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Movie Tales
Tobias Putrih approaches the question of the present-day function of
the cinema theatres and the film medium in its cultural and social role.
In a time governed by electronic media and technological progress, he
explores various perspectives of the moving image by constructing intimate
movie tales.
In his series of works named Cinema Solution (2001), Putrih questions
the role of the cinema theatre as the result of the dark, unseen room,
where the viewer “gets rid of his own body”. His basic idea
is “to build different, personified cinema theatres... Constructing
the personified cinema theatres as a simple model for the objects of pleasure,
high-tech objects, spectacle-producing mechanisms. Their recognition is
in immediate confrontation with my body.” Cinema Solution consists
of four models of cinema theatres which are based on historic and even
utopian concepts of the visual field. These are as follows: the exploration
of the visual field by Friedrich Kiesler, manifested in 1929 in the construction
of the New York Film Guild Cinema; the visionary work of Herbert Bayer,
who connected the Bauhaus tradition with the ideas which later developed
into corporative thinking in the industry of culture; the design of the
underground cinema, which remained unrealised, by the land-art artist
Robert Smithson; and the vision of the dream cinema journey into time
and space by Chris Marker. Putrih's models of these designs represent
a unique overview of more than a hundred-year-old tradition of cinema
theatres and are at the same time a personal, intimate response to the
present-day globalised and computerised theatres. With the photograph
series Lost Cinema (2001/2002) Tobias Putrih tells us a similar kind of
a personal movie tale. On storyboards made of laser prints he lets his
friends act on an infinite surface of a cardboard landscape. In the twilight
of cardboard world and real world he takes the position of a film director.
“I would like to ask you not to try to understand the meaning of
the photographs. They were made as a starting point of an emerging electronic
movie”, Tobias Putrih introduces Lost Cinema to the viewer.
Gregor Podnar
First published in the Manifesta 4 catalogue, European biennial of contemporary
art, 25 May - 25 August 2002, Frankfurt/Main 2002, p 154-155.
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