Heinz Emigholz (born 22 January 1948 in Achim, near Bremen, Germany) is a filmmaker, actor, artist, writer and producer. He lives and works in Berlin and Malta. Emigholz has produced a comprehensive filmic and artistic oeuvre and has also done performance art and acted in other directors’ films (Cynthia Beatt, Silke Grossmann, Stefan Hayn, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Ken Jacobs, Sheila McLaughlin, Sandra Nettelbeck, Elfi Mikesch, Lior Shamriz, Joseph Vilsmaier, Klaus Wyborny a.o.).[1][2][3]
Career
Emigholz has been trained as an illustrator and a retoucher. He has studied philosophy and literary studies at the university in Hamburg. In 1968 he started to work with the medium film. Since 1973 Emigholz is working independently as a self-employed artist in the USA and in Germany. In 1978 he founded the film company Pym Films.[3]
Emigholz’s first films, dating back to the early 1970s and the context of avant-garde and Experimental film, display "a complex interaction between abstract temporal compositions – or filmic movements, respectively – and selected urban and natural landscapes" (Emigholz).[16]
In Demon (1976/77), he began to examine words. The film explores the prose poem "Le Démon de l’Analogie" (The Demon of Analogy) by Stéphane Mallarmé. "Just as previous films were cut so that fixed features of the landscape and their connections met with a score, in this film, there is one shot for each word." (Frieda Grafe)[17] Emigholz included narrative and scenic elements in Normalsatz / Ordinary Sentence (1978–81) and his subsequent films.
His visual composition and framing, which establishes a phenomenological relationship to space, is described as striking, as it ignores the conventional perpendicularity and the central perspective: "The visual space is always populated in the films rather than being empty space whose coordinates are fixed to categories borrowed from abstract geometry, such as the horizon and the vanishing point. Where there is a space, there is also a body that defines it, even if it be via its negative form, absence." (Ronald Balczuweit)[18] This type of construction of space remains defining for his series Photography and beyond, a "collection of films that can be combined freely and that deal with products designed by humans – architecture, drawings, writings, sculpture" (Emigholz). The series was established in 1993 and drew on previous work from the 1970s and 1980s.[19] The films of the subseries Architecture as Autobiography show the extant buildings by architects, civil engineers and designers such as Bruce Goff, Adolf Loos, Robert Maillart, Rudolph Schindler, Louis Sullivan and others in chronological order.
About film Emigholz states: "As a technical medium, film projects the spaces of memory themselves rather than presenting them solely by means of a mental trick. The media of writing, drawing, photography, film, electronic imagery and computing have shifted the complex art of recollection into a readily-available array of technically -generated storage systems. The ancient art of the rhetorician is still present, albeit in rudimentary form, in the memorizing of text by actors and speakers.[20]
Art
In New York in 1974, Emigholz began to work on Die Basis des Make-Up/The Basis of Make-Up, a series which grew to more than 600 drawings by 2008. The title goes back to the caption of a photo showing a skull in a makeup textbook from the 1930s. All the drawings were in black and white and were published as photographic prints in the format 54 x 64 cm. Like many of his films, they were developed from the artist’s notebooks which he uses to record sketches of his own texts and to paste various specimens of civilization garbage, sentences overheard on the street or on television, advertising, diagrams from military textbooks and much more.[1] These bits and pieces were transformed in the drawings and films and were connected to one another in austere compositions, but their origins remained discernible.[21] Narrative approaches emerge, yet they do not connect to a single narrative, but can still be combined freely. The "experience of the provisionality and relativity of all interpretations" (Hanne Loreck) is mirrored in this formal openness.[22]
Mamani in El Alto (Architecture as Autobiography, Photography and beyond – Part 35, about Freddy Mamani), 2022, DCP, 5.1, 95 min, director, script, camera, editing
Salamone, Pampa (Architecture as Autobiography, Photography and beyond – Part 34, about Francisco Salamone), 2022, DCP, 62 min, director, script, camera, editing
Berlin [Underground] (Photography and beyond – Part 33), 2021 HD, director, script, camera, editing
Antivilla (Photography and beyond – Part 32, about Arno Brandlhuber), 2016-2021, HDV, 6 min, director, script, camera, editing
WEISS hoch ZWEI (Photography and beyond – Part 31), 2021, HDV, 22 min, director, script, camera, editing
Casa Golly (Photography and beyond – Part 30, , about Arno Brandlhuber [de]), 2015-2021, HDV, 7 min, director, script, camera, editing
The Lobby, 2020, 76 min, director, script, camera,editing
The Last City, 2020, 100 min, director, script, camera, editingediting
Years of Construction (Baujahre Kunsthalle Mannheim 2013–2018, Photography and beyond – Part 29), 2013–18, DCP, 93 min, director, script, camera, editing
Le Corbusier [IIIII] Asger Jorn [Relief] (about Le Corbusier'sVilla Savoye and Asger Jorn's Grand Relief in the Aarhus Statsgymnasium), 2015, HDV, color, 29 min, director, script, camera, editing
Two Museums (Photography and beyond – Part 22; about Renzo Piano's building for The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and Samuel Bickels' Museum of Art in Ein Harod, Israel), 2012/2014, DCP, color, 18 min, director, camera, editing
Five music videos for the band KREIDLER, 2012-2013, (together 55 min), director, camera, editing
The Airstrip (Decampment of Modernism – Part III, Photography and beyond – Part 21), 2016, DCP, color, 108 min, director, camera, editing
Parabeton – Pier Luigi Nervi and Roman Concrete (Decampment of Modernism – Part I / Photography and beyond – Part 19), 2012, DCP, color, 100 min., director, camera, editing
A Series of Thoughts (Miscellanea V, VI, VII und IV), 1987-2011, HDV, color, 91 min., director, camera, editing
Zwei Projekte von Frederick Kiesler (Two Projects by Frederick Kiesler) 2006-2009, HDV, color, 16 min., director, camera, editing
Sense of Architecture (explores over 50 projects of contemporary Austrian architects), 2005-2009, HDV, color, 168 min., director, camera, editing
Loos Ornamental (about Adolf Loos), 2008, 35 mm, color, 72 min., director, camera, editing
Schindler's Houses (about the American work of Rudolph Schindler), 2006–2007, 35 mm, color, 99 min., co-producer, editing, director, script, camera
Miscellanea III, 1997–2005, 35 mm, color, 22 min., director, editing, camera
The Basis of Make-Up III, 1996–2005, 35 mm, color, 26 min., director, camera, editing, drawings
D’Annunzios Cave (a film about Gabriele d'Annunzio and his pretentious villa), 2002–2005, DigiBeta, color, 52 min., director, editing
Goff in the Desert (explores 62 buildings by architect Bruce Goff), 2002-2003, 35 mm, color, 110 min., director, camera, editing
Maillart's Bridges (explores the works of the bridge builder Robert Maillart), 1995-1999, 35 mm, color, 24 min., director, camera, editing
Sullivan's Banks (about Louis Sullivan's buildings for banks), 1993-1999, 35 mm, color, 38 min., director, camera, editing
The Holy Bunch, 1986–1990, 35 mm, black and white and color, 89 min., director, script, camera
Die Wiese der Sachen, 1974–1987, 16 mm, black and white and color, 88 min., director, script, camera, editing, lighting, actor
Home Movies 1971 - 1981, 1985, actor
The Basis of Make-Up, 1979–1984, 16 mm, black and white and color, 84 min., director, script, camera, editing
The Basis of Make-Up I, 1974–1983, 35 mm, color, no sound, 30 min., director, script, drawings, note books, camera, editing
Execution. A Study of Mary, 1979, narrator
Normalsatz, 1978–1981, 16 mm, black and white and color, 105 min., director, camera, editing, script, actor
Bartleby, 1976, actor
Demon. The Translation of "The Demon of Analogy" by Stéphane Mallarmé, 1976/77, 16 mm, black and white and color, 30 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production
Der Ort der Handlung, 1976/1977, actor
Hotel, 1975/76, 16 mm, black and white, 27 min., director, conceptual design, camera, editing, production
^Heinz Emigholz: "A Scene Near Schenec-Tady", in Ronald Balczuweit et al.: Heinz Emigholz. Normalsatz. Siebzehn Filme. Berlin: Schmitz, 2001, p. 39.
^Frieda Grafe: "Beschriebener Film. 1974–1985", Die Republik, 72–75 (1985), p. 216.
^Ronald Balczuweit: "Phänomenologische Rahmung", in: Balczuweit et al.: Heinz Emigholz. Normalsatz. Siebzehn Filme. Berlin: Schmitz, 2001, p. 140.
^Heinz Emigholz: "Photographie und jenseits", in: Ronald Balczuweit et al.: Heinz Emigholz. Normalsatz. Siebzehn Filme. Berlin: Schmitz, 2001, p. 299.
^Emigholz, Heinz. "Two Notes on Photography and beyond." in: Lecture at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee. August 15, 2010.
^See Stefan Ripplinger: "The Art of Separation. Heinz Emigholz Dissociates Words and Images", in: "Heinz Emigholz", museum für gegenwart, 11 (2007), Köln: Dumont, pp. 25–28.
^Hanne Loreck: „The pain starts at 10. p.m. Seeing Thinking“, in: "Heinz Emigholz“, translation by Catherine Nichols, museum für gegenwart, 11 (2007), Köln: Dumont, p. 20.
