Robert Nery

Paul Winkler, in Retrospect

Paul Winkler Films 1964 - 94, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, July 1995.

In four days in July, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Sydney Intermedia Network screened a retrospective of Paul Winkler's films - a total of 30 films - the earliest from 1964. A one-room artist's studio installation, where Paul Winkler can be seen working on a new film, stays until 10 September. He was on hand to introduce each screening session and at the breaks to converse with interested viewers, typically with a down-to-earth literalness sometimes underlined with deadpan humour, which his accent makes easy to miss. An attractive and useful catalogue of Winkler's films commemorates the retrospective.

Ingo Petzke, the German film curator, remarks that Winkler's "low-tech invention pushes the possibilities of comparatively simple mechanics and long-known camera devices to their outer limits and beyond". In most of the films, those devices are still and moving mattes and recently, the optical printer. Typically, a compositional procedure - a rotating or revolving patterned matte, for example - is applied or alternated with one or two others to create a series of composite (or arrays of) images. Many of his films give the impression of a kaleidoscope given a regular shake or gradually turning. Certainly, the intrigue which is their initial effect is very like the effect of the kaleidoscope on us when we looked through it as kids. The films, however, withstand longer contemplation than kaleidoscopes. Winkler's procedures often create complex figure-ground or depth relations among the part-images in any array and intricate visual cross-rhythms through editing on different layes. In the not untypically intricate Traces (1982), symmetrical and asymmetrical hieroglyphs of circles - irises - of varying sizes, irises within other irises, or overlapping others, close onto black and open onto street surfaces and street scenes like pastel flowers in time-lapse photography, such that an entire street scene might be contained in a tiny iris within another small one and the grainy surface of a footpath scattered among different irises. Winkler's themes are indicated by the laconically functional titles of his works - Taylor Square (1980), Bondi (1979), Australian Bush (1986), Urban Spaces (1980) - but more than abstract pattern-making, most of them have something to say about their themes. Sometimes, his procedures are metaphorically suggestive - in Long Shadows (1991), "a prism in front of the lens, which chased the images (including some of me, photographing) 'round and 'round ... [mirrors] the way history endlessly repeats itself" or in Green Canopy (1994), household glasses, spinning very fast in front of the lens, are intended to suggest the "blinding headache churning premonition", caused by a news report on deforestation. The works sound awfully banal when they are described in this way, but they continue to fascinate or intrigue as we watch them in so far as the simple ideas Winkler wishes to communicate are reasons for complex or subtle compositional effects, the end-products of fine perceptual judgements and painstaking ingenuity. In many of the films, the relationship between controlling idea and composition seems exemplified by the disparity, sometimes wacky, between the banal photographic part-images and the formal things done to them. This sort of humour - a low-key sense of incongruity - runs through Winkler's work. About Brick And Tile (1983), which is almost just abstract pattern-making, he writes that a German audience: "was less than impressed when I explained that the film would hopefully assist potential home builders to select their desired brick and tile combination".

The retrospective catalogue contains four essays - by Peter Mudie, John Flaus, David Perry and Quentin Turnour respectively. David Perry's - on techniques and technology is instructive and transcribes converastions with Winkler on his aims and methods. It is accompanied by diagrams on the mattes used to produce Winkler's composite images. Mudie concludes that "it is with the relationship of apparatus/mind and nature that Winkler provides the viewer with an interface between what some may see as mutually exclusive concepts. 'Nature' does not merely provide the raw material at the disposal of the material or apparatus of his filmmaking. It becomes integrated into the final artefact". But it is not clear from Mudie's essay how this integration of nature into the artefact differs from the artefact's simply being an instance of photography, by definition a collaboration between nature and human intention. He also claims that in works like Sydney Harbour Bridge (1977), Bondi, Ayers Rock (1981 )and Long Shadows, "the viewer is ... put in the peculiar position of experiencing those all-so-familiar subjects through the altered vision of another. For some, this is disorientating and confusing, for Winkler's ... visions logarithmically demand more from the viewer than many other avant garde/experimental films (that merely divorce the viewer from the pro-filmic subject)". But what if these films of Winkler's are not shown to "us"? And how is divorcing the viewer from the pro-filmic subject different from being fiction?

Between the first three essays and Turnour's final appreciation are all the films except the first three 8mm ones, described by Winkler himself and side-by-side with short reminiscences and homages by Albie Thoms, Tina Kaufman, Bruce and Barrett Hodsdon, Martha Ansara, Barrie Pattinson, Larry Kardish (MOMA film curator), Robert Haller (Anthology Film Archives director), and others. Finally, the catalogue has a list of Collections, Selected Screenings and Exhibitions, and a Selected Bibliography on Winkler.

© Robert Nery
MESH#6 Winter, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts