Friedl

Friedl vom Gröller is the next artist Christiana Perschon films for her portrait series about older female artists living in Vienna. This is the portrait of a woman who herself well understands the practice of portrayal. But here it is less about portrayal and more about the encounter between two different generations of Austrian filmmakers. A performative exploration of being together animates the seconds captured on film as Gröller lights and smokes a cigarette. This togetherness is reinforced by vom Gröller's companion film, Ich will nicht gefilmt werden, sondern selber filmen/ I don’t want to be filmed but rather shoot myself, in which she captures her take on the encounter with Perschon. Perschon is allowed to pose one single question, according to the stern irony of her portrayed subject. The question hangs on the silence that drifts through Gröller's own cinematic works. It is this same mysterious silence that lends the image its power and befalls Perschon's close-up of the artist. But this is no coincidence. Perschon's cinematic portraits always find the appropriate way of doing justice to the person in front of her camera. She conceives the portrait not as a perspective on something, but as a view through something. Her protagonists teach her and her 16mm camera how to see. It is astonishing that vom Gröller, who unabashedly puts herself on the spot in many of her own films, here desires to escape the camera's gaze. When she hides her face behind her hands and the cigarette smoke, one gradually begins to realize how she is always at work in the determining of her own image. She and the length of the film roll decide what is to be seen of her. It is precisely this characteristic assertion of the "I" as seen through the eye of the other that Perschon's film makes visible. (Patrick Holzapfel)

Translation: Eve Heller