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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathStill Picture, Moving Picture
Podium discussion with Isabell Heimerdinger, Dieter Daniels, Susanne Holschbach, and Kathrin Peters
Susanne Holschbach
 
Interiors (Heimerdinger, Isabell), 1997
 
 
 

 

Still Picture, Moving Picture

Heimerdinger: My original motivation for the work «Interiors» was to investigate to what extent horror and psychological nuances in films already exist in filmsets – that is, of course, the case. Only I wanted to see how far this went. So I emptied the spaces used as background for action shots or as backdrops. I wanted to use working sets and to photograph on location, but that wasn’t possible. It would have been too time consuming and complicated, and I found it a lot more interesting to approach the matter through the film itself.

Daniels: We know from experience that professional still photography always shows a different picture of a scene. This is never identical with what we see in the film.

Heimerdinger: True. Added to that, in this case, is the memory of the viewer. The spaces seem somehow familiar to us because we have all seen one or the other film made in them.

Daniels: So it feels as though one was in this space before, saw it before, but can’t really say where or when. That’s an interesting fictional leap. You think that you have experienced it because you saw it in the film. So where exactly does this memory come from?

 

Holschbach: Here we could speak of the difference between the still picture and the moving picture. With «Interiors,» something is shown that often escapes our perception in movies. One might have an idea of what that is, but can’t really grasp it. Removed from the motion picture, the still picture allows us to analyze this. Regarding the difference between film and photography, Kaja Silverman writes that film is always connected to amnesia: each image erases the previous one. By comparison, photography is an analytical instrument that I can strip something down with.

Daniels: I’d like to expand on that, if in a more general way: in the 1990s, confronting cinema existed as a kind of leitmotif in the visual arts. There were three to four major exhibitions that presented a wide spectrum of artworks devoted to cinema. Was that a boom, or how does one explain it? The arts seems to have a kind of analytical interest in large-scale, fiction-making machinery.

Heimerdinger: True, and that boom surely had to do with celebrating film’s centennial. But I

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