For Birgit & Wilhelm Hein

What is it about the ‘material films’ of Birgit & Wilhelm Hein that remain so absolute?

Why is it that so many similar films seem like tame exercises, but these still feel like both the end of cinema – the very last possible gesture – and the birth of something new and absolute? Something that is still very much the manifestation of “a new European cinema that is forceful, raw and brutal”.

We don’t have the answer to this question. But during a recent screening of Materialfilme II(1976) at the Plastik Festival in Dublin, we experienced the full physical force of this cascade of colour planes. And it felt like we were exposed to the molten core of cinema itself.