59th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Juror Presentation: Thorsten Fleisch - Sensual Destruction: Disintegrating the Frantic Silence of the Universe

Expired April 1, 2021 4:00 AM
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After the initial live event, the program will be available for on-demand viewing until 12am midnight EDT on 3/31


A cinematic journey and investigation into materials, surfaces, perception, and higher states of consciousness. With childlike curiosity and wonder, source materials like high voltage, skin, blood, crystals, and the camera itself are picked apart and recontextualized. Thorsten Fleisch creates hypnotic films that comfortably walk a fine line between pure abstraction, destruction, suggestion, and observation.


Thorsten Fleisch was born in 1972 in Koblenz, Germany. He made his first film experiments with his dad’s Super 8 camera while still in school. He studied experimental film with Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and works with digital and analog film. With materials such as the body, crystals, fire, and electricity, he has worked directly on 16mm filmstrips. Crystals are grown on the film and 30,000 volts burn through photo paper. The results are poetic and abstract visual systems with references to catharsis, the cosmos, and the universe. In 2003 Fleisch received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz (Austria) for his computer-animated film Gestalt. High voltage is the center of his work Energie!, for which he has won international acclaim. He created commissioned work for Gaspar Noé, Red Bull, and Basement Jaxx, among others. His films have received several awards, showing at festivals worldwide including New York Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and San Francisco International Film Festival. He lives and works in Berlin.

For Energie!, an uncontrolled high voltage discharge of 30,000 volts exposes multiple sheets of photographic paper, which are then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization.

  • Year
    2007
  • Runtime
    5 minutes
  • Country
    Germany
  • Note
    Berlin, Germany