INDEX #016: Dietmar Brehm - Black Garden

INDEX DVD RELEASE 016

THE MURDER MYSTERY 1987/92, 16 min
BLICKLUST 1992, 16 min
PARTY 1995, 17 min
MACUMBA 1995, 18 min
CORRIDOR 1997, 18 min
ORGANICS 1998/99, 17 min
BONUSTRACK: INTERVIEW MIT DIETMAR BREHM 2000, 8:30 min (TIV-TV station)

Even though the six films function perfectly well as individual works, I always had the feeling of filming a single work. The source of inspiration was much of the historical Roman literature I read. From this sprang the motivation for the sombre-sexual treatment of the pumping-screen body portrayals. In the end we are all living corpses and very soon dead again.
Dietmar Brehm

The moods of his films resemble an atmosphere between the dream and trauma. Brehm treats the dream as a source of strategies for association, similar to the secondary process to which according to Freud all the workings of the unconscious are subject. Dietmar Brehm ­ a master of the grammar of a non-conceptual language.
Bert Rebhandl

...Brehm, a photographer and artist as well as filmmaker, makes his films from old and discarded footage, ideally the sort that invokes some kind of erotic scenario. From each of the films that make up his most ambitious project Schwarzer Garten (Black Garden, 1987-1999), Brehm collected a small selection of material and meshed the divergent images into perverse, semi-abstract, meditations on sexuality and violence. He edits the three or four different types of images (be it medical/scientific film, images taken from television, pornographic material or footage Brehm shot himself) together into an obscure matrix. The original images are distorted and degenerated. They are often overexposed and their grain enhanced through re-filming. Brehm re-films the footage in such a way as to create throbbing, pulsating images that visibly flicker at varying rates: an effect that he refers to as the “pumping screen”. The overall distortion allows for the seamless integration of footage from different sources.