Matthias Müller

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Matthias Müller (born 1961) is a German experimental filmmaker and curator, often working in the field of found footage films. From 1994 to 1997 he worked as Guest Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main (Germany), and from 1998 to 1999 at the Dortmund Fachhochschule. Since 2003 he is Professor for Experimental Film at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany. For his films he has received numerous awards from many international festivals, including the American Federation of Arts Experimental Film Award in 1988, the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1996, the main award at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 1999, the Ken Burns “Best of the Festival“ Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2003, and the German Short Film Prize for Animation in 2006.

"His works can be read as an unwritten history of experimental cinema in Germany. He has been known in the film world for decades due to his presence in numerous short and experimental film festivals in Germany and worldwide and in communal cinemas. Furthermore, in recent years, he has made a name for himself in the art world as well with his video installations and photography. From the Super 8 movement in the eighties as well as the genre-crossing work with found footage, through the mutual interweaving of analogue and digital image media up to the cinematographic installation: In Müller’s biography as an artist and in his film aesthetics, Hollywood, avant-garde film and queer cinema meet, as well as the radical changes in media and representation technologies in the eighties and nineties – together with the resulting changes in the cinematic landscape, which for him too have opened up to include the art spaces.

"Müller's determined interest in questions of memory, traces of the past and the historical body makes his films, videos and installations the central point for a vast array of interrelated approaches." [1]