CRITICAL
OVERVIEW:
Marcus Bergner is a prodigious, brilliant artist who has worked, individually and collaboratively, across many forms and media – music, performance, visual arts, sound art, writing, aesthetics, philosophy, film, video, design, animation – for over 40 years. Just as his creative exploration traverses diverse fields, his personal path has taken him to many parts of the world, igniting fires of illumination in centres including Melbourne, Prague, Berlin and Ghent. From his multiple works with the collective Arf Arf through to his current community-based projects with Myriam van Imschoot, via numerous sole-authored pieces, Marcus has always been, for me, at the “avant-garde of the avant-garde”: researching and interweaving inspirations, methods and thought-programs from art new and old, paths forgotten or never truly trodden. His films, in particular, “chisel”, flash, ponder, juxtapose, dig deep into matter that is at once material, psychic and political. Is he not as well known, celebrated or subsidised in Australia as he should be, because he plays so systematically across the borders of forms and genres, refusing to stereotype himself into one, repetitive practice, signature or medium? But there’s no stopping Marcus’ flow now: it is up to us to keep up with where art will take him, and where he will take art.
– Adrian Martin, 9 March 2020
FILMOGRAPHY: THE INCUBUS : 16mm, 15mins, sound, colour, 1979.
Made with Michael Buckley and Marie Hoy. A musical combining animated and live
performance sequences. Includes cameos from musicians from the post punk
scene of Melbourne in the late 1970s.// BOB BROWN : 16mm, 5mins,
sound, colour, 1981. Homage to the American avant-garde writer Bob Brown who
lived and worked in Paris in the early part of 20th century collaborating with
Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and Stuart Davis. Sequences filmed in the London
Zoo, edited and produced at the London Filmmakers Co-op with a cameo by the
musician John Murphy.// HANDBERG NOTES : 16mm, 12mins, silent, colour,
1983. A film collage using written language and live action sequences within
home-processed footage. Distributed by the German Film Archives, Berlin.// GO
GOLD : 16mm, 12mins, silent, 1983. A film made to
perform with by using the title written in 25 different languages.//ETRUSCO
ME : 16mm, 6mins, sound, colour, 1983. A scratch animation and expanded-cinema
work made for a live performance of the singer Marie Hoy. Inspired by Etruscan
pottery in Rome.// DOPPELGANGER FILMS : Super 8, 15mins, sound, colour,
1984. Based on Brecht’s dictum that: A deep need must be approached
superficially. States of estrangement, entrapment or entrancement arising out
of suburban identity and momentous instants of mistaken identity are enacted in
different domestic spaces. All editing was done in-camera as were all the
special effects, so everything appears like flimsy performative prompts or
props including live projections, mirrored images and flashes of white light
caused by removing the film cassette from the camera while filming.//WERE WE
LEAD ASTRAY? : Super 8, 30mins, colour, sound, 1986. A travelogue or shaggy
dog film made during a prolonged visit to Turkey including shots of the snow
covered landscape of Goreme and a prison nearby.//STRAMM : Super 8,
23mins, colour, sound, 1986. Homage to the German expressionist poet August
Stramm. By turning things inside out by the way one uses the camera: outside
inside and inside outside. Performances from Mary and Rudy Grant. Poetical
material from Gerhard Ruhm, Ernst Meister and Stramm.// MAGNIFIED CRUMBS OF
KINDNESS : Super 8, 16mins, sound, colour, 1986. Shot under the counter in
a trendy cafe in Melbourne exposing the underbelly of the cooking industry.
Cameo appearances by artists and musicians including Lee Smith, Wols, Frank
Lovece, Andrew Hurle, John Murphy and Stephen Bram. Maria Callas singing Norma appears on the soundtrack.// AN HISTORIC DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY : 16mm,
20mins, colour/b&W, sound, 1987. The script is written directly onto the
film itself and tells the story of an imaginary historical figure during the
time of Charlemagne.// MUSICAL FOUR LETTERS : 16mm, 6mins, colour,
sound, 1989. Every conceivable word with four-letters that has anything do with
music (including melodious bodily functions and swear words) have been written
directly onto the surface of a 1940s Mexican musical film. Here words reveal
their innately luciferous and fictive capacity for abstraction and offering an
escape route for memory. (see also text below)//TALES FROM VIENNA HOODS : 16mm, 20mins,
colour, sound, 1989. An experimental animation film based on the Rorschach inkblot
test. Afterimage and echolalia effects are thrown into a waltz of sound and
blankness. The script for the soundtrack based on the verbal results of an
en-mass Rorschach test applied to the USA army. Includes a sound poem based on
Czech tongue twister written by Ladislav Novak.//VIEWMASTER FILM : Super
8, 36mins, sound, colour, 1990. A rambling and poetic travelogue film made
while living on a series of Islands in the South Pacific. Special effects
generated by the children's optical toy the View-master.// COIMBRA PRISON : Super 8, 8mins, silent, colour, 1991. A structural film made by walking and
circling around the prison in Coimbra Portugal over a three week period.//TAP
TAP RUIN : 35mm, 6mins, sound, colour, 1992. All the titles of books by the
Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar are written backwards on blank 35 film with
the sound track a collage of sounds recorded in the Naples train station with
sound poems by the filmmaker.//THE GOOD SOUP: 16mm, 5mins, silent,
colour, 1992. Made with Frank Lovece and Michael Buckley. A filmic letter made
by a group of friends to a missing friend in Rome.//THREAD OF VOICE :
16mm, 19mins, sound, BW+colour, 1993. Made with Michael Buckley, Frank Lovece
and Marisa Stirpe. A experimental documentary by the Australian sound poetry
group Arf Arf about their work. Adrian Martin wrote about the group: “The
artistic work of Arf Arf, across all the media they use, is vivid, kinetic,
involving, very humorous, full of the rawness and randomness and mysteriousness
of life. It's full of almost violent juxtapositions and gear shifts - as well
as sudden, lyrical passages of calm, poetic grace.”//ANGLEDOZER : 16mm,
16mins, sound, colour, 1996. A filmic collage using an optical printer and
various different film stocks to compose a metamorphosis of found imagery
within architectural space. The sound track comprises of a live performance by
Marisa Stirpe on jaw harp. Distributed by Light Cone, Paris and German Film
Archives, Berlin.//PALERMO : Super 8, 7mins, silent, BW, 2000. A kinetic
and indexical light play shot and edited in the streets of Palermo. A pivotal
film in the work of the filmmaker with a small wave to Werner Schroeder. // SURFACE
STUDIES : Digital video, 12 mins, sound, 2002. Using found footage and
footage shot in Rotterdam and Byron Bay, poetic homage to the diminishing
surface within the digital era. Voice-over from the singer, songwriter and
artist Anita Lane.//THE SURFACE : 16mm, 60mins, sound, colour, 2009. ‘The
exterior is an interior raised to the power of mystery’- Novalis. This is part
of a series of art works and writings by the filmmaker focusing on notions
relating to the role of the surface within visual perception and art. When
looking at an opaque object what one actually sees is only aspects or parts of
the surface. Following on from this it can be argued that all the white areas
in this film are actually the optical/metonymic evidence of a kind of surface
object (sell-you-void). Space here is light and whiteness appearing as a
spatially special act of re-definition/redesign in terms of filmic perception
or surface thought. The chemically divergent and found film prints were
systematically and graphically altered or un-built through processes of
batiking, bleaching and sgraffiare like methods of manipulation of the
film surface. A film mosaic gradually built over ten years with the final
result incorporating elements of blind spotting, sight-gags, radical blocking-out,
gestaltism, ruin-pleasure or ornamentation through ruination. Surfacing and
drawing connects to daily experiences of glancing that involves many humorous,
sensuous, poetic and even subversive qualities.The sound track is entirely sound
concrete of the vocal leftovers, sound effects or ready made silences of
the found footage. Made from over three hundred educational and training film
prints.//VERBFILM : digital video, 6mins, silent, 2014 Dormant visions
affix themselves onto the walls of this Camera Picta, leaking antiquated
nooks and crannies.//SOUND POETRY FILM (WASHING MACHINE) : digital
video, 6mins, sound, colour, 2017. Original sound poems performed as the basis
to camera throwing and abstract imagery. With an appearance from the artist Kathrin Maria Wolkowicz. //SUPER
EIGHT FEELING : Super 8, 14mins, colour, sound, 2019. A montage or mosaic
of home movie footage taken from over a 30 year period up to the late 1980s.//FILM TIMELINE : 2023, part of an ongoing series of cinema poems. See below.
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Etrusco Me |
Thread of Voice |
Dirk de Bruyn wrote on MUSICAL FOUR LETTERS:
This film defines a unique space between image and sound. The hand drawn dancing phrases are words of sounds, and function like those action biffs and whams often sprinkled through action comic books. here they are presented more as graffiti than design. They function as a virtual sound track, not heard but remembered and internally rehearsed - a kind of kinetic inner voice. The percussive musical soundtrack played on accordion by the filmmaker acts as a background to this virtual action. Scratched on the run these kinetic words flag the compacted time we now experience in every day existence, where the gesture must contain more than it ever did and be delivered quicker and cheaper than ever. Musical Four Letters delineates the kind of space that can be opened up in the found, the erased and this most recent layer of a palimpsest of the symbol that stretches through abstract cinema, back through the magic lantern into shadow play and the cave, perhaps Plato's cave. Bergner allows one to witness, what is now glimpsed in post-modern life as this raw distilled impulse. These dancing words are stuttering talismans put in the service of us gaining back a place at the valued center of the every day. As we realise that this discarded film, with its seemingly chaotic scratchings and erasures, opens up a vibrant vista of image and sound, we are handed a way, an attitude, with which to renovate our own discarded and devalued every day existence with new vigour and vision.To impart meaning and a certain sense of loss, gesture now needs to be contained in the glimpse to the increasingly agitated and fragmented observer. For the consuming machine the response is a seamless design and technological regale on that fixated need to acquire the glorified object and its image. For Bergner it is about opening up a way to revisit the personal and that neglected of spaces, the public, anew.
(From: Image Smithing Lost and Found 1998)
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Musical Four Letters |
Musical Four Letters |
©
Marcus Bergner, April 2024.
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