Bibliographic record
Abstract
From early in his career, the German independent Matthias Muller has made films in conversation with the history of cinema. Sometimes his work is purposely reminiscent of earlier films. Sleepy Haven (1993), for example, evokes several landmarks of Queer cinema-particularly Kenneth Anger's Fireworks (U.S.A., 1947) and Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour (France, 1952)-as a context for a cinematic meditation on ocean voyaging, the body as romantic continent, and the filmstrip as psychic flesh. Home Stones (1990) recycles imagery of women in Hollywood films, recorded off a television screen, to create a revealing and amusing moment of meta-film noir. Alpsee (1994) is Muller's depiction of the childhood of a creative young boy, living alone with his mother-and an homage to Douglas Sirk's American films and their imaging of the gorgeous repression of bourgeois life. The series of six videos called Phoenix Tapes (1999), co-made with Christoph Girardet, provides an interpretive tour through the work of Alfred Hitchcock. And the recent Mirror (co-made with Girardet, 2003) recalls Michelangelo Antonioni's films. Muller's conversation with cinema has been much involved with the materiality of the media in which he works. Early on Muller worked with Super-8mm, exploring the possibilities of hand-processing his own footage in a series of films culminating in Aus derFerne-The Memo Book (1989), his psychodrama of coming to grips with the death of a former lover. By the 1990s he was also working in 16mm. Indeed, Alpseeand Pensao Globo (1997), his depiction of a young man with AIDS who is torn between memory and mortality, are particularly gorgeous 16mm films. By the late 1990s Muller was also exploring video and 35mm film. The Phoenix Tapes are Betacam videos; as are Beacon (co-d. Girardet, 2002), an evocation of life after trauma; and both Manual (co-d. Girardet, 2002) and Play (co-d. Girardet, 2003), inventive found-footage pieces that focus, respectively, on cinematic relics of earlier technologies and the filmic depiction of film and theater audiences, nebel (2000), Muller's stunning homage to Ernst Jandl's poetry-which along with Rick Hancox's Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) (Canada, 1982) is the most impressive translation of a poet's work to film that I'm aware of-was shot in 35mm, though it includes imagery from other gauges. And Mirror (2003) is a digital video that can be presented as a Cinemascope film. Muller has also made still photographs and DVDs for exhibition as installations in art galleries. Muller is an independent filmmaker, not simply in the traditional sense that he is independent of the movie business (except for the fact that he frequently recycles the Hollywood product), but in a more general sense: increasingly he sees himself as independent of conventional filmic categories, even of the category of itself. He positions himself somewhere in between commercial filmmaking and or experimental filmmaking; between filmmaker and video artist; and, like Shirin Neshat and Sharon Lockhart, somewhere between the film world and the art world. Paradoxically, Muller's success in making independent work that is distinctive and personal has often depended on his careful choice of collaborators, especially composer/musician, Dirk Schaefer; media-maker/ writer, Mike Hoolboom; and video artist, Christoph Girardet. This interview was conducted entirely by E-mail, with the assistance of translator Allison Plath-Moseley, beginning in April of 2004. I sent questions to Muller, he sent answers in German to Plath-Moseley, and she sent translations to me, which I edited and returned to Muller for corrections. Scott MacDonald: Were movies important for you as a child? And if so, which movies and movie experiences are most memorable for you? At what point in your development did you begin seeing avant-garde films? Matthias Muller: Although I'm part of the first generation that was socialized through media from kindergarten on, I really did not grow up with movies and television. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".