DE STIJL / MONDRIAN

By : variés

France, 2010, PAL,
zone 2, mono


Not available for sale now


DE STJL / MONDRIAN
Several film directors
PAL, All Zones
+ 16 pages booklet

The Centre Pompidou presents 8 short-films for the first time directed by the famous artists of movement "De Stijl"

The "Mondrian / De Stijl" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou from 1st December 2010 to 21st March 2011 actually comprises two paths: one to explore Piet Mondrian, a prominent painter and leading light of 20th-century art in general and abstraction in particular, and the other to explore the De Stijl ("The Style"), movement, which Mondrian embraced and which swept across every realm of artistic creation - from painting to architecture, and on to sculpture, graphic arts, cinema and design - to become one of the main avant-garde movements that shook Europe after the turn of last century.

FILMKOMPOSITION, Werner Graeff (1922-77, color, black and white, 4min13)
Werner Graeff, student from Doesburg's class at the Bauhaus, was Richter's most loyal disciple. In 1922 he drew his first scores, which were realized as films only after the war: FILMKOMPOSITION I/22 (D 1922/77), working with colorful shapes, and the black-and-white FILMKOMPOSITION II/22 (D 1922/59).

RHYTHMUS 21, Hans Richter (1921, black and white, silent film, 3min42)
In this first of the series, originally known as FILM IST RHYTHMUS, he experiments with square forms. These forms appear in very simple to very complex compositions-from the beginning shots where the squares with the frame. The effect is a subversion of the cinematic illusion of depth. Richter creates a precise rhythm with the movement of these shapes. "The simple square of the movie screen could easily be divided and orchestrated," wrote Richter in 1953. "These division or parts could then be orchestrated in time by accepting the rectangle of the "movie canvas" as the form element. In other words, I did again with the screen what I had done years before with the canvas. In doing so I found a new sensation: rhythm- which is, I still think, the chief sensation of any expression of movement." (Publication excerpt Circulating Film Library Catalog, New York The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, p. 166)

AN IMPRESSION OF PIET MONDRIAN' NEW YORK STUDIO AND HIS LAST PAINTING, Harry Holtzman (1944, color, silent film, 5min58)
After his death, Mondrian's friend and sponsor in New York, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components.

MOOD MONDRIAN, Marie Menken (1961-62, color, silent film, 5min)
In MOOD MONDRIAN, Marie Menken brought her reconstructive approach to visual art (as seen in her earlier Visual Variations on Noguchi) to bear on the painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie" by Piet Mondrian.

DIAGONAL SYMPHONY, Viking Eggeling (1921, black and withe, silent film, 8min13)ad feedback
A tilted figure, consisting largely of right angles at the beginning, grows by accretion, with the addition of short straight lines and curves which sprout from the existing design. The figure vanishes and the process begins again with a new pattern, each cycle lasting one or two seconds. The complete figures are drawn in a vaguely Art Deco style and could be said to resemble any number of things, an ear, a harp, panpipes, a grand piano with trombones, and so on, only highly stylized. The tone is playful and hypnotic.

RHYTMUS 23, Hans Richter (1923-25, black and white, silent film, 3min23)
Somewhat less radical than its predecessor, RHYTMUS 23 is constructed entirely out of the interplay between square shapes and diagonal lines, often related via superimposition, and the underlying architectonic principle is geometric symmetry.

FORM PHASE IV, Robert Breer (1954, color, silent, 5min)
Using an old Bolex 16mm camera, FORM PHASES are the first films of Robert Breer, simple stop motion studies based on his abstract paintings.

LIMINAL, MINIMAL, Christian Lebrat (1977, color, silent, 20min)
Christian Lebrat's films decompose the image into particles (strips of light) exploding the frame, creating new intensities of color.