Konstantinos-Antonios Goutos
aka theFlâneu®
Greek videomaker
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biography
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Interview:10 questions
1. Tell me something about your life and the educational background
Born on 11 February 1973 in Larissa, Greece.
Thessaloniki, Athens, Vienna, Prague, Weimar, Rome, Berlin, Leipzig, Krakow, Genoa, Lissabon were and are very important stations in my life…
Music studies (Larissa), film-directing studies (Athens), video and media art studies (Leipzig), conceptual and intermediate art studies (Prague) is my official educational background.
2. When, how and why started you filming?
After many intensive years of passive or theoretical activity with the most of the mediums (books, films, press, radio, television, etc.) and after a deep existential break,
I was started (1999) my journey…
Since 2002 I am strolling through Europe, since 2005 I am calling me “theFlâneu® 
3. What kind of subjects have your films?
Exi[l]stence, Home, Flight, Time, Escape, Beauty, Game, Coincidence, Information, are the starting points, Flaneur, Genius Loci, Aura, Heterotopias, Unhappy Consciousness, Homo Ludens, Punktum -are the terms of the theoretical background.
4. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?
I stroll like a „Flâneur“ through the city. I do not have a turtle with me (as the original Parisian Flâneur of the 1830‘s used to); later, I do not write stories (as Edgar Allan Poe or Hans Christian Andersen used to), I do not write poems (as Baudelaire or Rilke used to).
I just have a video camera. I take shots of the city; I take shots of the “life” of the people of the city; sometimes, I also shoot “myself”…
(…without camera moves, without tripod, without a zoom lens, without special lighting, with original sound, without permission…);
Later, I put the shots together with no chronological sequence and every time under different contexts:
tales and history, reactions – relations, sounds – words, lights – colours, structures – architectures, incidents – accidents, order – disorder…
Not a description of a journey but „my lyrical reaction, with all my truth and simplicity“ as Federico Garcia Lorca once said about his collection A Poet in New York.
5. How do you approach such complicated matter like Shoah represents?
The work it was made without any purpose or plan on my first walk through Auschwitz…
6. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.. What about digital technology?
My equipment and the way I create is extreme minimal.
I am strollilng with an one CCD digital camera (Sony DCR PC 8E) and I am editing with Windows Movie Maker.
From the very beginning it happens to stroll under some conditions:
without tripod – without camera moves – without the use of a zoom lens
without special lighting – without extra microphone – without permission…
Some similar condtions are to be used by cutting:
the sound and the length of the shootings should be the original without any cut or use of effects.
Comments, archive material or music were never used…
7. How do you finance your films?
My strolling was and is in the most of the cases self-financed. Some of the travels was a matter of luck, some other travels a result of an invitation…
8. Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team?
I am working individually…
9. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?
Films of Vertov, Haneke, Benning, Penalva or Juergen Boettcher,
paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, Giorgione, Rembrandt or Strawalde,
photos of Atget, Stieglitz, Friedlander, Lartigue or Cartier-Bresson,
texts of Benjamin, Kracauer, Bazin, Mc Luhan or Vilém Flusser,
are important works for dialog and inspiration…
10. What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?
To keep strolling without any purpose or plan..;-)
Can works of yours viewed online besides on VideoChannel/SFC? Where?
List some links & resources