Labyrinthine2010

In Labyrinthine (2010) Biermann takes forty-one shots of memorable and iconographic moments in Hitchcock's classic Vertigo (1958). The shots are superimposed on top of each other creating a hypnotic labyrinth of repetitions and transformations. The different moments overlap in a kind of contra-punctual proliferation lasting 15 minutes. Ultimately, a labyrinth of movements appears both within the image (the image within the image) and between the images (the changing relationship between the images within the image). Continuity editing is replaced by a discontinuous and labyrinthine editing, and the screen doesn't show one image at a time, but several.... The images have a stuttering and discontinuous logic which arrests and focuses on perceptual phenomena which slips away when seeing the film. Biermann opens these intervals of the imperceptible and enlarges them and turns them into art form of its own. It is as if he uses the technologically enhanced object quality of the images to explore the optical unconscious by means not envisioned by Walter Benjamin. –Eivind Rossaak, Algorithmic Culture, or the New Multiplicity of the Image, Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam University Press, 2011) In Labyrinthine Biermann transforms Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) ...using digital imaging technology to restage the film as an architectural work, something constructed within a spatially enclosed whole. – Martin Rumsby, Millennium Film Journal No. 56