Hein, Birgit; Hein, Wilhelm
«Raw Film»

The two experimental filmmakers, who for many years worked as a couple, made their early black-and-white ‘Raw Film’ montage with very short frame sequences and an extreme reduction to a purely material aesthetic. The film image is ‘disrupted’ in different ways: traces of dirt, frame lines or perforation holes appear in the picture, at other points the image freezes or melts. Positive and negative images are used. Since the original material was chosen at random and taken from existing 8mm and 16mm films, the image sizes are sometimes parallel, sometimes alternate. The velocity of the editing rhythm and mounting signal noise reinforce a ‘rawness’ directed persistently against narration.