Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler has photographed the physical rolls of classic movies, using the object as a portal for memory in his project The Unseen Seen.

 ​From the project:​

"The concept is to confront the viewer with the image of an object (filmrolls) and in doing so recall images from the spectator’s memory. By reading the movie title, I want to generate emotions and images from our memory.

I got access to the film archive and museum „The Deutsche Kinemathek“ in Berlin through my friend Volkmar Ernst, who works there as a technician. I drew up a list of well-known films and those with unusual titles. I set up a little photostudio inside the cinema of the archive and backlit the film rolls by installing film lights behind the objects, lighting each roll in the same way for continuity. The result was a collection of images of a few hundred filmrolls.

Through the act of collecting and selecting the film rolls I noticed analogies between the colour and the shape of the rolls, and the content of the movies.

Besides the nostalgic connotation concerning the movie itself, there is the nostalgia concerned with the loss of a tradition. This projcet also deals with this loss - „the dying of film“.

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