Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller

The Work Cut shows a montage of 95 shots from 95 movies ranging from the late 1940s to the 2010s in which the human body is idealised and depicted as practically indestructible and highly mutable as well as being the cause of pain, anxiety, hysteria and delusion. It ties the phantasmagorical idea of the fully transparent, controllable and infinitely malleable body to the notion of corporeality as a wound that can never heal. The concept of the body that can be formed and disciplined is juxtaposed with a physique that is fragile and vulnerable to danger, one that terrifies, ages and dies.

“The bodies that spring from Girardet and Müller’s cutting board have lost their sharp outlines, instead becoming what Deleuze calles 'anorganic bodies' – decentralised bodies that have been stripped from their organisation and have turned into 'zones of indiscernibility' in which various persons blend into one another, and where technology seamlessly merges into body parts and vice-versa … a wholly new corporeal sense arises from the images and transfers itself onto the stunned viewer, who has no choice but to be overwhelmed by these unfamiliar sensations.”

                                                                                                                                  - Johannes Binotto

Funded by the German Federal Filmboard

Cut was awarded the Best European Short Film of 2013 Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde Shortfilm Festival.

In Eye, a film sequence is dissected into five moments – reminiscent of phase photography. The circular shape of a spotlight is beginning to glow, to shine and then to disappear in semidarkness again. The high-gloss surfaces of the prints evoke the association of one's own reflection in the pupil of a counterpart when we are eyeball to eyeball with one another. The spotlight's stages of glowing, then gradually disappearing into darkness are mirror images of the constriction and dilation of the pupil.