Series Site
October 16 & 17
Eve Heller’s films have established her as one of the great contemporary practitioners of the found-footage genre. Her work exemplifies cinema’s capacity for recording traces of experience, for conveying fragments of history, and for conjuring the psychological, visual, and emotional textures of dreamlike states. Her moving image works – constructed from educational movies, newsreels, and her own cinematography – engage with personal and shared histories, but exist at the crossroads of the intangible and the tactile. These films are suffused with the immediacy of lived experience – attentive to the physical reality of people, animals, and objects represented in the imagery – while equally sensitive to the materiality of the film medium itself, channeling an elusive, inscrutable domain of memories and emotional echoes. Heller fractures, juxtaposes, and distills her source materials such that new, more evocative and resonant meanings and ideas emerge from the colliding fragments.
Heller has demonstrated a continuing commitment to working with 16mm and 35mm film, a choice that transcends a fetishistic or nostalgic attachment to the analog medium by emphasizing and making use of film’s unique ability to convey a palpable trace of the sensible world. Heller’s latest film, SINGING IN OBLIVION is emblematic. It uses a variety of techniques – observational photography, found imagery, photograms, and rich sound design – to conjure a meditation on death, memory, and transience. Centering on a Jewish Cemetery in the Vienna district of Währing partially destroyed by the Nazis and today in a state of decay, Heller combines her own ghostly footage of the site with photograms of organic material, as well as fragmentary imagery reprinted from glass negatives she discovered at a flea market in Vienna. Like so many of Heller’s works, the film itself becomes a kind of photogram: a physical object on which now-vanished lives have left their imprint, speaking equally to presence and absence.
On the occasion of the awarding of the Viennale Erste Bank Film Award to SINGING IN OBLIVION in 2022, we’re pleased to welcome Eve Heller in person, to present a program surveying the majority of her film works.