Arabia (1991)The strange and seductive 16mm films of Swiss artist Klaus Lutz (1940-2009) will be unspooled and projected onto several UK screens – and a giant white balloon – for the first time this month. Thanks to Projections, Tyneside Cinema’s artist programme, audiences in London, Leeds and Newcastle have a rare occasion to indulge in the filmmaker’s potently oneiric images.
I say images because visuals form the entire content of these silent reels. Absent of any aural component – apart from the whirr of the 16mm projector, coughs, squeaky chairs and other ambient sounds swimming around the room – the viewer is sucked deeper into the engrossing visual fantasies that Lutz created.
Lutz’s project is worldbuilding, and each of his films contributes to an overall visual universe of common motifs, costuming, colour palette, strategies of movement and atmosphere. Eyeballs, swirling globes, clouds, stars, cones and the colours black, white, red and blue dominate. Rather than narrative, this world is structured around action, performance and montage. For example, Arabia (1991) is a double-projection 16mm film exhibited with one reel projected onto a wall/screen and another onto a spherical balloon, a technique Lutz would also employ on several other films. It begins by showing a spherical (fake) eyeball, into which the camera zooms to reveal what looks like a swirling globe.
In this way, Lutz probes worlds interior, miniature and microscopic, as well as ones massive, grandiose and celestial. In many sequences, what look like stars, solar flares or planetary structures zoom by in the background; while in other shots, the artist’s own body appears to have been shrunken down and injected into another human’s bloodstream, as he traverses capillaries, arteries and the inner landscapes of the body. This constant vacillation between outer and inner space, achieved solely through practical effects, becomes even more astonishing when one realises he shot virtually all his films completely inside of his modest East Village, New York apartment.
Lutz completely blacked out the living room and turned into a shooting studio. He had a plunger to open the shutter and expose the film, engaging it with his mouth if necessary to keep his hands free. Lutz would time shots with a handheld cassette recorder that played audio of him counting seconds, and use this to rewind the appropriate footage to make multiple exposures and interact with layers of image. The level of calculation required to measure exposures, experiment with different frame rates and to block shots that would interact with each other is almost incomprehensible. In essence, Lutz found a way to create an animation stand that he could fit his whole body inside. While most animators craft outsized worlds from small images, Lutz expanded the capability of his camera through lenses, mirrors and trick shooting so that he could swim underneath it himself.
His films are often compared with early cinema pioneers like Georges Méliès or Segundo de Chomón, the continuity being the ingenuity with which he broke conventions of image-making to find new tools, new techniques, new forms and ideas of what cinema could be. The restless invention of film’s pioneers holds kin with Lutz’s caveman aesthetic and his radical rethinking of the mechanics of the medium.
But they are not simply retrograde; Lutz’s films also anticipate technological futures. At the beginning of Arabia, Lutz is at a table writing on a white-framed, rectangular object with a white tool in his hand. It looks remarkably like an iPad or sketch tablet. Lutz’s films feature screens and circles – both static and moving – which show moving images from television, film shot on the street or other types of found footage, in essence envisioning the ease of projection and the ubiquity of video within our digital world.
This expresses the crucial, paradoxical dualities that we find within Lutz’s films. The future and the past; the microscopic and the monumental; the luddite-tinkerer and the technologist-futurist, whose films were all crafted from a singular vision. This he poured out onto film to make a fantastical world, all from the inside of a modest New York apartment.
- This article is modified from a commissioned text accompanying Klaus Lutz: Performances for Screens, a Projections tour to BFI Southbank, Pavilion and Tyneside Cinema, funded by the Swiss Cultural Fund.
