Filmoteka Muzeum

What the Fuck Is This (1986) is one of the first works by Marcelo Zammenhoff, created at the age of sixteen, before moving to Łódź from Ciechocinek. The artist comments: “What the Fuck Is This? is my first and the longest independent experiment with the camera and 8 mm film stock. It is an abstract and intuitive cluster of more or less random, associatively edited shots, an auteur found-footage piece. I started playing with film around the age of sixteen, when I also began experimenting with sound and music. This led to the idea of producing a filmic illustration, a quasi-music video to a 20-minute soundtrack composed by myself – a collage of bizarrely processed sounds and beats from an 8-bit Amstrad computer from the mid-1980s. There was obviously no synchronisation, so the sound had to be started manually. The film was hand-edited, and the number of takes and frames was calculated using mathematical and random-selection methods. Hindsight shows that the expressive productions created in the provincial Polish town of Ciechocinek resembled the cinema of New York’s Richard Kern from the very same period.”

(ND)