Gustav Deutsch is a maestro of found footage filmmaking. In this enterprise, he travels to film archives worldwide, researches, and excavates clips from obscure films, and reassembles them into montage sequences that create compelling visual narratives organized around larger thematic concerns. Two of his films have previously shown at the Tribeca Film Festival: FILM IST. 7-12 (2003), which addresses questions of magic, the circus, and the fantasy aspect of cinema traced back to Georges Méliès, and World Mirror Cinema (2005), which focuses on movie theaters and the entertainment culture.

In FILM IST. a girl & a gun, the director weaves together a stunning array of color-tinted images from a variety of genres, including scientific, erotic, fiction, and actuality films. Deutsch also obtained privileged access to the film archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, enabling him to incorporate sequences from especially rare erotic and sex films into his latest oeuvre. Deutsch adroitly assembles a precisely constructed, mesmerizing ebb and flow of images into extraordinary montage sequences divided into five acts: Genesis, Paradeisos, Eros, Thanatos, and Symposion.

Within this narrative construction, the director creates a stunning vision of the natural and mythological order of the universe, love between the sexes, and weapons of mass destruction. These unique images are complemented by a dramatic music track, alternating between both haunting and romantic melodies. Opening the film with an arresting side view of Annie Oakley shooting her gun at the target, and ending with the iconic, startling shot of the cowboy in The Great Train Robbery aiming his gun at the audience, Deutsch implicates the spectator in the eternal cycle of life and death, so brilliantly and uniquely articulated during 90 minutes of cinematic construction. Recommended for adults only.

Directed by

Gustav Deutsch and Gustav Deutsch