The Beauty Of My Island – Shooting Klaus Lutz

Frank Matter, doc., 33 min., CH/USA 1999

Reminiscent of Chaplin or Méliès, Klaus Lutz’s films tell adventure stories about a little man in a strange and lonely world. The protagonist flies over big, imaginary cities, walks through intrastellar space, and interacts with props, signs and anthropomorphic drawnings. In August 1999, Klaus Lutz agreed to collaborate with filmmaker Frank Matter on a documentary about his work. For ten days, they locked themselves up in Lutz’s apartment in New York’s East Village. 

While the artist shot a short movie titled «The Beauty of My Island», Matter documented every single step of the working process on video tape. Simultaneously director, camera operator, actor, set and costume designer, Lutz is shooting his films in his tiny East Village apartment. His film language and the complex technological means he uses to tell his stories are the result of a life-long, meticulous investigation. Lutz is working with double and triple exposures, a wide variety of distorting and spheric lenses, balloons, pneumatic devices, rear projection, and turntables. There is no editing: the film is totally created in the camera.

Klaus Lutz is a unique filmmaker, creates a visual universe completely his own. The protagonist flies over big, imaginary cities, walks through dark spaces, and interacts with props, signs and anthropomorphic drawnings.

«The Beauty of My Island – Shooting Klaus Lutz» is not a conventional the making of documentary, but a silent examination of an artist’s unique working process, a playful, charming, and in its own way often funny reflection on illusion and perception, movement and speed, light and darkness, shape and color, film and video.

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