by Per Kvist
2005
From the booklet of the DVD "Cityscapes",released on lowave.
“Because film belongs to the category of the visual arts, its laws are related to painting and dance (…) Since this art is played out over time, one of its crucial elements is the temporal rhythm of the optic exposition. Hence a relatively new, until now only latent type of artists will develop; artists that are situated between painting and music”. – Walter Ruttmann, from Art and Cinema and Painting with time, 1913-1919.
These texts, which foreshadow the cinematic avantgarde in Germany, could have been descriptions of HC Gilje´s artistic project. He operates in the space between music, dance and rhythmical visuality. He is educated in the visual arts, however he makes use of an extensive cross-disciplinary repertoire in his live improvisations and video works- both rooted in a close collaboration with composers and sound artists, and his work within visual theatre and dance.
HC Gilje´s Cityscapes portray the metropolis with its people, traffic and architecture. Thematically this has a clear resemblance to modernism’s focus on the metropolis, and what was experienced as the aesthetically modern. Examples of this can be found in Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire and especially Walter Benjamin. The metropolis is reflected as motif, but also as an aesthetic experience based on perception through shock and fragmentation of time and space; this can be said to function as the base for the futuristic studies of movement and the cubistic dissolution of the unified image. We have seen this in the cinematic avantgarde and the so called urban symphonies like Dziga Vertovs The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), and Walter Ruttmann´s Berlin- Symphony of a Great City (1927).
Thematically Cityscapes suggests a different approach to the story than that of modernistic optimism - the feeling of an architectonic dystopia which fades as time goes by - is manifest. The fascination of new technology is gone. Technology is for Gilje just a tool to create poetic stories – stories about global universal conditions of urban life. He focuses on the framework that constitutes urban space – buildings, streets, traffic and the crowd – phenomena that sets condition for human movements. These are aspects of the city that we now take for granted and perhaps not really see anymore – and with this as a raw material he creates open and ambivalent stories about experiences of urban life and energies created. And what once was regarded as shock aesthetic is now experienced as a poetic dimension of Giljes work. As spectators we have learned to deal with the visuality of the fragmented space.
Formally, the similarities between Gilje´s artistic project and Ruttmann´s work are clear. They both structure visual sequences as a form of music, and they both focus intensively on the relationship between the visual and the sonic aspects of their works. Visually there is a striking resemblance between their works. We see this clearly in relationship to Ruttmanns Opus-films created in the early 1920-ies and his Berlin film. Opus I-IV are abstract films, based upon an animation technique where several layers of images operate contemporaneously. The Berlin-film is mainly based on photographic shots of the city, structured by Ruttmanns ambitions to make an abstract film. And like Gilje, Ruttmann wanted with his Berlin film not to create a documentary, but to grasp the experience of life in a big city.
HC Gilje´s artistic project can be viewed as a synthesis of Ruttmann´s two different technical approaches of the animated image and the photographic shot. Gilje does it with a different technical ease and platform. Based on digital sampling and processing of both image and sound, he releases the potential of the cinematic avantgarde and grants it an important position in the contemporary artistic expression.
lysfanger nr.1
by Hanan Benammar
2018
Pings: Matter, Environment and Technology in the work of HC Gilje
by Mitchell Whitelaw
2017
Conversations over time
by Anne Szefer Karlsen
2017
Siding with the light
by Joost Rekveld
2017
Conversations with Spaces
by HC Gilje
2017
TIME, SPACE, CHANGE, SPEED, MOTION - Interview with HC Gilje
by Nicky Assmann
2013
Right Here, Right now - HC Gilje´s Networks of Specificity
by Mitchell Whitelaw
2009
Within the space of an instant
by HC Gilje
2005
HC Gilje – Cityscapes and the
cinematic avantgarde
by Per Kvist
2005
preface to Shadowgrounds catalog
by Jeremy Welsh
2001
interview with HC Gilje
by Andreas Broeckmann
2001
Work on the Myth
by Gerrit Gohlke
2002
VideoNervous
by HC Gilje
1998