Klaus Wyborny

In conversations with his friends and colleagues, among them Bernd Upnmoor, Helmut Herbst, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Wyborny, Daniel Kothenschulte and Helge Schneider, Ulrike Pfeiffer takes us on a journey into the broad expanse of Nekes' cabinet of wonder and his cinematic works. At the same time, this documentary provides an insight into the history of experimental film in Germany.

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A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.

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After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

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Harry, a timpanist and pyromaniac, and Ginamove into the same apartment due to Hamburg's housing shortage. This is the beginning of a wonderful enmity, with Harry, who has been tried and tested in marital warfare, and relationship terrorist Gina proving to be quite equal opponents.

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Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

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A humorous and ironic film that draws attention to the problems of long-distance tourism and European arrogance: A German travels through Africa (Hotel Diana Beach, Mombasa, Kenya); his superficial and clichéd commentary, dictated into a cassette recorder, contrasts with the beauty of the landscape and the fascination of the foreign continent, which cannot be captured by superficial brochure terms. A young tourist who throws herself wholeheartedly into the African adventure succeeds in developing a greater understanding.

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Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.

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Astronaut Mulligan sets out to find a mysterious planet.

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Diwan, a lyric anthology, an outdoor movie with people. With people living in the surrounding precious and very beautifully photographed nature, are neither more nor less than one part of it. What Nekes manages there with landscape, as a cunning and quote many fine artist in a medium that runs in time, as he defeated the time changed, by themselves for change of scenery uses, as it interferes with the laws of chronology through the rewind ability of the camera or destroyed, which is a compelling and highly aesthetic experimental company.

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The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

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An attempt to celebrate Christmas in New York.

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The story of a group that has a difficult time near Bialystok at dawn on July 19, 1944.

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The story of a man who never attended Sarah Lawrence College but still made some impact.

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A man-made catastrophe depopulates entire regions. How do survivors observe this event, and how do others react?

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A young man decides to leave the country after the 1965 West German parliamentary elections. He hitchhikes out of Hamburg, but makes it only as far as the Lüneburg Heath. There, he meets a woman driving a Jaguar, protects her from an “attack” by a light sport airplane and then helps her sell her car to a shepherd. When doubts arise about the buyer’s solvency, the man and woman take the train back to Hamburg …

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Unpublished film premiered at the Filmmuseum München retrospective.

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Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”

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There are about 140 landscapes painted by Claude Monet in Pourville during 4 long stays between 1882 and 1897. The coastline has hardly changed since then. Enriched by the historic dimension Wyborny presents a panorama of this coast by superimposing Monets paintings with the present reality of the location.

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A dozen narrative poems by Durs Grünbein, interpreted in sounds and images. Wyborny treats the texts as sounding boards for his own casual observations about the places Grünbein discusses, at times presenting what the writer saw and at others moving in a completely different direction.

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Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema.

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Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends—cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz—simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.

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The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.

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A German TV movie

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Astronaut Mulligan sets out to find a mysterious planet.

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The film depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911, the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith.

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The much-yearned-for adventure presents itself to a prince and his friends: a mission to liberate a young man’s kidnapped beloved. But her personal description leads them to a different woman with whom the prince now falls in love. Suddenly, they find themselves at war and see their true task here: to rescue culture from the barbarians.

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The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During its screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".

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A short film

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An attempt to celebrate Christmas in New York.

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A man-made catastrophe depopulates entire regions. How do survivors observe this event, and how do others react?

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