Biography of Matthias Müller
Few artists working today could be said to have had a greater impact on European experimental film than Matthias Müller. As a filmmaker and artist much of Müller’s work focuses on the inadequacies of memory, questioning its imperfections as a tool of recollection.
Matthias Müller’s films resonate with insights into his own identity, combining new fictional strands with autobiographical elements. Often in his films what is missing or what is left out is most significant, as though he is exploiting what is unsaid to provoke uncertainty in the viewer. Müller’s use of found footage—film from archived, forgotten, or privately owned films—emphasizes the main concern he has for his work, to make “a curious echo more vibrant than the sound that produced it”.
Born in Bielefeld, West Germany in 1961, Matthias Müller established himself with a series of cutting-edge films on Super-8, the preferred medium used by Germany’s post-punk wave of underground filmmakers. Since 1999 Müller has been working in collaboration with Christoph Girardet, with whom he won the Prix Canal+ du meilleur court métrage at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. Alongside Girardet he won the German Short Film Prize for Animation in 2006. In 1990, 1997, and 2000 Müller was awarded the prestigious Preis der deutschen Filmkritik.
