Vintage Print

Siegfried A. Fruhauf

13 min, black and white, color, DCP or 35mm

Austria 2015

“An old photograph forms the starting point of my exploration. The picture must have been taken towards the end of the 19th century, at a time when film had just been invented and pictures were only starting to move. Its origins date back to a phase of transition between the still and the moving image. By creating a wide variety of duplications of a single image I am trying to translate it into the temporal and contemporary nature of film.” (Siegfried A. Fruhauf, https://www.viennale.at/en/films/vintage-print)

“In late 19th century photography, glass plates were used to capture the negative. Director Siegfried A. Fruhauf finds just such a plate among his friends’ storage equipment. In Vintage Print, he scans and illuminates the photograph anew, intertwines the analogue with the digital, traverses the Modern Age – from photography via film to the digital world. The resulting movement thereby opposes the tranquil meditation within the contemplation of the landscape. In the soundtrack, an almost chronological narrative develops, accompanying the picture in all of its disquietude, like a frame.” (https://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/2016/02_programm_2016/02_Filmdatenblatt_2016_201609142.html#tab=video25)

“Medial triptych through time as stunning journey of discovery: a photographic landscape scenario starts to become animated to the rhythm of crickets’ chirping; hops back and forth and over the course of the work runs through mutations that originate, on the one hand, in the filmic medium, and on the other hand, the digital. Where picture succeeds picture and a stroboscopic flicker and the patina of a filmstrip are discernable, we glide into the medial rhythm – temporality – of analogue film. Where the image stacks up and becomes temporalized mainly through pixel mutations, the digital algorithms can be perceived in the duration of the work.” (Alejandro Bachmann, http://sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/show/2285)

Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf, born 1976 in Grieskirchen, Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Heiligenberg, Austria.