Rückspiegel
Michaela Melián

Michaela Melián spoke with filmmaker Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Josef Anton Riedl, Hans-Jörg Wicha and Kurd Alsleben about their multimedia film project Varia Vision—Unendliche Fahrt (Varia Vision, Endless Journey, 1965), the Studio for Electronic Music and the Ulm School of Design. The work Varia Vision—Unendliche Fahrt was intended as a statement against the rigid peepshow principle of the cinema, providing non-stop audiovisual impressions on the theme of travel to an unbroken flow of visitors moving through the exhibition hall. For Rückspiegel (Rear-View Mirror, 2008), Melián conducted interviews with the makers of Varia Vision, filmed actors reciting these interviews. The characters speak in turn about their project and about formulating a mission statement at the Ulm School of Design—shut down while they were teaching there in the 1960s due to political disagreements—to offer a vision of the future of film whose full scope still hasn’t been realized today.