Birgit Hein & Florian Zeyfang

By way of conclusion of their Materialfilme (1976), an exploration of the materiality and the reproduction processes of film, filmmakers Birgit and Wilhelm Hein made WEISSFILM in 1977. It was an experiment with 16-mm film that since has only existed in one original version with no copies. The film has never been duplicated or digitalized, and even the filmmakers thought it was lost. In 2013, more than 35 years later, Florian Zeyfang photographed all the scenes of this film as part of the LIVING ARCHIVE project (arsenal Berlin), producing the installation entitled SPLICEFILM. This is the last in a series of film videos that look at photography and the moving image. These films, installations, and slide projections are now collected for the first time in the book SLOW NARRATION MOVING STILL (Berlin 2014). On the occasion of the presentation of this publication, Birgit Hein and Florian Zeyfang will be presenting WEISSFILM and SPLICEFILM in the mumok kino and will be talking about the relationship between film and still.

Film Program

Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, WEISSFILM, 1977, 5 min
Florian Zeyfang, SPLICEFILM, 2013, permanent
Florian Zeyfang, Introduction to a Short History of Photography, 2008, 12 min

Book Presentation

Florian Zeyfang
Slow Narration Moving Still
With texts by Ariane Müller, Marc Glöde, and Anselm Franke; interviews by Katarina Pierre and Adnan Yıldız.
Sternberg Press, Berlin (2014)

Presented by Birgit Hein & Florian Zeyfang 

Birgit Hein is a filmmaker, film critic, and performance artist, and lives in Berlin. With her structural films (since 1966), performances, film essays, and scholarly publications, she is seen as one of the primary pioneers of German underground and experimental film.

Florian Zeyfang is an artist and filmmaker and lives in Berlin. His last film Institute Above-Ground (directed with Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger) was premiered at Berlinale 2015.