What happens in a cinema when you film it at a resolution of 10K with a 360° camera and then reverse the spatial and temporal axes? In a way never before shown, "tx-reverse" shows the collision of reality and cinema and draws its viewers into a vortex in which the familiar order of space and time is suspended.
It is not surprising that cinema-in-the-cinema scenes are often used in horror films. For they irritate and unsettle by reminding us – the immobile viewers hidden in the cosy darkness – of our own questionable position.
Back in the 1990s, Martin Reinhart invented a film technique called "tx-transform", which exchanges time (t) and space axis (x) in the film. Normally, each individual film frame represents the entire space, but only a brief moment of time (1/24 second). In the case of tx-transformed films, however, the opposite is true: each film frame shows the entire time, but only a tiny part of the space – in cuts along the horizontal spatial axis, the left part of the image thus becomes the "before", the right part the "after".
Twenty years after Martin Reinhart and Virgil Widrich used this film technique for the first time in a short film (tx-transform, 1998), they again deal with the question of which a previously unseen world arises when space and time are interchanged, aptly in a cinema and at full 360°: at the Babylon Kino in Berlin they filmed with the OmniCam-360 about 135 actors and calculated the installation tx-reverse 360° for the ZKM from this material.
Austria/Germany 2018, short film, DCP, colour, 1:2,39 / tx-reverse 360°: Austria/Germany 2019, installation in 360°, 10K
Length: 5 min. Click HERE for the Trailer Making of tx-reverse 360°
Concept and direction: Martin Reinhart, Virgil Widrich
OmniCam-360: Jana Pape, Danny Tatzelt, Christian Weissig
DOP: Martin Putz
Production Assistants: Elias Wolf, Moritz Woll
Organist: Anna Vavilkina
Sound: Bastian Orthmann
Set photos: Alexander Grennigloh
Programming: Matthias Strohmaier
Postproduction Consulting: Leo Coster
Postproduction: Bernhard Schlick
Music and sound design: Siegfried Friedrich
Cinema technology: Bernd Rohde
Production: Virgil Widrich Film- und Multimediaproduktions G.m.b.H., www.widrichfilm.com
Financed by Federal Chancellery Departement for the Arts, City of Vienna, Duerckheim Collection
Produced in cooperation with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
About the author: Virgil Widrich
Virgil Widrich, born 1967 in Salzburg, works on numerous multimedia and film productions. He is one of the founders and Managing Directors of the multimedia company checkpointmedia GmbH, University Professor of Art & Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and owner and Managing Director of Virgil Widrich Film- und Multimediaproduktions G.m.b.H.
His first feature film is "Heller als der Mond" ("Brighter than the Moon"). His short film "Copy Shop" won 38 international awards and was nominated for the Oscar. "Fast Film" premiered in Cannes 2003 and has won 36 awards until today. His most recent feature film is "Night of a 1000 Hours" (2016). In 2018 he directed his first music video "Nena & Dave Stewart: Be my Rebel". In total, his work has been awarded more than 150 international awards.
Virgil Widrich lives in Vienna.
