Preorder ‡ Stanley Schtinter & Gareth Evans, Snow, Always Snow
£12.50
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN STANLEY SCHTINTER
& GARETH EVANS ON THE IMPLICATIONS & ASSOCIATIONS
RELATIVE TO A FILM, SCHNEEWITTCHEN
(S. Schtinter, 70m / 35mm, MMXXV)
Tenement Press / Harry Caul #1
ISBN: 978-1-917304-07-8
100pp [Approx.]
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
£12.50
Publishing 21.03.25
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The first in a series of collaborative “in conversation”
publications named Harry Caul, a release to mark and
commemorate the domestic and international
premiere(s) of Schtinter’s feature, Schneewittchen
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Schneewittchen (2025) is a feature film by the artist and author Stanley Schtinter. An auditorium only presentation of which only one print exists. In this volume, director Stanley Schtinter and producer Gareth Evans consider their co-work on Schneewittchen—discuss the project’s implications and associations—and consider the film a catalyst fit to enable a wide-ranging conversation.
Evans and Schtinter touch on the water damage done by mainstream culture to our contemporary critical faculty; consider sight and storytelling; imagination and image-making; creativity and light; the luminosity of the dark; and riff on the implications borne by an ownership of the means of production in an age of extinction. A feature-length discussion grounded in their collaboration; their exchange is a commons composed of 18181 words.
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The Tenement / Caul publication of Snow, Always Snow is curtained by a fleeting portfolio of photographs by Joshua Bonnetta, taken on location during the production of Schneewittchen, and an abridged iteration of Evans and Schtinter’s dialogue was broadcast via the London-based radio station, Resonance 104.4FM, 13.02.25.
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‘The visual is essentially pornographic,’ wrote Fredric Jameson, adding that ‘pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.’ Turning down the Prince [Toby Jones] and his invitation to watch the passionate lovemaking between the Evil Queen [Julie Christie] and the Hunter [Hanns Zischler], Snow White [Stacy Martin] retorts, ‘Rather than look, I’d rather hear.’
Sound supersedes sight in Stanley Schtinter’s austere anti-fairy tale Schneewittchen, an English-language remake of João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000), made largely of an audio performance of Robert Walser’s titular play set to a black screen, occasionally relieved by shots of passing clouds. In Walser’s radical reworking of the Grimm fable, a resurrected Snow White reconciles with the Evil Queen, denying any foul play and even seeking forgiveness for provoking her jealousy.
A parable for our post-truth times, Schtinter’s film provokes reflection on the ontology of a tale as it travels across languages, mediums, geographies and eras. If Walser’s play breaks the reader’s foundational trust in a benevolent, just world, Schneewittchen breaches the implicit contract with the film spectator, offering a motion picture emptied of both motion and pictures: a work where the visual can only appear as excess.
Srikanth Srinivasan,
IFFR: International Film Festival Rotterdam (2024)
Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2025, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser's titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brother’s Grimm fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film, Branca de Neve / Snow White (2000), which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then. While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter's film will, according to the artist, ‘only ever show in analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.’ For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike.
[...]
The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries—namely, the autonomy of thought and action.
Morgan Quaintance, Art Monthly
(No.483, February 2025)
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See here for a further word on this title.
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Stanley Schtinter has been described by writer Iain Sinclair as ‘the last accredited activist, the last avant-garde.’ He recently presented the premiere of his “endless” video-work, The Lock-In, at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and exhibited the work as a solo presentation at the Barbican Centre in London during July 2022 (reviewed for The Guardian by Jonathan Jones as ‘an epic film [...] spellbinding, Warholian’). From May 2021 until May 2022 he presented Important Books (or, Manifestos read by Children) at Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2021, he published the edited collection, The Liberated Film Club and, in 2023, Last Movies (respectively, the second and tenth titles in Tenement Press’s “Yellowjacket” series; see here and here). Schtinter is the artistic director of purge.xxx; an “anti-” record label (“anti-” everything) wherein he curates and publishes a catalogue of sound-works, soundtracks, and collaborations.
Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event curator, producer, host and documentary mentor. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books and curates their Screen at Home series. From 2012-2023, he was the Adjunct Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery. He has written many catalogue essays and articles on place, culture, artists and the moving image, including an extensive text for Radiohead’s KId A MNESIA catalogue.
Joshua Bonnetta is a Munich based interdisciplinary artist working with sound and image across installation, performance, and traditional cinema exhibition. His current works explore environmental sound through acoustic ecology and conservation bioacoustics frameworks. His work has been shown at The Berlinale, BFI London Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, and at various festivals, museums, and galleries internationally. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, The Guardian, and the New York Times. His sound works are published by Shelter Press, Canti Magnetici, and Senufo Editions.