The Light of the World

Klaus Wyborny’s STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDS had its premiere at the Viennale in 2010, where it got rave reviews. Afterwards it was shown at several film festivals where Wyborny documented the cinema situations with a video camera. Out of that he made DAS LICHT DER WELT. In a letter to Harun Farocki he wrote about the result: “It’s a strange 86-minute film, partly in the form of a superimposition of seven image-layers. It has the same music (played sevenfold) and the same light-structure as STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST, but it takes place in seven different locations simultaneously, in front of competely different audiences. So one can see how the film was brought to the DAS LICHT DER WELT, and how the observed viewers are in some sense illuminated by the very light, that exposed my original films between 1979 and 1993. Quite a haunting prospect.”