Michael Brynntrup

Michael Brynntrup is a German experimental filmmaker and media artist living in Berlin. Besides experimental films and video installations, his better-known works also include electrography, digital art and internet art projects. Since 2006 he has been Professor for Film/Video at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. On his website, Brynntrup summarizes his biography as: “Identical twin brother stillborn. Since then studies in Philosophy.” This mini-biography is characteristic of his artistic concerns: death, birth, doppelgängers and repetition are all motifs that can be found in almost every one of his films, and always with philosophical undertones. At the start of his film SUDDEN AND UNEXPECTED – A Déjà-Revue (1993), he highlights this with a quote from Michel de Montaigne: “To ponder death is to ponder freedom. Those who have learned to die no longer know to serve.” Freedom and its limits are a constant theme of Brynntrup’s works, in terms of both content and form. In his films, he deals with transgressions, extremes and taboos; as an experimental filmmaker, he explores (among other things) society’s media reality (such as in the film E.C.G. Expositus, 2003), and strives to develop a filmic language that goes far beyond technical limits, commonly accepted ways of seeing and cinematic conventions.Michael Brynntrup (aka Brinntrup, Bryntrup) comes from a long-established Westphalian farming family near Münster, Germany, where he also studied law, before changing to philosophy. In 1981, he moved to Freiburg to study literature and art history. He formulated his theoretical analysis of contemporary art in a 1981 essay entitled Eine Vorstudie zum Schlusspkt. (A Preliminary Study on the End Pt.).