Film art – Klaus Wyborny becomes 80: Entropy and narrative

This man is so far ahead of us that it will be difficult to follow him at some time: The filmmaker and writer Klaus Wyborny, who will be on June 5, was thought out the German disaster long before it became state, and he made fun of the “artificial intelligence” than hardly anyone knew what that was supposed to be.

He is a physicist from home. He joked, he once joked, who could stay with physics if he would not have thrown in as much LSD in New York, where he studied. After that it was only enough for art. One should add: it was enough for art twice. In any case, she rarely has such a rich intellectual background as with him.

From a default for him, he focused on a topic that was considered the greatest of all evil: narrative, history, narrative. The advanced artists rightly despised the narrative as an ideological crutch and sentimental glue. They wrongly believed that it was not worth thinking about it. Because it is hardly possible to even walk across the street, without this gang not having something from a story, namely a start, a goal and sometimes a punch line (a car approaches at high speed). The narrative is therefore a primitive thought that is obvious to us. In the chaos of the sensations, it constructs connection. Few deconstructed it as cocky as Wyborny. Let’s take his film “Das Open Universum” (1990).

His premise is that the universe (like our society, by the way) is understood in a constant decay. The stars will go out in ten high fourteen years. This “entropy”, as the physicists say, opposes the narrative that wants to bind everything. Of course, this film only occurs in rudiments or stumps: “On the day before the wedding, she lost a foot.” Sometimes the narrative rudiments fit together loosely, sometimes massage in an adventurous way, for example in this passage: three friends make a sailing trip. Carla (Tilda Swinton) is bored terribly. Frank (Hanns Zischler) consoles her with the sailor saying that she may hammer the maggots out of the ship’s fighter. Carla takes this literally and pounds on the rusks.

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In half a dozen scarce settings, Wyborny drives the madness to the extreme: Frank is enough for Carla, it seems that it seems that a long nail succeeds in her skull, cut to Robert (Christoph Hemmerling), who turns horrified, then on Carlas French viewing cards, she calls: “Oh, that Feels Good.” A fish bites. Another look at the cards (which alludes to Jean-Luc Godards “Les Carabiniers” (1964)), the narrator sums up off: “France. The State. The philosophy. The Enlightenment. ”In a minute from sadism to sarcasm. And in this minute we recognize that every element of a narrative can be combined almost arbitrarily with others. What should have donated against the disintegration, itself disintegrates itself (for example, into individual settings or sentences).

Then follow as a non-referible alternative viraged fragments of large cities and industrial plants, pictures that are rhythmically assembled after piano accompaniment. In the end, Robert strands on an island and contacts cannibals. With this original scene, the film material jumps from the positive and back and catapults into a film (1973) (1973), which is very similar with a positive and negative film Wybornys, a favorite by Susan Sontag. It is the allegory of a state foundation, demonstrated on stranded people who pull themselves together and kill. In the second part of the film, the birth of the nation becomes that of the narrative film itself, because Wyborny’s title does not refer to “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) by DW Griffith for nothing.

Griffith also offered both: a narrative of the crimes that justify the modern state and a grammar of cinematic storytelling. Wyborny has meticulously analyzed this grammar like no other: looks, rooms, conventions. One of the many surprises that his film theoretical writings offer is how lightly he is able to jump from a cinematic structure to painting and preferably to literature, i.e. from Griffith to Vincent van Gogh or Honoré de Balzac.

Wyborny began to interest the cinema and literature at the same time. His first novel, “the adventurous but hapless life of William Parmagino”, was created in 1969. It is a work that has a abdomen and a halo, as well as disputes with Pliny to the older or Gregor von Tours. And everywhere (since “William Parmagino”) are Nazi era, war, Holocaust. In the “Comédie”, too, the story fluctuates between the structure and decay. It is undermined by over-nose instances that, as artificial intelligence (“PC Melville”, “PC Olson” and others), the written censor and edit. So far, only the tip of the iceberg can be seen by Klaus Wyborny’s entire work. Therefore, excursion steamer are warned: there is a risk of collision.

Film theoretical writings by Klaus Wyborny: Elementary cut theory of the feature film. LIT-Verlag 2012, 464 pages, Br., € 44.90; Basic features of a topology of narrative. Lit-Verlag 2014, 357 pages, Br., Antiquarian; Try. On the way to a cut theory. Applied topology. Exploration of outskirts. LIT-Verlag 2016, 365 pages, Br., € 34.
On the website of the »Filmgalerie 451« website, films by Klaus Wyborny can be borrowed and buy.