Being and Nothingness
Das Sein und das Nichts
L'être et le Néant

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  Reviews  
     
 

"Being and Nothingness" transforms a piece of music into a visual and examines the role of humans in this performance of sound and light. After a prologue in which composer and conductor Beat Furrer is shown obtaining and arranging a score by Schumann, its performance is the film's actual theme: As the notes pass through the picture, the musicians of the Klangforum Wien ensemble appear and disappear according to their acoustic contribution. The result is a choreography of sound, and the music's transience and vastness is turned into a ballet of bodies which, somewhere between presence and absence, commemorates the instability of being as a dialectic micro-spectacle.
Enjoyment of the music produces optical ghosts which — resembling the heads of musical notes — scurry across the picture, adding rhythm to the composition visually. As the musical texture thins out during the finale, the visual elements become increasingly fragmentary: a twitching at the edge of perception, a nervous optical irritation which partially settles into the subconscious. At the conclusion the conductor, who had previously entered the pandemonium of sounds as a deus ex machina, gratefully accepts the applause in a white cube. A white square on a white background, a complete defusing of the grand story, and the nadir in the production of sound. Being-in-itself, wrote Sartre, is unchanging, undifferentiated pure being, simply the fullness of being without any sort of negation. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Thomas Miessgang

  
     
     
  What you see is what you hear in filmmaker Bady Minck's visual treatment of an original composition by Beat Furrer. As the conductor masterfully tames time and commands silence, the dominance of music over the body is skillfully illustrated while the music becomes a living picture.  
  Jason Buchanan, New York Times  
     
     
  Some very special treats await lovers of experimental films at this year's BIFF. Two eagerly anticipated titles, Bady Minck's "Being and Nothingness" and Guy Maddin's "Brand Upon the Brain!", from established artist-filmmakers are among the highlights.
Those who remember Bady Minck's incredible "In the Beginning was the Eye" will be overjoyed to hear of her latest outing. Like many in the avant-garde cinema, Minck brings a visual artist's eye to the meticulous composition of her mixed-media films, with the result that her mesmeric animations fully deserve the mantle of "fine-art film". "Being and Nothingness" continues her interest in inventive visual storytelling by extending her feeling for intense visual rhythms into the musical realm.
Minck's work is the latest in a long line of visual music experiments that visualise fantastic journeys into musical scores, providing delight to the ears, as well as eyes. The sinuous pleasures of synaesthesia - the blending of the senses so that one "hears" images and "sees" sound - as well as Minck's characteristic cheeky approach, lie in store for audiences with a penchant for experimental art.		  
  Danni Zuvela  
     
     
 
"Being and Nothingness" visualizes a fantastic journey into a musical score. The musicians appear and disappear in the same way as the notes and sounds. Bady Minck has given music a virtual space — and the main scene possibly plays out in the mind of the conductor and composer, who obliterates the musicians by means of a hand gesture.
Martin Pieper
  
     
     
  A daytime exterior, a street, an antique shop, a book opens and reveals a musical score, the Novelette n° 8 opus 21 by Schumann. The composer and conductor Beat Furrer is the buyer and soon-to-be arranger of this score. "Being and Nothingness" offers a variation on the text by Jean-Paul Sartre as underlined by the musical titel given by Beat Furrer: Ein Lied, das über das Ende des Liedes hinaus ein anderes Ende finden wollte — a song that aimed to find another ending beyond the end of the song.  
  Catalogue FID Marseille  
     
     
 

An orchestra conducted by Beat Furrer performs a score by Schumann. In turn the filmmaker plays with images instead of notes, making the musicians appear and disappear according to their participation. Visual score or chamber film, the performance is playful as much as enlightening — which is not bad at all when what is called into question is being and nothingness!

  
  Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal  
     
     
     
  Synopsis  
     
 

"Being and Nothingness" works with a piece by Beat Furrer to make the parameters of the generation of music visible. Music is poured into pictures: What you see is what you hear.

The individual musicians appear only in the extremely brief moments in which they play, with their bodies representing notes on a visualised score. The film illustrates the dominance of music over the body, its presence and its disappearance. Conductor Beat Furrer acts as the tamer of time and the master of silence.

For the film & music project Free Radicals, Bady Minck realises the two short films "Being and Nothingness" and Seems To Be together with Klangforum Wien. The principal performers of both films are the musicians of Klangforum Wien together with composer and conductor Beat Furrer.

  
     
     
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