Studien zum Untergang des Abendlands (Estudios de la decadencia de Occidente) es una película realizada por Klaus Wyborny en 2010, compuesta de un total de 6.299 tomas en super8 mm divididas en 58 segmentos, y rodados durante los años 1979 y 1991. Studien... también ha sido concebida como instalación de 58 loops paralelos en DVD - cada pieza presentada en un monitor individual.

Sinopsis 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

Notas 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

Enlaces externos * Página en la web de Wyborny (en alemán)