Black Death Filter

The intention of Black Death Filter is to permit the viewer to explore the cinema´s blackness with his or her gaze.

(Dietmar Brehm)

One of Brehm’s most recent works, Black Death Filter (2003) – named after a brand of cigarettes and consisting of ten minutes of black-and-white film without sound – is also intended to be a veritable hole in the cinema. Supposedly designed so that “the viewer can explore the blackness of the cinema with their gaze”, the film, in a completely unemotional and somewhat “deflationary” manner, holds out the prospect of a kind of final avant-garde work. In doing so, it skilfully keeps the aspects of obliteration and new beginnings in suspense. Brehm has reportedly been experimenting with video since 2000 – as yet unpublished – and one can look forward to seeing what effect his disruptive techniques will have on digital technology. Forced pixel drones? A hole in the screen? Black Death network fire? (Christian Höller)