Dark Star – HR Gigers Welt Dark Star – HR Giger’s World

Switzerland, 2014, DCP, 1.78, colour/b&w, 95′
14.4. | 18:00 | Slovenian Cinematheque

directed by Belinda Sallin cinematography Eric Stitzel music Peter Scherer editing Birgit Munsch-Klein featuring H. R. Giger, Carmen Maria Giger, Stanislav Grof, Hans H. Kunz, Leslie Barany, Paul Tobler, Tom Gabriel Fischer, Carmen Scheifele de Vega, Mia Bonzanigo, Andreas J. Hirsch, Marco Witzig, Sandra Beretta, Müggi III

Hommage to H. R. Giger is organized with the support of the Embassy of Switzerland in Slovenia.

Documentary filmmaker Belinda Sallin accompanies the renowned Swiss artist during the final year of his life. “Hans Ruedi” H. R. Giger (1940-2014) was a painter, sculptor, designer and filmmaker, creator of a unique mixture of surrealism, fantastic imagery and pop culture, of carnal physicality, ice-cold mechanics and mystical transcendence. Charting our nightmares, mapping our primal fears, and above all exposing the danger and threat which humanity poses to itself and its habitat, Giger gazed into the darkest abysses – not because he held them dear, but because it was “the only way this amiable, modest and humorous man was able to keep his fears in check.” Giger’s apocalyptic messages stand in stark contradiction to our time’s megalomaniacal fantasies of progress. His biomechanoid monsters are X-ray images of our human selves.

A precious documentary portrait, the last and most intimate encounter with grim visionary H. R. Giger – author of the Oscar-winning visual design for Ridely Scott’s Alien and Jodorowsky’s Dune, the greatest cult film never made – takes us into the artist’s home, a magical cavern and a parallel world, filled to the brim with iconic images of Giger’s biomechanics.

“Those who fear my paintings, haven’t grasped reality.”
– H. R. Giger

“Over his life, H.R. Giger dreamed some fearsome dreams. Teeth, female faces, and fetuses. Tubular forms that could be snakes, birth canals, or phalluses. All imagined in a monochromatic future devoid of color. ‘Waking up can be a bitter experience,’ Giger says as a young artist in the 1970s, in Dark Star – HR Giger’s World, Belinda Sallin’s gentle and competent documentary about the life and art of this influential Swiss artist. Especially, if ‘you haven’t finished dreaming yet.’”
– Ethan Gilsdorf, The Boston Globe

“Giger has become the official portrait photographer for the Golden Age of Biology. Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us because of its enormous evolutionary time-span. It shows us all too clearly, where we came from and where we are going. He reaches into our biological memories. He takes baby pictures of us eight months before we were born. Gynaecological landscapes. Intrauterine postcards. Giger goes even further back, probably into the nucleus of our cells. … Like Hieronymus Bosch, like Peter Brueghel, Giger mercilessly shows us the anabolism and catabolism of our realities. In these paintings we see ourselves as crawling embryos, as fetal larval creatures protected by the membranes of our egos waiting for the moment of our metamorphosis and new birth. We see our cities, our civilizations as insect hives, ant colonies peopled by crawling creatures. Us. Giger gives us courage to say ‘hello’ to our insectoid selves.”
– Timothy Leary