Eyewitness – Augenzeugen

Eyewitness – Augenzeugen

Production country: 
de
Year: 
1993
Duration: 
7 min
Edition: 
2013
Format: 
film/video
Klaus vom Bruch, Der Augenzeuge, 1993 video still © der Künstler und / the artis
Klaus vom Bruch, Der Augenzeuge, 1993 video still © der Künstler und / the artist and VG Bild-Kunst, 2012 Courtesy of imai - inter media art institute, Düsseldorf

Vom Bruch describes Augenzeugen (Eyewitness), subtitled Behind the Doors of the Haus der Kunst, as a series of "philosophical speculations" on the famous Third Reich propaganda building in Munich, which opened in 1937 to serve as the official German art museum. In his video, archival footage of the museum's double doors open and close repeatedly upon a succession of appropriated filmic images from newsreels and cinema: bomber jets, a goose-stepping cartoon cat (Tom from Tom and Jerry), Hollywood starlets (Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland) singing in close-up, the bombing of a European city. The slow, repetitive motion of the doors establishes a droning rhythm, countered by lively accordion music, which underscores what vom Bruch has termed "ironically charged images of passion and war."

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