This is the virtual home of Thorsten Fleisch.
Born in Koblenz, Germany in 1972 he began experimenting with super 8 film while still at highschool where he also exhibited his first film, a super 8 loop (see below).
After highschool and community service in an institution for the mentally ill he went to Marburg to study art, music and media at Phillips Universität. One year later he changed to the Städelschule in Frankfurt in order to study film with Peter Kubelka. There he started working with 16mm film.
Shortly after his studies at the Städelschule he made ‘Blutrausch / Bloodlust’ which not only got him a lot of attention but also the Ann Arbor Filmcoop Award.
Since 2001 Thorsten Fleisch is a member of the Board of Artistic Directors of The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (or TIE).
He received several grants among them a grant from the Filmbüro NW and a grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema.
For ‘Gestalt’ he received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica the number one festival for computer related art.
His film ‘Energie!’ was screened at more than 150 festivals and received numerous awards.
His films have been screened at film festivals worldwide including New York Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Int. Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Melbourne Int. Film Festival and many more.
He worked for Gaspar Noé’s film ‘Enter The Void‘ and made visuals for Basement Jaxx‘s live tour in 2009. He has also worked for the TV series ‘Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman‘ on the Science Channel in 2011. For the Samsung Smartfilm Award in 2014 he was the mentor for the experimental film category.
In 2015 he released his first video game ‘Teslapunk’ for Nintendo Wii-U & Microsoft X-Box One.
He lives and works in Berlin.
His films are distributed by Light Cone [France] and Arsenal Experimental [Germany].
Some opinions on his films:
…directly related to themes of life and death, and the possibilities of staging corporeality through cinematic materiality, are the works of the German filmmaker Thorsten Fleisch.
[Kim Knowles ‘Blood, sweat and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film‘]
…Blutrausch (1998) is real-life cyborg cinema, a deliberate marriage of the apparatus and blood that stands as the most elemental form of self-portraiture, albeit one that shows the inside of its subject rather than the outside.
[Gregory Zinman ‘Making Images Move‘ University of California Press]
… Friendly Fire (2003) literally burned what you could see, and it was the light of the fire, the projector’s beam, that played out in stunning violence onscreen. With so much attention dedicated to the preservation of film, Friendly Fire proposed a cathartic alternative: ruined figures of melted celluloid and crackling ash. In death film comes alive, more vital, reborn by the very forces that destroy it.
[Genevieve Yue ‘Senses of Cinema‘]
… this beautifully crafted and shaped film is an exhilerating piece of visual music. The images speak poetically of a merging of technology, projected light, and the human body. The extreme close-ups remind us of the fragility and beauty which covers our bodies.
[David Finkelstein ‘Film Threat‘ on ‘Hautnah’]
… everyone in the jury did agree that gestalt displayed a spectacular use of fractal set techniques. Fleisch shows exceptional deftness in assembling a series of algorithmic transformations that are beautiful and really visually interesting.
[Jury of the Prix Ars Electronica 2003 on ‘Gestalt’]
… other works highlight the paradoxical relationship between movement and stillness at the heart of cinema. Thorsten Fleisch’s sculptural Dromosphere uses a device built by the filmmaker to convert a toy car into a vibrating orange blur – celebrating and mocking the need for speed.
[Jake Wilson ‘The Age‘ on ‘Dromosphäre’]
