Wilhelm Hein (1940-2025)
“Here’s a long way to get rid of everything that prevents you from reaching your artistic goal, to make films like walking, jumping, sleeping, breathing – all the most natural things in the world. The ideas, pictures, movements, film cuts, everything works by itself. Nobody can stop you from going back to the most naive state after all these detours, pains, agonies, feelings of guilt, self-destructions, self-censorship, and so on. But all these detours were necessary to reach, at the end, the basis of pure artistic creation. If it works, there is no way back again.”
– Wilhelm Hein, Berlin, 7/04/2004
An influential German artist and filmmaker, deeply connected to him, quite recently shared with me that when Wilhelm Hein finished his magnum opus in 2002 and named it You Killed the Underground Film or the Real Meaning of Kunst Bleibt… Bleibt..., it caused a stir within the community, as many began to wonder, “Could he be referring to me?”
I first met Hein while he was completing his fourteen-hour tour de force. Back then, I was unaware of the stir he had caused. I knew very little about underground film and it never crossed my mind that I could have done anything to kill it. However, it took me years to realize that his message had taken root in me: we must do everything in our power to ensure we don’t ‘kill’ it.
His films, theories, and life conveyed that message in the most consistent and deliberate manner. When I say ‘his films’, I do not mean just his, like the instant avant-garde classic Roh Film, the Kali Film Series or Materiafilme, works that he co-created with Birgit Hein, his wife for almost thirty years. I refer also to the hundreds of films in his collection, incredible worlds of experimental cinema by Andy Warhol, Gregory Markopoulos, Man Ray, Kurt Kren, Dieter Roth, Nick Zedd or Tony Conrad, to name a few. An aluminium tapestry of 16 mm cans lined the walls of his Berlin apartment from the floor to the ceiling. These were ‘his films’ too. And he generously shared them, screening them in his flat and various other spaces until I too, like many others he taught, came to understand what the underground was.
His theories and teachings were never regurgitations of what the Avant-Garde had been in the past but instead explorations of what it could do in the present. Wilhelm Hein was an educator not of film but of film ethics. His own work, both the work he completed with Birgit and the one he made alone, demonstrate this.
The word ‘film’ appears in the majority of Hein’s titles and is equally central to the themes and content of the work. There was an ongoing struggle with the profound impact the medium of cinema had on shaping the world – evident in the material films of the early days, like Roh Film, the found footage works they later explored, such as Eternity and a Day, Charles Manson, or the Kali Films, and culminating in his masterpiece and magnum opus, You Killed The Underground Film.
Shot by him on 16 mm for almost ten years, completed in 2002 and rarely screened in its fourteen-hour entirety, this is an explosive and radical blend of film theory, history and unharnessed passion for cinema’s possibilities. As his friend and frequent collaborator Marc Siegel described back then, “a fascinating and challenging example of what it means to make politically relevant underground film in an increasingly rented world”.
If there is one theme that defines all films by Hein, it is cinema itself – specifically, how we can perceive it in new and unconventional ways. The term ‘Materialist Film’ falls short in capturing the scope and vision of the works created by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein between 1968 and 1974, even though they were included in Peter Gidal’s book of the same name. Their early body of work aligns more closely with the oeuvre of the Lettrists, like the early films of Guy Debord, such as Howls for Sade, although the Hein films developed to something more entertaining and undeniably sexier.
Wilhelm Hein was one of the proto-curators of the world’s avant-garde in Germany. In a period of tremendous mobilisation in all aspects of the arts, the Heins travelled a lot and interacted with the experimental cinema on both sides of the Atlantic. Through a series of publications, exhibitions, educational manifestoes, screenings and performances, they established an alternative hub for the international underground cinema and left a deep mark on the revival of the cinematic avant-garde in the late ’60s.
In that period Wilhelm published the album X-Screen and co-founded the eponymous movie theatre in Cologne, where in 1974 Jack Smith was invited to stage the performance that thirty years later would inspire Wilhelm with the title You Killed the Underground Film or the Real Meaning of Kunst Bleibt… Bleibt.... One can still get a glimpse of that in Birgit Hein’s Kino 74 film, which was broadcast on German state television at the time.
Many photographs featuring Jack Smith still adorned Hein’s walls thirty years later, alongside lobster artworks and quotes by the American maverick like “Everything should be free, and it can begin with Art”. To say that Jack Smith influenced Wilhelm Hein would be an understatement. Perhaps the elusive nature of Wilhelm Hein stems, in part, from the same ethos that connected him so deeply to Smith – a dedication to challenging traditional modes of film distribution and rental.
Well into his seventies and for decades before, Wilhelm travelled with his 16 mm Eiki projector to numerous alternative film events. Under the moniker ‘Fuck the Idiot Box’, he would present a reel or two of You Killed the Underground... alongside older films by himself and many others.
Throughout his life he would also paint and create collages. Together with his second partner and artistic companion for over thirty years, the esteemed photographer, artist and filmmaker Annette Frick, they organized film shows and exhibitions, eventually in their own gallery Casabaubou in the Wedding quarter of Berlin. Beginning in the early nineties and continuing for over twenty years, Annette and Wilhelm published the notebooks Jenseits Der Trampelfade Hefte, preserving many of his writings, drawings, and collages for posterity.
But this was never enough, Wilhelm Hein’s films have always been hard to access. Wilhelm’s final show at the Arsenal in Berlin in September 2024 hinted at his desire for the films to remain alive and relevant. It is difficult to imagine watching them without Wilhelm being there, behind the projector but it has to happen somehow. It is essential for new generations of filmmakers to engage with his ideas. Perhaps there could be a way back again.
Images: © Annette Frick
