News Archiv
Sun, 03. November 2019
Gustav Deutsch, 1952 – 2019
The Austrian Film Museum and sixpackfilm are deeply saddened by the death of our beloved friend and artistic collaborator Gustav Deutsch. Gustav passed away on 2 November after a short, grave illness.
In Gustav we lose an outstanding artist whose work constantly transcended the boundaries between the disciplines. Born and raised in Vienna Gustav Deutsch studied architecture and from the late 1970s worked with video. His interest in experimental documentary film and participative artistic practice soon led to him becoming a member of the Medienwerkstatt Wien video collective.
In the 1980s his work with artist and lifelong companion Hanna Schimek commenced. Their artistic research projects, carried out across a variety of social, geographic and artistic domains, continued until just before Gustav’s death.
The work with "Found Footage" – found, recovered and re-contextualised archival and historic film material – was central to Gustav Deutsch's work. With the trilogy FILM IST, which dealt with the phenomenology of the medium film, he achieved international recognition. His work has received numerous awards, including the Austrian Award for Film Art in 1999. He and Hanna Schimek were awarded the Austrian Film Award 2014 for the set design of his feature film Shirley – Visions of Reality, which premiered at the Berlinale 2013.
In his last feature-length film How We Live – Messages to the Family (2017) he brought the beauty of amateur films onto the big screen. But Gustav was more than an artist: a wonderful and engaging teacher and mediator of his work with archive material he conducted countless workshops, and master classes. The excellence of his work led to numerous festival and cinematheque invitations, most recently the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (2019), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2018), the Festival of New Cinema in Montreal (2017), the Archivio Aperto Festival in Bologna (2017) and the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea (2018).
Up until very recently Gustav and Hanna Schimek worked with the team of the Austrian Film Museum on an artistic outreach project in Vienna, am rand : die stadt (on the margins : the city), which focused on private films of Vienna’s suburbs. Gustav Deutsch was no longer to witness the completion of this project in mid-November.
We mourn the loss of a great artist, collaborator and partner who entrusted our institutions with the preservation and distribution of his filmic oeuvre. But even more than that we mourn the loss of a close friend. Gustav was an inspiration to us all: he firmly believed that aesthetic excellence can be reconciled with an uncompromising commitment to the social impact of art. Above all, he was a kind and generous human being.
We miss Gustav Deutsch painfully and our deepest condolences go to his companion in art and in life, Hanna Schimek.
November 3, 2019
In Gustav we lose an outstanding artist whose work constantly transcended the boundaries between the disciplines. Born and raised in Vienna Gustav Deutsch studied architecture and from the late 1970s worked with video. His interest in experimental documentary film and participative artistic practice soon led to him becoming a member of the Medienwerkstatt Wien video collective.
In the 1980s his work with artist and lifelong companion Hanna Schimek commenced. Their artistic research projects, carried out across a variety of social, geographic and artistic domains, continued until just before Gustav’s death.
The work with "Found Footage" – found, recovered and re-contextualised archival and historic film material – was central to Gustav Deutsch's work. With the trilogy FILM IST, which dealt with the phenomenology of the medium film, he achieved international recognition. His work has received numerous awards, including the Austrian Award for Film Art in 1999. He and Hanna Schimek were awarded the Austrian Film Award 2014 for the set design of his feature film Shirley – Visions of Reality, which premiered at the Berlinale 2013.
In his last feature-length film How We Live – Messages to the Family (2017) he brought the beauty of amateur films onto the big screen. But Gustav was more than an artist: a wonderful and engaging teacher and mediator of his work with archive material he conducted countless workshops, and master classes. The excellence of his work led to numerous festival and cinematheque invitations, most recently the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (2019), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2018), the Festival of New Cinema in Montreal (2017), the Archivio Aperto Festival in Bologna (2017) and the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea (2018).
Up until very recently Gustav and Hanna Schimek worked with the team of the Austrian Film Museum on an artistic outreach project in Vienna, am rand : die stadt (on the margins : the city), which focused on private films of Vienna’s suburbs. Gustav Deutsch was no longer to witness the completion of this project in mid-November.
We mourn the loss of a great artist, collaborator and partner who entrusted our institutions with the preservation and distribution of his filmic oeuvre. But even more than that we mourn the loss of a close friend. Gustav was an inspiration to us all: he firmly believed that aesthetic excellence can be reconciled with an uncompromising commitment to the social impact of art. Above all, he was a kind and generous human being.
We miss Gustav Deutsch painfully and our deepest condolences go to his companion in art and in life, Hanna Schimek.
November 3, 2019
If you would like to share your thoughts and memories of Gustav Deutsch, you can do so via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or send your thoughts to kontakt@filmmuseum.at.
On our website, we have set up a special page where a number of submissions will be posted: www.filmmuseum.at/in_erinnerung_an_gustav_deutsch. We hope that in some small way these stories will help us all deal with the tragic loss of Gustav Deutsch.
