those places is indeed Vila do Conde itself, filmed by Müller during his visits to the festival in previous years. To enhance the work even further they invited Canadian director Mike Hoolboom to write the text for the film (which was voiced over). The night of its screening was unforgettable with an audience that filled the room and surrendered to the quality of the films made by Matthias, Girardet, Miguel Gomes, Sandro Aguilar, Daníele Cipri and Franco Maresco (all the directors invited for the 10 series) Müller and Girardet came back to Vila do Conde the following year to present “Manual” which would receive a festival award. The film was made of footage from 1950’s and 1960’s films where mechanical devices such as tape recorders, screens and switches were shown. These elements were masterfully composed through loops and repetitions in opposition to a masculine face and hands creating a sort of pseudo drama. 2004 was a year of new projetcs and three new presentations in Vila do Conde. “Breeze”, a trailer made for the Viennale, “Play” a narrative filled with drama and suspense made from fragments of films and audiences and finally “Mirror”, the only film by Müller and Girardet that makes a departure from the prevailing logic of their individual and joint work. It’s not made from found footage as their previous work. It’s a live action film with actors and purposely filmed images with some formal elements that hint at “Last year in Marienbad” by Alain Resnaís. It was possibly a first step towards a turning point in their work or maybe just an exception to an obsessive tendency to revisit and manipulate images. Finally 2005 brought us the latest in a series of complicities and the fulfilment of a dream – the organisation in Vila do Conde of an exhibition of their individual and joint work. Its development was a stimulating process as we aimed to create a show that would articulate the presentation of some of their most recent work (unknown in Portugal) with a venue whose characteristics had never been experienced by both – the Solar Gallery. The solution was to present their work in different dimensions without ever resorting to large scale projection. It also meant to respect the architecture’s paths and transparencies so that through them the noise and silence of the work could be explored. And as if this wasn’t enough, Müller and Girardet decided to create two new works for the exhibition and premiere “Ray”. Now that we head towards the new challenge of having a cinematic art gallery we can only hope that the making of Revisitations is just a starting point for another series of projects and complicities.