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Stefanie Schneider
A love song (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - Polaroid

2013

About the Item

A love song (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) (The Girl behind the White Picket Fence) - 2013 20x20cm, (ask about a larger sized edition) Edition of 10, Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory #13916. Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider's THE GIRL BEHIND THE WHITE PICKET FENCE

 Stefanie Schneider’s taken her artwork to film. With over 10 years in the international art world to support her, ‘The Girl behind the White Picket Fence’ is Schneider’s first feature film. A dedicated Polaroid fan since the mid 1990’s who mastered the analog medium to it’s final dying breath. Since Polaroid stopped making the best film in the world, it’s been Schneider’s goal to buy as much as she could find. Knowing that there will never be another chance to fulfill her lifelong dream to make a movie, using her own original artwork style. Schneider scoured the Internet for Polaroid film. Trucks deliver boxes upon boxes of expired Polaroid film. Testing the randomly working film takes days, turning to years. Years of buying film, script writing, prop production, actor contracts, all done in little bits. Shooting film in California and compiling in Berlin, Germany, back and forth with each season. This film is the result of a dream that started with friends she loved such a long time ago. It’s dedicated to them. They know who they are. 
An artists world of movie stills, ‘The Girl Behind the White Picket Fence’ is a succession of Polaroid film stills. One after another, this film takes this to the limit and still delivers. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, flowing with the rhythm of the music or in the energy the film portrays. The gaps keeps the viewer paying close attention but after a little time, you no longer notice. All photographs are real analog Polaroid film so this is a one off, never to be replicated, a complete window into an artists mind as she sees the world. Sunny, hot, in love, open spaces evoking freedom but also banishment. This project was that each actor would write their own story about love and Schneider would piece them together to make some sense of fate. Ultimately, this work is the vision of Stefanie Schneider. As with any dream, the finished result came about not as originally planned but it happened and will never happen again. This film is about old fashioned analog beauty, combining love, choices of life. It’s a film about searching, about truth and sometimes where that truth takes us. 
This film started out with a vision of grand collectiveness with all participants coming from Schneider’s time in Hollywood ranging from directors to actors, producers to agents and writers to weirdos. The American dream was alive and well in this motley group who fell in love with Schneider’s idea to capture a story about love on Polaroid film. Funding started with Schneider procuring film from all over the world, creating a interactive website for the artists to collaborate on together and collecting material for the script. Shooting locations were scouted and life size props built. Caroline Haertel from ‘micafilm’ based in Berlin Germany joined Schneider who then brought in Kirsten Niehaus from ‘Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg’ and Barbara Haebe from Arte TV in Germany. Both of whom have been very supportive. 
The concept began to take shape. The realization of how to actually make the film became apparent with each tested Polaroid first taken, scanned, and then finally sequenced to about 4000 frames from over 5,000 actual Polaroid photographs. Each requiring about 30 minutes of work. 
The center of this story is the ‘Lonely Hearts Radio Station’ DJ, played by Steve Marshall who talks to the searching broken hearted in the southern Californian desert. A sad young girl calls in to better understand what is going on which results in an unexpected chain of events. Through dreams, memories and even mystics, Heather finds that you never know with whom, love finds you. There are signs if you only listen. If only, you’re aware. 
Main characters: Hans, the mystic played by the veteran actor Udo Kier. Heather’s a young girl who’s lost her parents played by Heather Megan Christie Radio station DJ played by the comic Steve Marshall Hank is the local garbage man played by Kyle Larson. A story about past love, present and future love. Emotions are poignantly explored while clashing with the brilliant color of Polaroid film. This is a Polaroid analog film experience about love that flirts with the serendipity of our subconscious. Stefanie Schneider's new photographic works tell fantastic stories about her adopted Californian home. She seeks out faded American myths and distils auratically charged reality in a very personal and surprising way. She uses out-of-date Polaroid film, and the blemishes caused by the degenerated film stock, - are included in the composition in a painterly way. Exposure mistakes and low budget movie effects are combined to alienating effect. Everything shimmers and flickers before our eyes. The artist plays with the authentic poetry of the amateur, mixing strangely dreamy staging with random photochemical events. In the 16-part work Frozen, which is characterized by a strangely transcendent mood in the lighting, film-still-like pictorial clusters come together to form a mysterious story, with the artist herself as the lonely protagonist. the aesthetic is reminiscent of early Lynch films. The components of the elliptically choreographed events are scenes from an enchanted, gleaming winter landscape, together with "staged snapshots" of a pale young woman in her underskirts, who radiates the troubled reality of a mirage with her sleep walking presence. The story is presented in the manner of cinematic flashbacks or dream sequences. Stage blood and a knife are used to evoke a crime of passion whose surreal attractiveness is derived from the scenic openess of what is shown. The deliberate use of old instant picture stock establishes in a richly faceted way the ephemeral quality of vulnerability and transience within a reality that is brittle from the outset. The American Stars and Stripes, recently updated as the absolute epitome of a patriotic signifier, is the subject of the 9-part work Primary Colors (2001). Schneider's reassuringly European view, free of undue emotion, presents the Stars and Stripes motif in a strangley alienated form: she shows stills with phases of fluttering violently in the wind, even torn in some cases, and the poor film stock emphazises the fragility of the icon even more. (translated from German by Michael Robinson)
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