By Manfred Naescher
Berlin, Germany: self-published, 2009
Pages: 36
Dimensions: 8.1” in x 5.7” in
Cover: cardstock
Binding: staplebound
Process: digital printing
Color: full color throughout
Edition Size: 50
ISBN: none

Manfred Naescher's publications are well executed from the generation of hand painted images of screenshots from movies that fill his publications, to the exacting and beautiful layout and printing. Naescher doesn't make a lot of copies of each booklet so get this one while you can.

On the zine series Screenshots:
Screenshots is both an homage and an exploration of film in the form of an ongoing series of picture fanzines; a printed publication of recontextualized, reconfigured cinematic imagery, as interpreted through serial paintings. Each appropriated series of screenshots turns into a subjective take on cinematic memory, in a deliberate play with narrative forms and their inherent property of artifice. Source imagery from motion pictures is transformed into a fragmented series of reimagined still images in a zine—a complex, collaborative production is processed through the personal act of drawing, painting, and self-publishing.

Screenshots #4: Fighting
The fourth issue of Screenshots consists of 36 pages of fighting scenes in watercolor. Based on films of various eras and genres (from La Strada to The Bourne Supremacy), this series of drawings coalesces into one continuous book-length/five-decade-long fighting scene. The zine’s drawings of man-on-man fighting are based on film frames from The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953) with Marlon Brando as a motorcycle gang leader, Fellini’s La Strada (with Anthony Quinn as the Great Zampano, 1954), East of Eden (with James Dean, by Elia Kazan, 1954), the spaghetti western Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966), the headbanger mockumentary Fubar (Michael Dowse, 2002), and the slick action movie The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004).By imposing a uniform color scheme and omitting the original scenes’ backgrounds, the initially diverse imagery gains narrative cohesion. Furthermore, the anonymous protagonists in their voided locations create an iconography of fighting that ranges from troubled men’s awkward shoving (Fubar) and clumsy fist fights (La Strada, The Wild One) through emotional, violent outbursts (East of Eden) and brute macho aggression (Django) to the precision of Matt Damon’s man-as-weapon in The Bourne Supremacy. Arranged in a non-chronological, non-hierarchical order, the drawings create a subjective iconographic compendium of male aggression, as well as a narrative of pure action; the whole story is about nothing but fighting, and fighting alone.