Excerpt from "Collective Movements and Solitary Thrusts"
C. Noll Brinkmann
Millennium Film Journal | New York - Nos 30/31 | Fall 1997

... Klaus Telscher and Stephan Sachs have often worked together;
Telscher for example appears as a romantic mountain hiker in Sachs'
Paramount (1988), while Sachs, in Telscher's Her Mona (1992) poses as a contemplative male geisha. Stephan Sachs made a name for himself in 1986 with Le Dauphin, a film distinctive for its dynamic movement. An agile and mobile camera roams through exotica and tropical greenhouses, liberating erotic associations, but at the same time transferring the representational quality of photography onto almost abstract compositions of form and colour. Sachs works with the optical printer, controlling every nuance. Le Dauphin has a psychedelic, almost tactile sensual voluptuous-ness, a quality clearly absent from the more austere style of the Seventies.

Sachs' Paramount, mentioned earlier, takes a different direction.
Less formalist and Iyrical than his previous work, it combines found footage with the filmmaker's own material in order to create an ironic discourse about the ideological implications of mountain-climbing.
Foregrounding male fantasies of the lonesome hero in nature, it also
exposes related elements of European cultural heritage, drawn perhaps from German Romanticism or even from Fascism. All this, however, is not explicitly stated or didactically highlighted, but insinuated through subtle juxtapo-sitions of heterogeneous images, slight doctoring of the found footage material and beautifully shot atmospheric images that sometimes evoke landscape paintings from the early 19th century. Paramount is a salient example of the current hybrid mode of experimental film making, bringing the fine formal textures of the craft to the concerns and arguments of the documentary essay. ...

«Of the dolphin, after which the film is named, only the fin slap on water is visible.»
(Eva M. J. Schmid: Le Dauphin Report Oberhausen 1986).

«The curious gaze on one's own gaze. desiring and critical. a selfcreated distance, permits scratching on the surfaces of your own images. »
(Stephan Sachs in: Found Footage Film. Luzern 1992).