Rohfilm (Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, 1968) (Patreon)

When Mr. Thatcher accuses Charles Foster Kane of doing a bad job of running a newspaper, Kane replies, "I don't know how to run a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of." This is kind of the spirit behind Rohfilm, an early collaboration between conceptual artists Birgit and Wilhelm Hein. Based in Cologne, the duo were among West Germany's earliest practitioners of "materialist film," the sort of self-reflexive, process-based experiments that evolved into structural film in places like the U.S., Canada, and Austria. 

The Heins are not as well-known as their Viennese colleagues, particularly Peter Kubelka and Kurt Kren. There are historical reasons for this, having to do with exhibition opportunities and funding disparities, but looking at Rohfilm, it seems that there is something else that separates German and Austrian formalism. In their editing techniques, members of the Vienna scene took specific inspiration from modern music, especially the Second Viennese School. Looking at Kren's films today, it's easy to see affinities between his compact, intricate rhythms and transitions and those of Anton Webern. Even Kren's most chaotic films have a structure that's hard to miss.

Rohfilm, by contrast, feels like a cinematic version of free jazz. Within its mere 21 minutes, the Heins' film includes: flicker, sprocket holes, double projection, double-packing, optical printing, long passages of black leader, fragments of representational imagery (architecture, body parts, faces), Fischingeresque geometrical animation, Cagean radio noise, musique concrète, the sound of images hitting the audio head, scratches, hair, blurry forms, film grain, and probably other elements I'm forgetting. These different "tones," all recognizable from various points in avant-garde history, enter and exit the film in what seems to be a random pattern, as though the Heins are "riffing" on the celluloid.

Where contemporaries of the Heins were trying to exclude various elements of the film experience in order to purify the medium -- isolating one or two properties that could be examined more closely by the spectator -- Rohfilm is expansive, almost Wagnerian. Rather than demanding that we attend to the shape of the film, or its moment-to-moment temporal relationships, Rohfilm asks us to consider "the film" as a hypothetical unit, one that can hang together or come apart as we watch it. What are the patterns or structures that are needed for a film to be recognizable as a coherent work? And if those patterns seem to be missing, then how do we make meaning across the running time?

Rohfilm suggests that we recognize individual cinematic "notes" and work to forge relationships between them, if not in the moment then retrospectively. So if Rohfilm is to attain any kind of coherence, it will be up to the viewer to supply it as a cognitive act. And of course, this is the case for every film ever made. By widening its scope, Rohfilm achieves something axiomatic.

(Through the month of February, Arsenal 3 is hosting a Birgit Hein retrospective.)