All posts by Patrick Müller

In July, Lina Gasser from Switzerland interviewed me for her Matura thesis SUPER 8 – AN ANALOGUE SHORT FILM. I answered her questions.

How did you come to filmmaking? What attracts you to it?
In the beginning there was a huge passion for cinema. The films of Truffaut, Godard, Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and John Ford told me more about life than other art forms. After having given lectures on selected films by my favorite directors during my studies in 2003, it was studying abroad in Paris in 2006, during which I attended the Cinémathèque française almost every evening, that I got the idea to try filmmaking. Back in Germany, full of ideas and having hundreds of subversive-transgressive experimental films in my head, I took a camera and went into the woods. The resulting short film was then very positively discussed by friends and film students. Over the years I made more and more short films, which then even ran regularly at festivals. What makes me excited about filmmaking is the moving image: while a painting is quite static, in film, one can now show movement, relate music and sound, and create a unique rhythm through editing. Film as the art form of the 20th century unites almost all other arts in itself. A unique tool to express yourself.

Since my childhood I am fascinated by the sea: the view into the sheer infinite, full of reflections, wild and full of life. It leaves no human soul untouched, everyone seems to recognize a part of itself in it. Herman Melville‘s stage for American dreams gone insane in the personification of Captain Ahab, poets like Chateaubriand saw in it a “philosophical painting”. Of the latter, I filmed the poem La Mer in Brittany in 2010, and for the first time fell in love with the unreal, wild and seemingly untouched nature found there. Eight years later, in 2018, I again traveled to Brittany, this time to the southern area around Quiberon. There I was looking for a new film material and at the same time I wanted to break new ground.

My celluloid adventure started in June 2013. After years of filming with DV and DSLR cameras, I was tempted to try something completely different. One day I came across the interesting Lomokino crank camera for 35 mm film. Filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul had previously shot with it the stunning experimental film Ashes – the result inspired me and encouraged me to try it myself.

In Saxon Frankenberg, a Super 8 workshop will take place in June 2019. Five participants learn with filmmaker Patrick Müller the handling of a Super 8 camera and the development of the film to the negative with the self-produced organic developer Caffenol. Afterwards begins a colorful ramble through Frankenberg, where everyone can capture his view of the city on the Zschopau river during the State Garden Show. The next day, all of the films will be developed together, will also be projected onto the big screen of the beautiful Welt-Theater cinema on the 22nd of June 2019. Are you ready for the analogue coffee-movie revolution?

More information and registration details can be found here. The workshop will be held in German and English.

## UPDATE 17.01.2019: 1 place available ##

Ektachrome is back! Since October 2018, the eagerly awaited Super 8 color reversal material has finally hit the market. You can already read in many film tests that the new emulsion provides wonderfully fine-grained pictures and in particular realistically reproduces skin tones. But how do different cameras behave with the new film?

According to Pro8mm, the Reputation Stadium Tour with US country pop musician Taylor Swift will feature a whole lot of Super 8. Four cameras from Pro8mm were borrowed for the show and 22 cassettes of negative film were shot. Pro8mm then scanned the material in 4K. The “Reputation Stadium Tour” by the ten-time Grammy winner Swift is the most successful tour in U.S. history.

Starting December 31, the roughly two-hour concert will be on Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/de/title/81026251

It all started some years ago, when Lomography brought the Lomochrome Purple 16mm Motion Picture film to market. Instantly comments popped up in the internet, asking “What is it good for? Plants on it have the wrong colors and people look ill.” Suddenly I remembered the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Therein a meteorite hits the ground, poisoning every living being nearby. Vegetation grows large but are foul-tasting, and the people go insane or die one by one. The perfect story for an experimental horror film!

If you enter today “Kiev 16U” into a search engine, you will find in hundreds of articles the lenses of an unusual Ukrainian 16mm film camera: Mir 11-m, Vega 7-1 and Tair 41. Numerous Russian dealers unscrew them today from their ancestral camera housings to sell them individually and to convert them to digital cameras. Adapted to modern Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras, the slim fixed focal lengths actually deliver impressive picture quality.

Read More

“Säv, säv, susa”, these three words have not left my mind, since 2014, when I held a volume of poems by the Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911) in my hands. Klaus-Rüdiger Utschick meticulously translated them into German over the course of decades. At that time I visited him in his Munich apartment to talk about a planned film adaptation of another Fröding poem.

Tief im Wald meiner Heimatstadt Frankenberg verborgen, befindet sich ein altes Kriegerdenkmal. Ein unheimliches Gesicht aus Stein mahnt darauf nachfolgende Generationen, das Unheil des Ersten Weltkrieges nicht zu vergessen – Verständigung statt Zwietracht zu üben.

Promt fiel mir ein Gedicht dazu ein: An die Nationen, 1880 von Robert Hamerling für die Sammlung „Blätter im Winde“ geschrieben. Eindringlich blickt er darin in die Menschheitsgeschichte zurück und mahnt zu Frieden und Verständigung. Einst einer der meistgelesensten deutschsprachigen Dichter, ist Hamerling heute wie das Denkmal fast vergessen. Natur und Poesie sind in seinem Werk der Schlüssel für eine bessere Welt. Poesie kann man schreiben – oder in 24 Bildern pro Sekunde verfilmen. Ich mache seit Jahren Gedichtfilme und interessiere mich dabei für Texte, die man mit intensiven Bildern in Beziehung setzen kann.