Blow-Up

With extraordinary verve, Siegfried A. Fruhauf has made a name for himself in contemporary Austrian filmmaking in only a few short years. Fruhauf not only carries on the fertile tradition of avant-garde filmmakers from Upper Austria (Kubelka, Export, Weibel and Brehm, to name a few), he has also succeeded in discovering an approach to "structural" filmmaking which never fails to surprise.
Fruhauf´s films follow a discernible order, a concept which is worked out in advance. What was considered an "avant-garde" panacea in the late 70s, which more often than not turned into sheer academicism, is in his case broken up with humor. Fruhauf´s films are made with a wink and a nudge, and they draw their strength from an unbounded joy in experimentation with the material.
The raw material used in Blow-up comprises two shots from an old educational film about first aid: A man demonstrates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a life-size dummy; the dummy´s chest rises and falls.
Fruhauf introduces this scene into his own métier, turning the "blow-up" metaphor into an image with a false bottom. With the aid of a digital photocopier, the strip of film was reduced in size to a narrow ribbon, and Blow-up shows this transformation in reverse: The ribbon is resuscitated, swelling gradually until the initial image is recognizable and, in the end, fills the screen. And this would not be a Fruhauf work if this educational film on the cinematographic body did not conclude with a roguish smile....

(Peter Tscherkassky)


Blow-Up indexes the defilement of celluloid within a breathy rhythm that duly organizes the representational ensemble. Défilement is liberated from the dispositif’s fatality and the emblematic “24 times a second” of the image, cinema’s motor-energy then coming from a deeper, more perennial site: rhythm, even (we must say) the original ruthmos, which guides the mouths in Blow-Up to open and shut, the images to expand and retract, phenomena to beat and pulse.

(Nicole Brenez)

Orig. Title
Blow-Up
Year
2000
Country
Austria
Duration
1 min 30 sec
Category
Avantgarde/Arts
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
Blow-Up (Text)
Blow-Up (Image)
Blow-Up (Image)
Blow-Up (Image)
Credits
Director
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Concept & Realization
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Available Formats
35 mm (Distribution Copy)
Aspect Ratio
1:1,37
Sound Format
stereo
Frame Rate
24 fps
Color Format
b/w
Festivals (Selection)
2000
Viennale - Vienna Int. Film Festival
Austin - Cinetexas - Int. short film&video&new media festival
Olympia - Film Festival
Madrid - Semana de Cine Experimental
2001
Melbourne - Int. Film Festival
Sao Paulo - Short Film Festival
Uppsala - Int. Short Film Festival
Barcelona - L’ALTERNATIVA - II Mostra Internacional de Cinema Alternatiu
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Strasbourg - Forum du Cinema Européen
Regensburg - Kurzfilmwoche
New Jersey - Black Maria Festival
Montréal - Festival International du Nouveau Film et de la Video
Clermont-Ferrand - Festival de Court Metrage
Toronto - IMAGES - Independent Film & Video Festival
Osnabrück - EMAF - European Media Art Festival
Ludwigsburg - Filmfest
Teplice - Int. Art Film Festival Trencianske
Split - Festival of New Film and Video
Winterthur - Kurzfilmtage
Cork - Int. Film Festival
Augsburg - Kurzfilmwochenende
London - PANDAEMONIUM - Festival of Moving Image
Zürich - VIDEOEXperimental; Video & Film Festival
2002
Istanbul - Int. Short Film Festival
Zürich - VIDEOEXperimental; Video & Film Festival
Stuttgart - Filmwinter, Expanded Media Festival
Bamberg - Kurzfilmtage
2004
Tampere - Film Festival
Zürich - VIDEOEXperimental; Video & Film Festival