Provocation – Sex – Rhythm – Music – Polarisition – Joy – Frame – Pixel – Found Footage.
Thomas Draschan creates rhythm. A rhythm that is planned and gauged down to the smallest detail. Draschan is a collector and creator thrown into one. He collects film frames, be they educational films, didactical treatises, scenes from old films, excerpts and snippets. The urge to own pictures evolves into the art of recoding them.
Of the people whom he studied, who fascinated him, who guided or inspired him, whom he worked with, three persons who appear again and again in talks or essays by him stand out in particular: Peter Kubelka, Ulrich Wiesner and Sebastian Brameshuber.
The film work begins with Peter Kubelka (and Ken Jacobs) at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, where his first films like Franziska are made in his student years, and is continued in the development of some of his most famous films (like Metropolen des Leichtsinns and Yes? Oui? Ja?) together with Wiesner. He finally throws himself into the digital world with Sebastian Brameshuber – as the Duo Fordbrothers. It is collages, “pixel-paintings” and exactly timed music videos that distinguish Thomas Draschan’s newer works.
1998 he completed the master class in film with Kubelka and began to curate and organise film exhibitions at the Städel Museum. Furthermore the Frankfurt Sammlung was founded – films by Kubelka pupils, collected, restored and copied by Draschan. The last missing films are by Ulrich Wiesner who, at the time, was trying to make it as a painter. Draschan saw Afrika Bonus for the first time, a parody of Kubelka’s Afrikareise, and Germany Lacht on VHS tapes and henceforth worked with Wiesner, reprocessing his material. They soon ran out of films and started buying footage online to collect and edit.
Though Metropolen des Leichtsinns was initially rejected by the Austrian public, it was shown the world over at festivals and awarded various prizes. By now the twelve minute whirlwind trip through sense and senselessness from the beginning to the end of life is hailed as a modern classic of found-footage films, however the relationship with the native film institutions remained fraught. Wiesner did not live to see the result of the next joint film projects – Yes? Oui? Ja? turned out to be a far more existential work than had originally been planned. Since 2004 Draschan has once again spent more time in Vienna, perfecting his work with rhythm and montage. Films like To the Happy Few or Freude are pop-cultural tempests of images, a visual delight that positively explodes on the screen. At the same time he and Brameshuber advance into the digital space, deconstructing well known worlds of images, uncovering breaks and cracks of new media and leaves his personal mark in these gaps. He uses artefacts and mistakes to disenchant the digital cult.
The FAZ once wrote that Draschan’s works were „small works of film art whose titles act as mottos and whose theme is not just life but also the perception of it and its transformation in the art of film”. Also music videos (e.g. for New Order) and documentaries are to be found among the work of this artist, who has recently been rediscovered again by the art world. His work is noted at international exhibitions and his films are acclaimed at festivals like the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen or in Rotterdam.
Today Thomas Draschan lives and works in Vienna where he is reviving the local art-scene with the “Apartment Draschan”, among other projects.
Text: VIS / Wiktoria Pelzer, translation: Angharad Gabriel - 2010.