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Wolf Vostell «Starfighter»
Wolf Vostell, «Starfighter», 1967
©


 Wolf Vostell
«Starfighter»

Jet airplanes had already figured prominently in Vostell’s tongue-twistingly titled happening 'In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum' ('In, Around, and Round About Ulm'). In one part ('The Airfield as Concert Hall'), the audience was exhorted to 'admire the airplane' while the pilots ran the jet engines at different speeds for a full ten minutes. The videotape shows the US Airforce's Starfighter jet – notorious for its frequent crashes – in distorted and dissolving images that are looped in an endlessly repetitive cycle. Vostell explained: 'My films are psychological units of experience and learning processes in which boredom, delays, repetitions and distortions are analogies to processes going on in the world about us.'