Seems to Be

Based on Morton Feldman´s "Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety", Seems to be plays with the levels of optic and aural perception, with the deception of eyes and ears as well as the tension between two-dimensional reproduction and three-dimensional spatial recreation.

(production note)


Accompanied by murmuring, the sound of scribbling and hummed snatches of music, the camera sweeps over a collection of materials on a desktop, seemingly reflecting a creative frenzy. Musical notes and memoranda, pads and pencils, patterns of various kinds, mixed with slips of paper, half-full Martini glasses, ashtrays, death´s heads - then the picture swings around (the coffee cup along with it!) and an ensemble arranged according to musical instrument has been committed to paper. Constant movement, metamorphosis, variation and pleasant uncertainty: a concert hall? A movie theater?
The picture´s square remains, becoming in the course of the switch a bright square within the picture: a projection screen with an ensemble in the form of a projection screen in front of the ensemble, which is suddenly no more than a shadow of itself. Madame Press is dead. The imagination lives on. At least that seems to be the case.

(Christoph Huber)


A meditation on the certainties of being and perceptual illusions, a circling search in time and space, and at the same time a trompe l´oeil; the spatial dimensions of Morton Feldman´s steady, apparently timeless music are taken literally in the film: The sketched arrangement of a musical ensemble about to perform Feldman´s composition fills with "real" musicians caught in the paper´s two-dimensionality, only to move to the spatiality of the Vienna Konzerthaus. But what is real here, what is a visual fake? Seems to be dances on this platform of ambivalences, juxtaposing the metaphysics of a solid existential foundation and the agnostic skepticism of an abandonment of being marked by a visual chimera.
Godless Feldman, merciless abyss! What we see is looking back at us.

(Thomas Miessgang)

Translation: Steve Wilder


Morton Feldman’s “Madame Press Died Last Week at 90” is more sober and constricted than Mr. Furrer’s score. It revolves mostly around two repeated chords, and its instrumental textures are comparatively steady. In Schein Sein (“Seems to Be”), Ms. Minck again shows the players as they drop in and out of the score, but she also pulls back to show the musicians on the screen, the screen on a stage and the stage in a hall with an audience. It was an appealing if self-conscious solution, if making the films a matched set was the goal.

(Allan Kozinn, New York Times)


In Schein Sein (“Seems to Be”) Ms. Minck pans across a desk cluttered with significant Feldman cues — a Mondrian painting, a rug pattern, the voice of John Cage — before playing perceptional games to the tune of Mr. Feldman’s “Madame Press Died Last Week at 90.”

(Steve Smith, New York Times)