All of the shots in Beacon involve images of the sea and places associated with it. These were edited together with scenes from feature films. In the background can be heard the voice of a woman narrating fragments from various, sometimes naive, travel stories. Beacon was screened at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam in 2003, among others.
Locomotive is a video installation: a film triptych made from hundreds of feature films. The main motifs are a train, a traveler, and a journey. Individual shots are collected, multiplied, and reproduced. All of this turns into a series of repeating, easily recognizable episodes and rituals that have always been a part of films and that are associated with parting and melancholy.
Why Don’t You Love Me? is the fourth part of Girardet and Müller’s Phoenix Tapes cycle, which is dedicated to the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock. The filmmakers have put together fragments of 40 of Hitchcock’s films, creating a sort of archive of his cinematic obsessions. This part is dedicated to images of the unhealthy relationships between on-screen murderers and their overprotective, obsessive mothers – "Mother, mother, I’m ill!"
Bedroom is the fifth part of Girardet and Müller’s Phoenix Tapes cycle, which is dedicated to the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock. The filmmakers have put together fragments of 40 of Hitchcock’s films, creating a sort of archive of his cinematic obsessions. In Bedroom,the leading theme is the seduction and rejection of beautiful women, who, in the end, die, murdered in cold blood.
Technology is the most important subject in Manual. Tape recorders, reels, speakers, knobs, buttons, and pumps create a very complex mechanism that is used to dominate a human being in a mysterious laboratory. What matters is the compulsion for constant, unyielding repetition. Everything is measured, controlled, turned on and off until the circuit blows.
A body is wounded, mutilated, and operated on in such a way that it will never be possible to heal it. In Cut, their latest film, which was nominated for European Film Award, Girardet and Müller show scenes over and over again of a variety of wounds, interrupting them from time to time with a black frame. The end result is a collage-like film in which there are surreal references to Buñuel’s and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou.
Joanna Ostrowska