Movies: Matthias Müller

When a convicted felon fails to return from his prison leave and a young woman is found murdered, forensic psychiatrist Roman Mettler finds himself fighting for his existence. It was him who had composed the report permitting the leave....

There's a reason why many consider Iggy Pop the godfather of punk - every single punk band of the past and present has either knowingly or unknowingly borrowed a thing or two from Pop and his late-'60s/early-'70s band, the Stooges, who reunited in 20...

Nostalgic excerpts of fiction, fairytales and vintage science fiction from a child’s room to way out into the galaxy....

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm al...

“A study of light.” (Christoph Girardet/Matthias Müller)...

The film creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters....

The film comprises edited excerpts from 40 Hitchcock films in six chapters, each focusing on a different motif that reveals some of Hitchcock’s dark obsessions and techniques....

Matthias Müller’s films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema. They exaggerate the unreality and clinical perfection of the Hollywood studio films of the 1950s, quoting its sets and colours (Home Stories, 1990; Pensão...

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON pr...

Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and li...

The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city sympho...

In Phantom, each face, each body appears, like cinema itself, from beneath a curtain that flutters and flickers to reveal haunted silhouettes that never quite take shape....

2004 short by Muller...

Album also represents a further step on a path Müller set off on several years ago: away from festivals and toward the art market. Album does not have a linear narrative, but is instead conceived as a loop and is shown primarily in the gallery and mu...

Combining close-ups of redundant technology gleaned from 60s US sci-fi television series with a female voice of a 40s Hollywood melodrama, Manual makes absolute detachment clash with magnified emotion. When its record of the minutae of endless button...

A paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity....

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional charac...

This one is a collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with ...

This is somebody, nobody, anyone. This is us in the course of time. Persistently, in vain. The self is the need for permanent self-assertion....

2002 short by Muller...