by Sabrina Labis
Winter Semester 2024/25
The seminar Filmmaking as Magical Practice invited us to explore filmmaking not merely as a
medium of representation, but as a transformative and performative act — a form of contemporary
ritual. Drawing inspiration from Vilém Flusser’s reflections on the camera as a “magical apparatus”
and the “magical character of the image,” we examined how the practice of filmmaking might be
understood as a process of conjuring, channeling, and transformation.
Throughout the semester, we discussed how cinematic gestures — framing, scripting, editing, and
directing — might parallel ritual acts of invocation and transformation. What does it mean to treat a
script as a spellbook, a storyboard as a divination map, or the camera as a wand? These questions
guided both our theoretical discussions and our individual artistic explorations.
A central part of the seminar was an intensive five-day retreat at Gutshof Sauen, where we
immersed ourselves in a slower, more sensorial rhythm of working. Away from the habitual pace of
the city, the boundaries between filmmaking, ritual, and collective experimentation began to blur.
The act of filming became a form of invocation — a process of listening, observing, and shaping
energies through image and sound.
Inspired by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964) instructions, the students worked in groups of three to
five on a moving image project conceived as a Zauberformel — a spell, a performative gesture
translated into visual form. These collaborative works took on diverse shapes: multichannel
installations that expanded into a spatial experience, narrative short films that wove ritual and
storytelling, and experimental formats exploring rhythm, perception, and time.
Each group developed its own artistic response, exploring how intuition, coincidence, and collective
process might inform their creative approach. For some, long uncut takes created a sense of
temporal immersion; others experimented with repetition, looping, or layered sound to evoke
trance-like or dreamlike states. The act of collaboration itself became part of the ritual — a shared
process of negotiation, reflection, and discovery.
The seminar thus unfolded as a dialogue between theory and intuition, technique and ritual,
consciousness and materiality. It encouraged us to reconsider what filmmaking can do beyond
storytelling — how it can act as a transformative medium, an amplifier of perception, and a channel
for unseen forces.
Photos: © Edlin Jap