Norbert Meissner
«Filmfax»

In times of accelerated communication and busy schedules, «Filmfax» offers passing visitors an ideal crash-course in film history. A converted photo-cabin, now an interactive film-booth, serves up a computer-controlled menu of film classics, condensed to 5 x 2 minutes, in various genres: «King Kong,» «High Noon,» «The Third Man,» «The Road to Paradise» and (of course) «Casablanca» . Accompanied by a non-stop soundtrack, the familiar scenes rush past. Through subtle intervention, however, Meissner makes the memorable scenes jut out, buoy-like, from the stream of images. Long before digital compression» s march to victory, «Filmfax» provided evidence of the reducibility of classical film narrative working with identifiable patterns. Operating within a whole tradition of «found footage,» Meissner had already re-edited «The Third Man» in 1987 to create an entertaining forerunner to his piece of 1994.