Films — Jürgen Nefzger

HEY-A-A-HEY

2019

After a first meeting in the Lejuc woods, Jürgen Nefzger stayed with Frank to continue the conversation with a discreet but emblematic figure in the history of activism. His life story unfolds in fragments, in the intimacy of everyday life, linking collective commitment to a personal path marked by great integrity. The final scene gives voice to the deep bond between Frank and the forest, seen here not as a place of conflict but of fulfilment and dialogue.

The Eye of the Bull

2017

In The Eye of the Bull, New York appears in the morning light, windows glinting in the sun, buildings reaching for the sky. A strange feeling emerges, for the city that never sleeps has suddenly been emptied of all its inhabitants. Only pigeons, traffic lights, steam rising from manholes and clouds bring these images to life, as if they showed “the day after”. They recall Hollywood disaster movies, with one difference: here there is no distance in time, no futuristic anticipation; everything filmed, the objects, the cars, shares our own present. Some places, the Wall Street district with its Charging Bull or the Trump Building, emblems of triumphant finance and now of the uncertainty that American governance casts over the state of the world, seem to hold the keys to the second part of the film, set in Spain. Another territory, another context, the same human desertion. There, weeds grow (back) amid unfinished housing estates. In a wind farm, the blades and their ticking sound seem to mark a time that is now running out. The film ends on the figure of the bull, the same animal as in New York but carrying a different symbolic charge, while the excerpt from The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes highlights the idea of naivety, or even, to push it a little, of stupidity. Stupidity indeed knows no limit, except the one we agree to set in order to avoid the Holzwege, the wrong path humankind has taken, for to the economic crisis is added our failure to protect the environment.

The Cloud Machine

2016

“With The Cloud Machine, he presents a film made inside a large incineration plant. The plant sheds light on his purpose, with this notion of recycling, of the cycle in which contemporary societies are caught. Beyond the smoke released by the plant, there is the idea of an unchanging loop driven by a consumerist logic that carries people to shopping centres to buy products inevitably destined for destruction. The conclusion follows: in the end, nothing changes, whatever happens. The crisis — what crisis?”

Excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition Crisis? What Crisis? by Olivier Lecine, director of the Musée de la Photographie, Mougins

Das Wasser des Lebens

2014

My mother died on July 10th 2013. Being her only child, I came back to Germany, spending the last days with her alone at home where she passed away quietly in her bed on an early summer morning. She was 84 years old. I started to record things the day of her death. The still lives are the last memories of a home where I grew up and which I left a very long time ago before moving to France in 1990. Nothing in the house has really changed since then except that my parents are not here any more. Throughout the following summer, I emptied the house, keeping what I could and giving or throwing away almost everything. Before and while doing that, I felt the need to record and conserve as many fragments of what was left behind. From room to room, the film turns into a portrait of my mother and a reflection on the feeling of loss materialised by light, dust and time itself. Later on, when the house stood empty, I asked Heymo, a friend of mine from kindergarten if he could come over and play on his saxophone in the living room, filling the space once again with music and life.

Valdecaballeros

2006

“From the morning mists to sunset, Valdecaballeros is a video projection that follows a whole day. It contains the story of a failure, that of a nuclear power station built in the Extremadura region of Spain between 1974 and 1984, one which never functioned. The closest village, where nature is struggling to recover, remains fixed on its defunct predator/benefactor, bewitched by it, and continues to undergo the consequences of its very dense presence. In these images marked by the conflictual relations between the environment and the dangerous excesses of productivity, innocence and perversion chase each other along, bifurcating and reflecting each other, erasing distinctions, but obstinately exposing and decrying a harmful reality. Jürgen Nefzger’s gaze is skilled at eliciting alternately enchantment and disorder, knowing in advance that effectiveness is to be found in the tireless movement between the two."