Matthias Beckmann

Matthias Beckmann

I wanted to make a film without a plan – without any cuts – just starting, being surprised by the direction the lines and the action will take. Another idea was to draw only things from life without any help from photographs or movies. As I normally work on site in public places like museums, churches, hospitals, industrial sites etc., I thought the best place to explore was my own studio. So everything happens on my drawing table. You see my lamp, a Scotch tape, a pair of scissors, and at the beginning of the film you can even look through the window and see what I’m seeing when I’m sitting there. In a way this film is documentary like my drawing series.
I like the film drawings, but somehow they are different from drawings made as a purpose in themselves. Perhaps you can compare the phenomenon to Greek sculptures of athletes, like the discus-thrower. In a traditional work of art – a sculpture, a painting or a drawing – the whole movement has to be represented by a single position. The Greeks chose the “fertile moment”, a position that gives us information about what happened before and what is supposed to happen in the future. This leads to a very powerful, autonomous picture. The different positions in a sequence do not necessarily have this power as they are not produced to be looked at for a long time, isolated from the rest.