Christoph Girardet

The dual slide-projection Everything Not Said (2014) traces the boundaries between the body’s interior and exterior. A large collection of single frames showing bandaged heads was compiled from movies, newly arranged and paired with extracts from psychiatric health questionnaires. Caught between transparency and opacity; vulnerability and one’s armour against it; individuality and anonymity, the faces condense into a panopticon of voyeurs under observation.

The Work Cut shows a montage of 95 shots from 95 movies ranging from the late 1940s to the 2010s in which the human body is idealised and depicted as practically indestructible and highly mutable as well as being the cause of pain, anxiety, hysteria and delusion. It ties the phantasmagorical idea of the fully transparent, controllable and infinitely malleable body to the notion of corporeality as a wound that can never heal. The concept of the body that can be formed and disciplined is juxtaposed with a physique that is fragile and vulnerable to danger, one that terrifies, ages and dies.

“The bodies that spring from Girardet and Müller’s cutting board have lost their sharp outlines, instead becoming what Deleuze calles 'anorganic bodies' – decentralised bodies that have been stripped from their organisation and have turned into 'zones of indiscernibility' in which various persons blend into one another, and where technology seamlessly merges into body parts and vice-versa … a wholly new corporeal sense arises from the images and transfers itself onto the stunned viewer, who has no choice but to be overwhelmed by these unfamiliar sensations.”

                                                                                                                             - Johannes Binotto

Funded by the German Federal Filmboard

Cut was awarded the Best European Short Film of 2013 Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde Shortfilm Festival.

Voice: John Smith
Music: Giacomo Puccini

The film empathizes with childlike realms of imagination, accompanying a boy's stages of development towards individuation and disentanglement. The boy is awestruck at first, but then sets out on a phantasmatic journey. Conditions of detachment emerge visually against an emotionally charged aria expressing a desperate yet futile longing for proximity. Embracing elements of feature films, fairy-tale moments gone astray, and vintage science fiction motifs, Meteor takes its viewers along on a voyage from the children's room to outer space.

"The cinema of 2011 reminded us, of course, that there is also a cosmos outside film and politics, with God and Grace and Leaves of Grass galore. Straying a bit from the bombastic general line, one could also find the cosmic side of things, and things of great beauty, in Girardet and Müller's short film METEOR."

                                                                                                                             - Regina Schlagnitweit

Funded by Filmförderungsanstalt - German Federal Filmboard distribution funded Nordmedia Fonds GmbH

Meteor was awarded the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Bucharest International Experimental Filmfestival in 2012 and the ARTE award at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival in 2011

The film has been screened at the Ann Abor Film Festival (2013), the Tampere International Short Film Festival (2012), the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (2012), the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2012), the Viennale (2011) and the Venice International Film Festival (2011), a.o.

In Eye, a film sequence is dissected into five moments – reminiscent of phase photography. The circular shape of a spotlight is beginning to glow, to shine and then to disappear in semidarkness again. The high-gloss surfaces of the prints evoke the association of one's own reflection in the pupil of a counterpart when we are eyeball to eyeball with one another. The spotlight's stages of glowing, then gradually disappearing into darkness are mirror images of the constriction and dilation of the pupil.

„Eye“ zerlegt eine filmische Einstellung in fünf phasenfotografische Momente: Das Rund eines Scheinwerfers glüht auf, überstrahlt, versinkt wieder in einem diffusen Halbdunkel. Die hochglänzenden Oberflächen der Prints evozieren die Assoziation der eigenen Spiegelung als „Püppchen“ (lat.: pupilla) im Auge des direkt angeschauten Gegenübers; die Abfolge von Erstrahlen und Verglühen der Lampe entspricht einer spiegelverkehrten Darstellung des durch Verkleinern und Vergrößern der Pupille kontrollierten Lichteinfalls im Auge.

In Eye, a film sequence is dissected into five moments – reminiscent of phase photography. The circular shape of a spotlight is beginning to glow, to shine and then to disappear in semidarkness again. The high-gloss surfaces of the prints evoke the association of one's own reflection in the pupil of a counterpart when we are eyeball to eyeball with one another. The spotlight's stages of glowing, then gradually disappearing into darkness are mirror images of the constriction and dilation of the pupil.

Installation view Galerie Lukas Feichtner, Vienna, 2010

Actors: Elisabeth Masé, Ralph Kostrzewa
Camera: Christian Girardet

"The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spot light precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness. “I wish you could see what I see” remains futile hope. Blind spots gape between self-perception and the perception of others."

                                                                                                                                         - Kristina Tieke

"The central character of Contre-jour is the eye. As a physiological perception of shape, space, colour, light, dark. As the source and reflection of what sight doesn’t see. As a fragment of a body condemned to remain in the shade. As a substitute for a tactile relationship with the world. As a glance, a sexual impulse, the fixing of desire. Turning the eye on itself means fragmenting the world, dislocating its forms, extinguishing consciousness. As Victor Hugo foresaw, 'the eye was in the tomb'."

                                                                                                                                             - Yann Lardeau

"In Contre-jour mischen sie [Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller] selbst gedrehte Szenen mit kunstvoll verfremdeten Ausschnitten aus Hollywood-Filmen, und weil dieses Mal das Thema Blindheit und deren Heilung die Hauptrolle spielt, flackert das Licht so durchdringend, wie einem geheilten Blinden wohl der erste Sonnenstrahl erscheinen mag. Am Ende ahnt man, was es bedeutet, von der Schönheit der Welt geblendet zu sein."

                                                                                                                                          - Michael Kohler

Funded by Filmförderungsanstalt - German Federal Filmboard, BKM

Music: Perry Como

"Like an eye that cannot see, black separates the images of film clips that show blind people taking on the limits of their condition, bumping into walls and furniture as though imprisoned in hostile and unnatural environments. From Bette Davis’ famous eyes in Dark Victory to Jessica Alba’s in the recent The Eye, Mia Farrow in Blind Terror and Uma Thurman’s anxiety in Jennifer 8, passing by way of Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession and Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch Of Blue, all the way to the convulsive frames of Butterflies Are Free and the explicitly horrific images of Macabre. In this net of references, the soundtrack plays with the images, anticipating the contents of the next black frame, while the notes of Perry Como’s version of Faraway Places accompany the difficult movements of the blind."
                                                                                                    - Review from the 28th Torino International Film Festival, 2010

Production, concept and editing: Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller
Sound: Dirk Schaefer

Departure and arrival, end and fresh start, exoticism and zest for adventure, broad perspective and introspection: in Locomotive shots from hundreds of movies take off on a phantom ride through mediatic remnants on three projectors standing immediately adjacent to each other.

"The history of cinema began with a train, and it is as if this train has been driving into film history ever since; as if destined to return unendingly, it crisscrosses the Lumière films and their ghost train journeys, it drives the phantom rides of early cinema and is then embraced with open arms by the avant-garde as one of the primary motifs of the cinématographe, a motif which, more than almost any other, allows us to engage with the modern experience of visuality."
                                                                                                                                        - Christa Blümlinger

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Lingen, December 2007

Christoph Girardet describes his work Storyboard as “a collage made from a variety of randomly found images: empty spaces, enigmatic gestures, artificial environments.” Having already used a variety of found-footage material from Hollywood feature films from the 50s and 60s in his earlier works, Storyboard marks an endpoint to creating an associative density of emotions. Girardet is reappropriating the images in a way that they dissociate any form of narrative. Without a narrative the individual images and the way they are aligned gain centerstage in this work.

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Lingen, December 2007

Christoph Girardet describes his work Storyboard as “a collage made from a variety of randomly found images: empty spaces, enigmatic gestures, artificial environments.” Having already used a variety of found-footage material from Hollywood feature films from the 50s and 60s in his earlier works, Storyboard marks an endpoint to creating an associative density of emotions. Girardet is reappropriating the images in a way that they dissociate any form of narrative. Without a narrative the individual images and the way they are aligned gain centerstage in this work.