So., 4. Mai, 22:19
Dear Helga Fanderl,
I hope this letter finds you well. My name is Emma. I saw your short films at Anthology a few
weeks ago, and I wanted to write to tell you how much I enjoyed them.
I watched Constellations with one person I love and three strangers. A friend of mine who lives in
Barcelona told me her sister would be in New York, and that we two should meet. Ana (the
traveling sister) invited two writer friends, and I invited my boyfriend Adam along. When the five
of us convened at Anthology, Ana nervously exclaimed, "thank you for arranging this date!" and we
quietly filed into the theater together.
It felt fitting to watch your films – which are warm, inviting, intimate, and attentive –
with one person I know well to my left, and one I was just meeting to my right. I felt each short film was
greeting me, waking me to a world I knew. The glimmer of apartment buildings across water, the
crowning branches of a persimmon tree seen from below, or the dog in shimmering water, long as
an eel. Your gestures, the tips of painted fingernails just touching, or a woman folding her body to
kiss a man seated at a picnic, were fond and familiar (like memories of my own). I noticed my own
back curving to a V, stretching forward in my seat to focus all my attention – an attempt to mimic
your precision. To look as you do.
I found other moments to be entirely unfamiliar and beguiling. The peacock's flickering turns
captivated me, as did the flaring orange peels of tulips after being submerged in the black-and-white
tunnel. A return to life and all that blooms. Just when I thought a tree branch was the same one I
gazed at in the morning, or an apple the same I sliced for lunch, I saw something that shifted my
perception so finely – a slight pivot like one watery flick of the dog's tail.
And there was real glee to swiveling my head around as you changed the film, hearing Adam
whisper "so good," or catching Ana's eye, again new to me, but now sharing all of the joyful images
we'd seen (irises, trampolines, a kiss, a fuchsia blouse on the beach).
I hope you won't mind this long note. Thank you for these films.
With admiration,
Emma
FROM — , 2025
Konstellationen Super 8
by Helga Fanderl u.a.
Künstlerbuch — Helga Fanderl: Konstellationen Super 8 — Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin 2023 — D/E/F 248 S. ⤷ Read more
Film Talks 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema
by Simon Payne / Andrew Vallance
Edited by Simon Payne / Andrew Vallance
Published by Contact
In association with Arts University Bournemouth
and Anglia Ruskin University, 2021
⤷ Read more
FROM — Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema, 2021
Berlin Art Link on Helga Fanderl
by Jesse Cumming
Helga Fanderl’s ‘Raum für Film’ can be found behind an inconspicuous frosted glass window-front in Charlottenburg. The three words are visible on the window’s exterior, but they are easy to miss unless one is actively looking. It’s only the first confluence between the space and the work of the artist, who has been steadily producing and exhibiting small-gauge films that reflect fragments of life since the mid-1980s. [...]
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«Una lunga vacanza nella Terra» in conversazione con Helga Fanderl
by Giorgio Cornelio
Ho incontrato Helga Fanderl al Festival di Pesaro, nel 2015, mentre introduceva quella che mi era sembrata, allora, una piccola ingegneria dello stupore. Quando, come nel cinema di Helga, è in opera uno sforzo di comunione, il dono della presenza piena appare ineludibile, e ogni elemento è teso a portare, meticolosamente, il peso e la forma del suo mistero. Sottrarre questa costellazione di film alla pratica che li vuole ogni volta ricomposti, ravvicinati e disgiunti (come fosse un’allegoria coniugale, un tappeto cucito e inconsutile) vorrebbe dire destinarla ad un divorzio dal destino che le è proprio, quello cioè di indicare una misura del mondo che sappia essere, allo stesso tempo, richiesta, decifrazione e deposito di senso.
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FROM — Artnoise, Magazine di arte e cultura, 2017
Das Esszimmer, Bonn: Film Live by Helga Fanderl
by Sibylle Feucht
Dieses (Super 8) Kino wird während der ganzen Ausstellung nur zweimal zum Leben erweckt, nämlich wenn Du darin Deine eigens für den jeweiligen Abend zusammengestellten Super 8-Programme zeigst. Ansonsten ist es eine Art Kino-Torso, in das man sich setzen kann, um die eigenen Filme vor dem inneren Auge abzuspielen.
Ich denke, das ist eine bemerkenswert radikale und konsequente Art und Weise Deine Arbeiten, aber auch Deine Haltung und Arbeitsweise im Rahmen einer Ausstellung zu präsentieren […].
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FROM — Katalog, Das Esszimmer, 2015
Eternity in the ephemeral
by Harshini Vakkalanka
I think my love for poetry has shaped me to a large extent, my films are small, they are not epic. The sound or the music of language becomes visual music. There is a sense of rhythm, of density. It is about capturing the moment and opening up a particular experience, without having to explain everything. It is more or less what poets do, they are very aware of the way they say something.
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FROM — The Hindu, 2015
Die Poesie des Moments
by Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann
Die poetische Dichte dieser „Miniaturen“ hat anfangs dazu verleitet,
Vergleiche mit der Lyrik zu suchen, etwa mit dem Haiku. Doch geht
dieses Verständnis am Kern der Arbeit von Helga Fanderl vorbei, an
dem Verhältnis von Körper und Apparat, in dem sich ein ganz ande
rer Prozess entfaltet als das Schreiben. Körperliche Aktionen und
Reaktionen, Gesten des Blicks, der Empfindung, des Verlangens,
gehen ungefiltert durch eine bewusste Reflexion in die Filme ein –
die im Ãœbrigen reine Aufnahmen vorgefundener Wirklichkeiten sind.
Das Leben hinter der Kamera mischt sich mit dem Leben vor ihrem
Auge.
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FROM — Grip 50, Frankfurt a. M., 2014
Helga Fanderl Films and Screens
by Philippe–Alain Michaud
«Mädchen», «Sardinenkorbe», «Strom», «Pfosten im Fluß», «Pflanzen»: all the films made by Helga Fanderl — more than six hundred to date — describe, without metaphors, a simple action, a figure, an event involving movement or color, captured in the moment they happen and thus preserving their fleeting radiance.
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FROM — Katalog, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2013
Like the quiet, yet intense, meteorological quivering in an Agnes Martin grid painting, presence in art is a notion both unremittingly subjective and resolutely romantic. At least, it used to be. the pleasurable anxiety that often accompanies the encounters that banish our busyness, allay our fears, and remind us of our existence has become increasingly rare.
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Layers and Lattices: The Super 8 Films of Helga Fanderl
by Nicky Hamlyn
Fanderl’s willingness to surrender to the particular dynamics of the situation in which she finds herself, opens up her practice to otherwise unavailable possibilities. In some ways her stance exemplifies what most artists discover in the process of making, which is to allow the work’s own momentum to pull them with it, so that there is always a margin of doubt, of things to be discovered and surprised by, before the conscious awareness of the contents of this margin of doubt permits retrospective theoretical and strategic consolidation to take place.
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FROM — Sequence Issue No. 1, 2010
Film Live
by Helga Fanderl
To film with a Super 8 camera allows me to respond immediately to what I experience. My eye at the eyepiece, the camera in my hand - perceiving and recording simultaneously - I concentrate and create films in correspondence with the subject matter, in one gesture, as it were. I surprise what happens and feel surprised at the same time. I try to catch the moment, hic et nunc and in situ. That is the main reason why I always edit in the camera and why there is no postproduction.
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FROM — Sequence Issue 1, 2010
Collection d’images, autour du travail de Helga Fanderl
A noticeable feature of Helga Fanderl’s aesthetic conduct is that every time she shows her numerous films, which are one to three minutes long, she makes a different sequence. One would be inclined to explain this specific phenomenon in terms of the aphoristic quality of cinematic miniatures; however, the density and diversity of rhythm, form, color and tectonics of many of the films, edited in the camera, contradict such a supposition.
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