1968
5 min. 27 sec., b/w and color, silent
Premiere: Hamburger Filmschau, February 16-18th, 1968.

Digital restoration in 2015.

Safety Film consists of a Hollywood Western shot directly off a movie screen and restored to its raw form – an act that strips the film of its narrative, reduces its size and drains all color from the CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color Western. Scheugl’s method is penetration: He focuses on details, filling the screen with faces and facial features, textures of rock, the flanks of horses – with mouths, eyes and congregations of people way too close and out of focus (plus silent) to „narrate“ anything.

The flickering, grainy, black-and-white material of the film is intercut with extremely short positive and negative shots of a Viennese movie house facade, conveying the impression of a document: The interior (the Western) is set against the exterior (the movie house) – the inner and the outer logic of the machine of cinema.
Stefan Grissemann, 2012.

Distribution: sixpackfilm, Vienna (DCP); Light Cone, Paris (16mm).