Matthias Müller(I)
- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Matthias Müller was born in Bielefeld, West Germany on March 29, 1961.
He first became interested in filmmaking while he was a student in Arts
and German Literature at Bielefeld University in the 1980s. In 1985
Müller co-founded the Alte Kinder Film Collective with friends
Christiane Heuwinkel and Maja-Lene Rettig. The members of Alte Kinder
collectively produced and distributed a series of cutting edge films on
Super-8, the film gauge preferred by Germany's post-punk wave of
underground filmmakers. Müller first gained international attention
with the release of his 1989 film, Aus Der Ferne, a meditation on loss
and mourning. Müller's next film, Home Stories (1990), used a mesmerizing montage
of shots from technicolor melodramas of the 1950s and 60s to comment on
Hollywood conventions. The film went on to win numerous awards and to
establish Müller's international reputation as an important new star of
the film and art worlds. Since then, Müller has continued to create
some of the most stunning works to come out of the avant garde in
years. Vacancy (1999), a nostalgic glance into the past, examines the hopes
and dreams of a post-World War II, pre-Kennedy assassination world. The
film's flickering cuts between 1961 and the present are a heartbreaking
reminder of promises left unfulfilled. In 1999, Müller and collaborator
Christoph Girardet were commissioned to create a series of works based on the
films of Alfred Hitchcock for the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. The result,
Phoenix Tapes (2000), is an entertaining study of the themes and techniques of the
master of suspense. Müller's short film, Breeze (2000), was used as an
advertisement for the Vienna International Film Festival.
