SPELLBOUND (2021) / INTO THE REALM OF THE NIGHT (2022) / L’HIVER DE L’ÉTERNITÉ (2022)
Isolation and travel restrictions, lockdowns that came and went: the coronavirus pandemic also presented me with new challenges as a filmmaker. When I had to cancel a planned trip to the Arctic Circle, where I wanted to shoot a new poetry film, shortly before the global lockdown in March 2020, nothing was the same as before. So I had to get creative and try to use the restrictions creatively.
Changes in perception have always played a major role in my films, so I tried to find an artistic equivalent in January 2021. It was snowing in thick flakes outside my house, it had been dark for weeks, which clearly affected my mood – health problems quickly set in. In that mood, I began to read Emily Brontë’s poetry and soon came across her poem SPELLBOUND, which she had written as an adolescent in 1837. In it, a young woman is mysteriously trapped in the woods and unable to escape. She dies, as if spellbound, in winter. The seeds of Emily Brontë’s adult themes can already be seen in SPELLBOUND: Willpower, fate and death. Somehow the mood in the poem reminded me of my own situation and, like a surfer waiting for the right wave, I knew that the right idea had now arrived. So I took my Bolex Rex2 camera and filmed on high-sensitivity 16mm Kodak film in the dark.
It was so cold at below minus 10 degrees Celsius that I had to warm up the camera again and again when it froze. Every decision for or against a camera movement in the strict composition was consciously made and, for the first time, elaborate double and multiple exposures were used to visually depict the descent into madness. Then I was at a loss: who could even speak the Brontë text appropriately, where could it be recorded at a time when the whole country was in lockdown? Thank the internet: I contacted the London actress Sarah Kempton via a voiceover platform, who read the text in a congenial way. The Chemnitz musician Uwe Rottluff, then still under his stage name Wellenvorm, created particularly cool music on his EMS Synthi A Portabella, which had the effect of the eponymous spell. At Ocho y pico in Madrid, the material was scanned in 6.5K for the first time – that’s how good 16mm can look in HDR! After that, the film went to the film festivals, either digitally or as an analog film copy: while many took place virtually worldwide or were far away, I was lucky enough to be able to travel to some festival locations in person and present my film on the big screen in front of an audience. For example, to the 19th Münster Film Festival, the 39th Tous Courts Festival in Aix-en-Provence or the Nature and Poetry Film Festival in Copenhagen, the latter of which was to have particularly memorable consequences for me.
When I arrived at the festival in Copenhagen in November 2021 to present my short film SPELLBOUND, it was like entering another world: Denmark had relaxed its corona rules at that time, which is why not only everyday life there returned to normal, but also the old amusement park Tivoli opened its doors.
From the melancholy mood at home, I now entered a kind of intermediate realm in which other laws applied. I wanted to express this feeling on film and picked up my simple Bauer 88F, loaded the black and white Fomapan 100R film and filmed at night in double 8! But this time everything that could go wrong went wrong: the camera faltered, I opened the door several times and tried to find out what the problem was with and without a change bag. I had an ambitious concept: this time the whole film was to consist of night-time double exposures, only one film was to be used. So I filmed one side, turned it over and then filmed the reverse side. Then everything again.
I could guess the sequence of motifs, but in the end I was completely at the mercy of the magic of filmmaking – and I was happy to surrender to the unpredictability! There was no alternative now anyway. When the finished film was back from development at Andec, I was amazed at how good it had turned out and that I only had to cut a few parts of it. Once again, my loyal colleague Uwe Rottluff, this time for the first time under his own name, contributed a dreamlike score which, together with the images, creates a special pull. You are only too happy to enter this exciting intermediate realm of the night. INTO THE REALM OF THE NIGHT became the most screened film in my short career as a filmmaker and was awarded the coveted jury prize at the Dresden Schmalfilmtage in July 2022. The citation stated: ” It is a film that takes the viewer into a mystical universe in which music and image collide and space and time merge.
L’HIVER DE L’ÉTERNITÉ (The Winter of Eternity)
Throughout the corona period, my thoughts kept wandering to the four rolls of film in double Super 8 that I had shot in 2017 on a trip to the sunny island of Ulysses, Gozo. At the time, I already had the philosophical text by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in mind, whose questions about life and the search for meaning had stayed with me since my studies in 2002. But I knew that this movie would have to be completely different from my previous ones. On the one hand, I wanted to pay a kind of homage to my cinematic idols Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (if such a thing is even possible), whose rigorous compositions and love of nature had encouraged me to make my own uncompromising films many years ago. On the other hand, I needed a French narrator for the demanding text and the right music, preferably an ensemble, thematically somewhere between Ligeti and Berg. At some point, I plucked up the courage and contacted Valérie Hendrich from France on Facebook. She is a visual artist and had caught my eye with her own Super 8 film, which stayed with me for a long time. I was overjoyed when she accepted and recorded the text in a professional studio. When I finally edited her voice to the footage, I knew that the film project was starting to take off and that I was on the right track.
Then I approached a young ensemble in the Saxon city of Chemnitz, Ensemble C. The young musicians saw the rough cut, read Saint-Exupéry’s book and dug into his world to come up with their very own new music. Andreas Winkler from the Chemnitz Music School accompanied them. During the coronavirus period, they were often only allowed to practise via video call. I took my hat off to their perseverance to do justice to the movie and the book and how they matched the text with their own artistic reality.
In the end, all the hard work bore fruit (the composition alone took a year, the film itself had been five years in the making): on November 2, 2022, the short film was premiered at the Gunzenhauser Museum, which is part of the renowned Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, as part of a film evening with live music (violin Antonia Winger, cello Amos Janz, vocals Alina Dillner, piano Alex Florian Lingath). Ensemble C’s composition was also awarded a prize the following year: in 2023, it won first prize in the “Jumu open” category at the 60th state competition “Jugend musiziert” in Zwickau, followed by first prize at the national competition in the summer.
These were also very happy moments for me as a filmmaker. L’HIVER DE L’ÉTERNITÉ screened at numerous festivals around the world and even won the prize for Best Nature Experimental Short Film at the Denver Underground Film Festival. It is perhaps my most personal film.
The world now seems to have returned to a largely familiar course. Looking back, this little odyssey seems unreal and beautiful at the same time. Unreal because everything was somehow new, confusing and unfamiliar, and beautiful because the happy moments were all the more intense in the face of the permanent mood of crisis. I am very grateful for everything, 24 times a second.
More about Patrick Müller’s films on his homepage www.patrickcinema.de
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