Studien zum Untergang des Abendlands (Studies for the decay of the West) is a film made by Klaus Wyborny in 2010, composed of a total of 6.299 shots in super8 mm divided in 58 segments and filmed between 1979 and 1991. Studien... has been also conceived as an installation of 58 parallel DVD based loops - each piece presented on an individual monitor.

Synopsis
In Wyborny's 'musical film', every new sound triggers a new image: 6,299 shots, all directly edited within his Super-8 camera. An intoxicating, stroboscopic trip to industrial, natural and urban landscapes in East Africa, New York, the Ruhr district and Rimini.

This experimental music film refers to Oswald Spengler’s world-famous philosophical work Der Untergang des Abendslandes (The Decay of the West, 1918). Culture pessimist Spengler argues that progress is an illusion and that the modern era brings little good. People are no longer able to understand the rationality of the world. Wyborny did not set out to make a film version of Spengler's theories, but rather a visual reflection on the modern age; a stroboscopic journey in five parts to industrial, natural and urban landscapes. He uses 6,299 shots, edited directly in a Super8 camera. Each piano note and violin vibrato evokes a new image: demolished buildings, rubble, destruction and nature, all shot between 1979 and 2010 in locations such as New York, the Ruhr, Hamburg, East Africa and Rimini. This film forms a counterpart to Wyborny’s previous films series Lieder der Erde. - IFFR 2010

Film notes
Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema. —Thom Andersen - Film Comment New York, Jan. 2011

In fact, it was here that I saw the best film of the festival, Klaus Wyborny’s Studies for the Decay of the West, a five-part landscape film (originally shot on Super 8 some 30 years ago in New York, Hamburg, the Ruhr, and East Africa), which performs the breathtaking feat of synchronizing preexisting musical compositions to footage edited in-camera so that each note corresponds to a cut—all 6,299 of them. “Before Final Cut Pro, you had to be very inventive,” Wyborny tellingly observed afterwards - Gavin Smith, FilmComment

External links
* Page at Wyborny's website (in German)