Helga Fanderl – filmprojection21.org

“I love making films with a Super 8 camera, reacting to serendipitous discoveries and transferring experience and perception, atmosphere and intuition, ideas and formal decisions to the camera work and the unseen film strip inside the cartridge. In–camera editing allows me to commune intensely with my subject matter at a certain time and place. My silent short films convey not only my cinematic vision of the world around me, but also the process of making them.

With prints of my films, I create constantly changing programmes – multiple montages – consisting of a temporary web of relationships, correspondences and contrasts between motifs, colours, rhythms and textures. For every screening, these constellations become an ephemeral ‘film’ of around 50 minutes.

Super 8 projections need a more intimate framework. For this reason, my films are projected from a pedestal within the screening room rather than from a booth. The projection becomes visible. You hear the sound of the projector, you see the person operating it, you sense the materiality of the film strip.

For my personal Super 8 work, what matters is to share with viewers the magic of the light event in a dark space that corresponds to the magical light writing in the camera obscura and the specific beauty of film as film.”