Das Goldene Tor (The Golden Door)

The basic idea is that it is impossible to fix film. Film is something, which is always in a state of flux...The images, ‘real’ in the beginning, gradually disintegrate and the gelatine layer, where the chemicals are embedded, dissolves. All that’s left in the end is the ‘raging of the elements’.

-Jürgen Reble

Jürgen Reble’s film works are marked by layers of residue, shifting abstract surfaces, chemical traces, scratches and blotches, as though a virus has infected the image, distorting its tone and colour, imbuing it with unusual textures and a strange aura. In these films destructive processes are the creative aesthetic agent. [...] A form of myopic mythopoeia, Das Goldene Tor confounds readings of interpretive “meaning”, however layered or subjective they could be; neither is it concerned with perceptual phenomena or visual processes. It is a self-contained metaphor, a self-actualising event through the experience of its passage. As it progresses its atmosphere becomes more intense, it is slower, it is hazily less distinct. Like the sympathetic layer of Thomas Koner’s soundtrack, it is “dark ambient”.

-Steven Ball