Matthias Müller

The great thing about open-air cinema on a summer's evening is the chance to see stars both above your head and on the big screen. Sitting in one some years ago, after the sun had reluctantly set, I saw a short film by Matthias Müller. Home Stories (1990) is a raucous compilation of chillingly near-identical scenes appropriated from Hollywood movies of the 1950s and '60s, in which women (including Audrey Hepburn, Lana Turner, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Lauren Bacall and Jane Wyman) take turns in quick succession to wake up frightened in the night, answer telephones, open the curtains, look anxiously out of the window and run frantically downstairs. I remember the excited applause and laughter from an audience that obviously appreciated the film's camp cross-gender identificatory spirit; they certainly seem to have drowned out any recollection of the feature that followed on its heels.

Since then, although artists such as Douglas Gordon have entered contemporary art history with their reworkings and recontextualizations of great filmic moments, I had not come across Müller's work again until recently, although he has continued to make films, won his fair share of prizes, had screenings of his films at countless festivals and exhibited in galleries internationally. A partial explanation for this is that his recent solo exhibition 'Album', which was curated by Kathrin Becker and was accompanied by the first substantial publication on his work, was also his first show in a German art institution. Perhaps it's also to do with the fact that, despite mutual admiration and occasional crossovers, independent film and art inhabit parallel universes. The exhibition concentrated on film, video and photography produced between 1994 and the present, although Müller first established a reputation on the German independent film scene in the 1980s.

The oldest work in the show, Alpsee (1994), is a much travelled and celebrated study of a mother-son relationship. The visuals of this wordless movie are carefully constructed in a style reminiscent of postwar melodramas, in particular those of Douglas Sirk, whose Imitation of Life (1958) is apparently one of Müller's favourite films. In a short dream-within-a-dream-like sequence Müller again makes effective use of multiple near-identical appropriated scenes. This time he collected a series of suffocating maternal embraces that suggest that a poor mother's love can also involve the unintended emotional transfer of all the ills she has suffered at the rough hands of patriarchy. Other works in the exhibition included a series of found photos of Wedding Bouquets (2004) and the video Promises (2003), depicting the same extremely similar stiff bunches of too many, too red roses: despite being formally unspectacular, or perhaps just uninterestingly presented here, these works nevertheless revealed how, depending on the vehicle we choose to transport our feelings, a terrifying chasm can develop between emotional intention and effect.

Müller is at his best when making pieces for a cinema-style setting rather than video art, even if he sometimes blurs the distinction between the two. For instance, his new diaristic video loop Album (2004), shown here for the first time, seemed more original and to have more to say than other monitor-bound works in the show. Album is constructed of all kinds of footage that Müller has made or collected over the years, with no particular end in mind. Images that convey the mutability of all things - a passing crowd, a shirt hanging in a window or an oceanic horizon - are interspersed with white-on-black text: 'Is absence possible while the memory of absence remains? ... The memories he avoids catch up with him like a shadow ... Can there be a conclusive view of what we did earlier? ... He believes he only has to collect.' Far from being trite, as such undertakings can easily become, Müller's meditation and insights into his own identity, memory and their relation to his image-making resonate. They also give a clue about his principal concern, namely the desire to create work that, is 'like a curious echo more vibrant than the sound that produced it'.