Camera Test (2022)
Siegfried Fruhauf
Camera Test, Siegfried Fruhauf, Austria, 16mm > digital, 4 min, 2022
The green leader of the 16mm film is still running, yet the rattling sound is already committed to forward movement. And indeed, it moves forward, but also back again, past hills, fir trees, and apple trees—and at some point the gaze zooms into the seemingly passing landscape, but will also move forward again. This generates a simultaneously connecting and disturbing stroboscope effect, which generates afterimages and allows the landscape to appear continuous despite obvious breaks; at the same time, the interim garish green “flash” offers glaring evidence that here we are dealing with a cinematically constructed journey rather than a “natural” one. Like the soundtrack, which is based on a staccato-style playback of ocean sounds split into stereo channels rather than a linear sound recording, the images are the cinematic synthesis of several camera pans across one and the same landscape, and not the result of a journey from A to B.—Christa Benzer
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Sixpackfilm.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy sixpackfilm © Siegfried Fruhauf.
About the artist
Siegfried Fruhauf (Austria) is a filmmaker born in Grieskirchen, Austria, in 1976. He is a notable contemporary representative of the Austrian experimental cinema tradition. His multilayered (in both senses of the word) films, often incorporating found footage and other abandoned photographic materials, are subjected to structuring processes, multiple exposures, copying procedures, and other complex transformations and reflections. He received his Diplom from the University of Artistic and Industrial Design, Linz, where he studied experimental visual design. He has made more than 35 films films since 1998, with screenings at venues worldwide, including Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Media City Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Image Forum, Venice International Film Festival, Austrian Film Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Centre Pompidou, San Francisco Cinematheque, Yale University, and Sundance Film Festival, winning awards from the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and 25FPS, among others. He is the recipient of a Lisztomania Award from Bauhaus Film-Institut Weimar (2011), an Austrian Art Award for Film (2018), and an Upper Austrian Culture Award for Film and Video (2022). He also frequently creates music videos for the Austrian cult band Attwenger. Fruhauf lives and works between Vienna and Heiligenberg, Austria, and teaches as a senior artist at the University of Artistic and Industrial Design in Linz.