How Long Is “Vintage Print”?

Like a Santiago Álvarez squared (or multiplied by 4K, to be more precise), Siegfried A. Fruhauf –a descendant of Austria’s Great Generation of Tscherkassky, Deutsch and Arnold– rede- fines with Vintage Print the power of film as imagination, at the service of an amazing economy of resources. If the pioneer of Cuban montage cinema became immortal when he left us his phrase “give me two photographs, a moviola, and some music, and I’ll make you a film,” Fruhauf slims down that recipe by cre- ating thirteen hyperkinetic minutes out of a single, century-old glass negative in decomposition. Ranging from figurative to ab- stract art, analogy to digital, and documentary to experimental, Vintage Print’s definitive achievement is that it reverses a road movie in its own terms, and the first thing that is left behind is the very same notion of cinema.