FILMKORRESPONDENZ FILMCORRESPONDENCE
16mm, 61min, 2020, silent, B/W
From the spring of 2018 to the spring of 2019, Austrian filmmakers Manfred Schwaba and Antoinette Zwirchmayr – who up to this point had maintained a faithful, intense „letter friendship“ – switched to an un- usual, artistic and intense method of communication.
Their letters adopted the form of short analogue films, shot on silent 16mm, edited mostly „in camera,“ to be (hand-)developed by the receiver rather than by the sender. These 24 monochrome missives have now been stitched together, with minimal editing and tidy- ing-up into a hour-long compendium in chronological order; some of the letters are „dated,“ others are not.
Filmkorrespondenz thus continues – in fact excitingly revives – the tradition of „epistolary cinema.“ In its cur- rent form this sub-genre can be dated to the Cartas exchanged by Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami, exhibited as part of a 2006 installation in Barcelona. Five years later, the Correspondencias project, also Spanish, brought together five pairs of filmmakers – most famously José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas – while in 2014 Mania Akbari and Mark Cousins‘ digitally-shot letters became the feature-length film Life May Be.
Established figures in the Austrian experimental scene, Schwaba and Zwirchmayr perhaps inevi- tably adopt a more radical, challenging and audacious approach than their illustrious predecessors.
The total absence of sound places the entire bur- den on their black-and-white images: cinemato- graphy and editing become absolutely crucial.
Some texts are shown, often produced by typewriters or stamping equipment – this is work happily and profitably in thrall to the allure of the analogue; indeed it‘s one which its makers intend never to be projected digitally. But Filmkorrespondenz primarily operates as fragmentary glances at quotidian reality: domestic scenes, travelogues to far-off lands such as the Phi- lippines, interludes of raw, solo intimacy, visits from friends, the careful arrangement of objects, random snatches. As they move ahead, brief glimpses of beauty.
In the spirit of Mekas, whose death occurred during the period of the exchanges (and is movingly, subtly referenced therein), Schwaba and Zwirchmayr via their diaristic musings afford us privileged access to two artists‘ inner worlds. Their collaborative project fascinatingly and rewardingly operates in the phantom zone between public and private space. The viewer becomes a kind of invited eavesdropper or spy, a third party navigating a delicate network of images, associations and signs to decipher the semi-hidden language of kindred souls.
TEXT Neil Young
REGIE | DIRECTOR Manfred Schwaba, Antoinette Zwirchmayr