Ugly Yelp

In his film Ugly Yelp, Olaf Breuning makes use of the aesthetics of horror films, do-it-yourself productions and music video clips. The video, shot in the cold green of a night vision camera, begins with a longer fading in from black. The actors wear cheap, black, long-haired wigs as an ironic allusion to the gothic scene and transport us into a world of Satanism and witchcraft. Despite the acts of violence, Breuning’s film is not genuinely scary, since the horror scenes are so amateurishly re-enacted that the deception can easily be debunked as such. He plays with easily decipherable codes and shows how remembered images influence our perception.
An important compositional element is the sound, which at first gently raises, slowly increases and unloads after a clap of thunder in a looped heavy metal guitar solo, thus evoking the title of the film, Ugly Yelp. The work was originally shown as part of a larger installation on a LED monitor mounted onto the handlebars of a BMW C1 scooter shrouded in fog.