Claudia Schmid - schmidfilm
Documentary - Sript & Direction / Street Photography
The Redrawn World – The Artist Heinz Emigholz, 64 min. A film by Claudia Schmid. WDR/3sat © 2009
Synopsis
“Normally, there is two-valued logic and causality—cause and effect. These are such simple relationships; I find them rather crude, and they do not particularly interest me. However, there most certainly exists a multi-valued logic—one in which the work of memory and the work of thought are integrated, and through which the real situation coalesces. And that is a logic that is complex—and that interests me.” — Heinz Emigholz
I have always been interested in artists who engage profoundly with the essence of art and its expressive possibilities, and who occupy solitary positions within the art world. When I first saw Heinz Emigholz’s *Sense of Architecture* films, I was fascinated by the intensity and distinctiveness of his visual language. In 2008, I visited the exhibition *Die Basis des Make-Up* (The Basis of Make-Up) at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, met Heinz Emigholz in person, and immersed myself in his multifaceted body of work. From the very first second, I felt a deep connection to his way of thinking, his artistic approach, and his works. The combination of crystal-clear analytical thought, sensitivity, and unadorned poetry impressed me immediately.
Like few other artists, Heinz Emigholz has spent his entire life—time and again—grappling anew with the possibilities and planes of composition inherent in film and the visual surface within the dimensions of space and time. He is fascinated by conceptual spaces and the relationship between real and projected space. In this pursuit, his primary instrument of thought remains the eye—that interface between the world and the brain.
His artistic engagement with "three-dimensional logic"—a logic that not only transcends the dualistic positions of our thinking but also penetrates the "free space" of the creative realm—immediately captivated my interest. Heinz Emigholz is one of the few artists who ceaselessly explore the liminal zone between art and film. As someone with a background in conceptual art myself, this line of inquiry feels deeply familiar to me in my current practice as a filmmaker.
The film *Die gezeichnete Welt* (*The Drawn World*) presents various excerpts from his cinematic and graphic oeuvre, following Emigholz as he moves through his exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Interviews provide an introduction to the underlying intellectual landscape of his work, shedding light on the artist’s multifaceted creative output.
Heinz Emigholz is a filmmaker, visual artist, author, actor, essayist, and producer. His early films from the 1970s—created within the context of avant-garde and experimental cinema—reveal a complex interplay between abstract temporal and spatial compositions: cinematic analyses of movement across selected urban and natural landscapes. Emigholz deconstructs camera pans, filming various predetermined points of a 180-degree sweep at a specific location—capturing them as static individual shots according to a pre-established "score"—and subsequently reassembles them during the editing process. His aim is to create "time containers."
In the late 1970s, he began to engage intensively—and additionally—with the multifaceted nature of language in relation to space and time. "Just as the landscapes in his earlier films were deconstructed into fixed points and their interconnections according to specific scores, here, each individual word is assigned its own distinct shot."
His feature films occupy a unique position within his oeuvre. Although they, too, explore the interplay of space and time, they are structured in a narrative rather than an analytical manner; they consist of discrete episodes—some abstract, others loosely based on biographical experiences—that coalesce into a dreamlike narrative. In doing so, they defy two-dimensional logic, treating the content of their sequences with free-associative fluidity. They possess a poetic quality and seem transported to another realm; yet, one can still sense the subjective perspective on the era and the intellectual landscape of that time. They exist in dialogue with his diary-like notes.
His drawing series "The Basis of Make-Up"—which he began in New York in 1974 and which continues to grow as a work in progress—now comprises 600 sheets. Like many of his films, these drawings stem from the artist’s countless notebooks, into which he enters and pastes all manner of "civilizational debris"—alongside drafts of his own texts—including phrases overheard on the street or while watching television, advertisements, newspaper clippings, diagrams from military textbooks, and private notes. The drawings are executed entirely in black and white and are produced as photographic prints measuring 54 x 64 cm. With his unusually minimalist architectural films—"Architecture as Autobiography" and "Architecture and Beyond," which he began in 1994—Emigholz once again created a stir. In chronological sequence, and through meticulously composed individual shots, he presents the complete body of work of various architects, civil engineers, and designers who particularly fascinate him—such as Bruce Goff, Adolf Loos, Robert Maillart, Rudolph Schindler, and Louis Sullivan. Here, too, he denies the viewer the customary, familiar perspective; employing static camera setups, he films isolated views of a given building, which he then edits together in a dispassionate, sequential manner. The viewer is thus compelled to mentally assemble these individual images into a cohesive whole. The audio, too, is pared down to the actual sounds present on location: the clicking of a keyboard, wind rustling through the trees, or the engine noise of a passing car. Emigholz has filmed his works exclusively in the 4:3 aspect ratio; he holds no interest in conventional right angles or central perspective.
“Rather than being an empty space—its coordinates anchored in categories borrowed from abstract geometry, such as the horizon line and the vanishing point—the pictorial space in these films is always already populated. Wherever there is a space, there is also a body that defines it—even if only through its negative form: absence.”
Born in 1948 in Achim near Bremen, the artist has produced an extensive body of filmic and artistic work, and has appeared in performances as well as in films by other directors. His career is marked by numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures, and publications both at home and abroad. He trained as a draftsman and photo retoucher, and went on to study philosophy and literary studies in Hamburg. In 1978, he founded the production company Pym Films. Since 1993, he has held a professorship in Experimental Film Design at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Credits:
Written & Directed by: Claudia Schmid
Cinematography: Susu Grunenberg
Sound: Ivonne Gärber, Oliver Lumpe
Editing: Oliver Held
Sound Mixing: Imke Bartmann, WDR
Editorial Supervision: Reinhard Wulf, WDR/3sat