A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)

A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)

A room above the slaughterhouse. While the animals are beeing butchered below, upstairs an adult is playing out scenes of early puberty. The woman in the room of the slaughterhouse cuts off all his hair. Aloud the man reads a story of the unrestrained Scheherazade. The children cheerfully cook the dog’s carcass and the adults resolutety expose their private parts... „Memories and dreams, which were banned in the cinema until now and which have magically freed themselves from the chains of the prohibitions and the realms of the taboos.“ (D. Kuhlbrodt)

Birgit and Wilhelm Hein

With WEISSFILM (White Film) the Heins ended a ten-year period of producing structural films: works that drew attention to the mediating presence and function of the film material itself. This comparatively short film consists of strips of transparent and semi-transparent film leader, which are roughly spliced together. There is no negative; the film only exists in this one original print. Neither copies on film or video, nor a conversion into a digital format were ever made. With each screening that adds dust and scratches to the material, Weissfilm changes its entity (Florian Wuest)

The KALI-FILME are a compilation of 8 single short found footage films, which were composed of Hollywood war-, horror- and women in prison B-pictures, historical war documentaries and porno films. In the trivial films we find images of our own subconscious instincts, which are tabu in the official high culture. KALI is a mother goddess of the Hindu mythology. She is the birth giving mother and at the same time the killing and castrating woman. Since primeval times men do fear her power.

One of the most important structural films of the period, Rohfilm demonstrates a radical anti-representational approach, destroying the figurative image and bringing attention back to the ‘raw’ photographic material, particularly its physical form. Resisting a stable reference point, the film is a multi-layered onslaught of blurred impressions, shifting surfaces and grating sounds that activates a form of sensuous viewing. In the making of the film, the Heins employed just about every technique of defamiliarization, including direct intervention on the surface of the film strip, rephotography, remediation, and different kinds of mechanical interruption and destruction. It is a striking example of a truly handmade approach. (Kim Knowles)

For their 35mm Materialfilme (1976), the Heins randomly spliced together a mix of colour and black and white material taken from the header and footer of commercial films. The scratches, scribbles, hand-written and commercially printed numbers and dots that adorn such footage rush past the eye until they are replaced by images consisting only of washed-out colours or scratched black and white frames.

Short film by Birgit Hein with paintings and texts by Gabriele Kutz.

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candour her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration for being alone and her experiences in Jamaica.