Video Films by Wolf Vostell

1963  Sun in your head 

Sun in your head, 1963. 7 min. b/w by Wolf Vostell

Camera: Edo Hansen

This is the earliest film montage in art history. By being the first artist to use broadcast moving pictures, Wolf Vostell demonstrated the potential of this medium as an aesthetic language, long before videotapes were made generally accessible. Working in collaboration with cameraman Edo Hansen, Wolf Vostell recorded excerpts of various television broadcasts. Since there were only a few channels and programs to choose from, sampling took several weeks.
The footage includes sequences of images of John F. Kennedy, a military parade, several news hostesses and politicians greeting each other, among other; while titles such as Magazin der Woche and Deutsches Fernsehen are intercalated, indicating the sources from which the sequences were taken. The images look deformed and blurry, broken and overlapped. The last three minutes of the film depict a flying bomber and its pilot maintaining contact with ground control.

The film was first shown as part of the Vostell Happening "9 N0 Dé-coll/agen", which was held in different locations in Wuppertal (Germany) on November 14, 1963. It was officially launched independently on January 11, 1964, at the Leidse Plan Theater in Amsterdam and is considered a forerunner of Video Art. Alongside the screening, the viewing public carried out various actions.

Text by Josefa Cortés Morillo, director of the Wolf Vostell Archive at the Museum Vostell Malpartida.
Text published at the catalogue VOSTELL - Stills, which is the catalogue raisonné of the WOLF VOSTELL VIDEO FILMS 1963-1994.
Edited by Rooster Gallery New York, 2016

© THE WOLF VOSTELL ESTATE, 1963/2021

No video may be shown in public without written permission of the copyright holder.

© THE WOLF VOSTELL ESTATE, 2021.