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Frederic D, stills from 'Miss Baghdad', 2007
(80 mins)

'Miss Baghdad' is an enigma of a movie - part of the reason being that nothing about it is illusive. (To watch a trailer for the film click here.) Its nightmarish palette is drawn straight from billboards and fashion glossies. Actors move around a static pixellated city, as if in a sort of cinematic video game. Rather than concealing its construction, it feels like the artifice has been intentionally ramped up - as though film history had been loaded into FinalCut and thrown into reverse to arrive at smooth digital remastery of the production ethos associated with slapstick and train robberies. The plot is straightforward as they come - a sort of anti-commercialist parable, its morals neither new nor subtly conveyed. A lovely heroine is distressed by the war - she appeals to her fellow citizens for help, and finds only trend-obsessed consumers. Meanwhile, the devious villain - a branding guru who wears a cowboy hat - wants to make her the face of the new Nike shoe; preying on her innocence, he packages her dissent as a innocuous but fantastically profitable "peace show."

And yet it all adds up to something complex, and quite beautiful. The question that irks is what that something is. Because one has the suspicion watching 'Miss Baghdad' that it's too funny, too aesthetically sophisticated - too good - to be a piece of earnest anti-corporate propaganda; and that on the other hand, it's too earnest to associate with contemporary art. It seems to throw all it has - nods to Godard and jabs at Wim Wenders, one-liners and occasional un-stylized tenderness - into a critique of the consuming vapidity of high-gloss marketing; yet its own seduction draws on those very techniques.

What fascinates most is the film's sensitivity for the world it attacks. The dialogue takes its cues from Saturday Night Live's appropriation of Sarah Palin's primetime interviews - if it's fabricated, the writer just might be brilliant, the plausible possibility that it isn't is both funnier and more chilling. ("At a party of this size you can't avoid collateral damage," in response to an attempted rape.) The visual language is even smarter: bathos is defined as a shoe in a nightclub, dangling by its laces. When I saw 'Miss Baghdad' in 2007, what I wanted to know was where it came from. The film's website - which characterizes 'Miss Baghdad' as a "youth drama" - lists the creator as Frederic D, and an email.

Frederic D is Frederic Detjens, who came to Berlin from Hamburg in the mid-90s for university. After a few semesters he dropped out to take a job with MTV Europe, then in the process of regionalizing its operations. While his classmates in the Freie Universitaet's Film Studies program - like most of their German contemporaries - were continuing their studies, Detjens spent his early twenties traveling between London and Eastern Europe, planning shows, promoting things. He returned to Berlin a few years later. By the end of the decade, the city's red-blooded club scene had become more cosmopolitan with the influx of an international nightlife diaspora, more glamorous, and centered in the Mitte, the center of the former East Berlin. It had also become more saleable (thanks to the German government's subsides for film production, and in no small part, to the market created by MTV's decentralization). Detjens began directing music videos. He was both worldly and very young, had impeccably funky dress sense, and a modest reputation as a DJ in his own right - and it happened that he was also very talented. "When I worked hard, it always worked out," Detjens recalls.

Detjens was happy to play and work hard in Berlin, until one day he wasn't. He's now rather vague about what happened - but it seems to fall into the broad category of the personal crisis. In 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, he left the city for Argentina, with the thought of writing a feature film of his own. "I was angry about the war, about how people were reacting to it," Detjens explained, "but this world of marketing was what I was familiar with - I'd planned to make a movie about that. I started to realize that they were part of the same thing." Later that year, he brought the script back to Berlin, moved into an un-renovated basement on a relatively dull street on the northern edge of Mitte, and south of gentrifying residential Prenzlauerberg, and began shooting 'Miss Baghdad'.

There was no budget for the project - when money ran out, Detjens would make some music videos - and there were no actors. Frederic's friends from the Mitte scene - DJs, bouncers, music video producers, sundry creatives - were recruited for the parts; given 'Miss Baghdad's subject matter they were essentially playing themselves. That slowed things down considerably as well. "Sometimes people were sick, sometimes they were hung over," recalls Detjens. Each scene was shot in the basement, in front of a bluescreen. Detjens, meanwhile, went around taking still photographs and footage of Berlin at night, which were later inserted digitally as backgrounds - giving the film its empty, stilted feel. The method, of course, also gave Detjens an uncommon degree of control over the composition of the film, so evident in mannerism of the finished work. It took about two years.

In the summer of 2005 Detjens began showing 'Miss Baghdad', at first nightly out of his basement studio, retrofitted as a cinema; next at Rio club, the epicenter of Mitte's pop-cultural flowering, now defunct. As Detjens describes it, the first screening was a dramatic event: he had invited all his friends from the world of music video production. Many were less than enthusiastic about his portrayal of their shared vocation. There was crying. People felt betrayed, Detjens recalls - it wasn't personal, but they took it personally. What about the people who you made the film with, weren't they concerned, as they were reading their lines, I asked, that they were making something that would be contentious? They didn't really question that aspect, Detjens said; 'we were after all, so used to making movies'.

'Miss Baghdad' never had a commercial release - or even not-so-commercial release. It showed that year at the Istanbul Biennale, and later at Paris's Jeu de Paume, and it continued to screen periodically around Berlin. Some people loved it, a few of them were the right ones - museums acquired copies, among them the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Detjens went back to making music videos. His interest had simply been in producing the work, he said. He'd spent enough of his time worrying about consumption and distribution.

In 2006 Nice & Fit - one of the more serious of the young galleries recently arrived in Berlin's Mitte - offered Detjens a venue. The gallerist, Helena Papadopoulos, had seen 'Miss Baghdad', she was organizing a group show, and invited him to contribute a two-dimensional work. She offered him a solo show the following year. For it, Detjens made a series of installations - digital photographs printed in thick, bruise-like hues onto translucent plastic sheeting. The sheets were layered to produce a murky pool of imagery: birds, faces, bedsheets and street scenes inscribed over and inside one another. Some of them involved three-dimensional accessories - a listless mattress, and other vaguely Emin-esque items. The references were inscrutable as 'Miss Baghdad's were clear. To coincide with the exhibition, Papadopoulos organized a special screening of the latter.

As it happened, the movie was again shown in the semi-underground space in which Detjens had originally shot it. Since 2003, the street had changed: music video production was already flagging with the rise of the online music business, but Berlin's contemporary art scene was feeling ascendant. Nice & Fit had acquired Detjens's former studio, which was two doors down from the gallery's main space. (Half a year later the gallery renovated and re-opened the former studio as a showroom, removing the caking plaster of posters from the façade to reveal a huge street-facing window onto a newly whitened interior.)

Papadopoulos urged Detjens to keep at it. Over the course of 2007, she took his photographic works along to a number of European art fairs. Detjens, meanwhile, started working more gingerly. Using the same translucent plastic drapes which he relied on for in his first photo pieces, he began a series of weightless-looking portraits. These works are single monochromatic images, printed with less ink - and covered with a varnish-like membrane of transparent plastic. When the light hits them the right way they look ethereal. Later in the year, Papadopoulos displayed one in Nice and Fit's booth at PREVIEW Berlin - a triptych of a girl's face, shot outside an Athens nightclub. When Detjens came to see it he declared that the lighting wasn't right, and the piece wouldn't work at all. The gallerist assured him that she was the gallerist, it looked good, and that art fairs were for selling art, and Detjens should leave it to her. Detjens insisted that the work be taken down. Papadopoulos told him he should go home and get some rest. The next day Detjens called her: he wanted to come back and take it down. But he didn't. In a review of the fair, Berlin's Tagesspiegel called the piece the Mona Lisa of the 21st century. It sold that weekend to a Chicago collection.

Frederic D, 'Bin für immer duschen', 2007
inkjet prints on various plastics
290 x 327 cm, unique

Detjens has said that he never wants to rely on artwork to make his living. He continues to make music videos, which despite the state of the industry still pay more, and faster. But parallel projects continue to develop. He wants to make another film. This summer at the Forgotten Bar, a contemporary art bivouac in Kreuzberg, Detjens showed a three-dimensional animation that he'd been working on with collaborator Fubbi Karlsson. Neither art nor commercial video has really explored three-d modeling, Detjens reckons. This puts it squarely in the realm of avant-garde fantasy, still a largely a technical endeavor. "I'm interested in this whole community," Detjens explains, in part because it's a meritocratic one. He compared the online world of three-d geekdom to graffiti culture where "every piece of code is like a tag."

Detjens' current show, 'Portraits Officiels', which the artist discusses below, is at Nice & Fit until 20 December.

ALIX RULE: Tell me a bit about upcoming show.

FREDERIC D: It's called 'Portraits Officiels'. I'm going to make live, "up to date" portraits - mixed media in the gallery, abstract portraits that capture the subject better than a photo would. For the opening, a lot of artists and musicians will show up, my friend Fubbi and I will build an environment with various cameras and sets where the portraits will be done. A lot has changed in the past 100 years but most of the portrait works still look the same, a face on photo paper. That can't be. It's the same in film.

AR: How so?

FD: Wide Shot, Close up, Lenses, Cameras, Actors. I'm surprised when I see musicians, a band, that somehow everyone is still going for the same equation: guitar, bass, drums, vocal.

AR: How will yours be 'abstract', as you say?

FD: It'll be abstract in the sense that it won't be a straight photo. But for me it's even more precise. I think and see 1,000 different things in a second, and I want to capture that in the live situation in the gallery with various instruments. Technical stuff, like cameras and sensors. But it'll also involve observing and directing people throughout the evening: A mix of technology, film, theater, fantasy and realism.

AR: So the works you produce will be moving images?

FD: Probably more than that. We're still working on it. I hope to be surprised as well.

AR: Are you more interested in the results or in the staging? That is, in the portraits, or in the process of making them?

FD: I think the moment is for me most important, but the idea came from an old tradition in of artistic "auftragsarbeit" [commissioned work, or 'hackwork'] - portraying kings and queens etc. for money. At the opening there will be more or less artists and friends. But I am also interested in portraying people I've never seen before.

AR: Why people you've never seen before?

FD: Because I like to meet people from other "genres", other scenes, perhaps even people that are strangers to me in their ways of living and thinking. Portraying them I'll try to discover them. The stranger to me, the more interesting. For them, probably as well.

AR: It sounds to me kind of like a reverse casting. Normally as director you'd choose people for a video on the basis of their "look"; here it'll dictate what you do, how you accommodate them.

FD: Like the politician who visits the dominatrix after work. People who want portraits after the opening have to apply. Or the gallerist will choose them. I don't mind, as long as they pay.

Frederic D, 'Good Colours/ Bad Colours & Moon', 2007
(4 min and 1:15 min)
colour DV / installation view, Nice & Fit Showroom
edition of 6

AR: Do you have rates? How will the pricing work?

FD: I'm not good with money, I leave that to the gallerist. But something linked to income would be fair, I guess.

AR: Your own production values tend to be pretty high - it's something that tends to distinguish commercial video from video art. Will that be affected by how much the client pays?

FD: High fees could allow us to try out some things we can't afford at the moment; but that has nothing to do with the value of the artwork. I always turn myself inside out for that. The subjects can come to the gallery or we can go to them.

AR: Amazing!

FD: I like it as well.

AR: How long will the project go on?

FD: Endlessly.

AR: Who do you expect to have a portrait done, after the opening?

FD: I don't know really. I think the works will be great and unique, it depends on the publicity I guess. Could be a nice Christmas present, thinking practically for a moment.

Frederic D, 'Untitled', 2007
inkjet prints on plastics
205 x 132 cm, unique

AR: How would you characterize the relationship between your music video work and your 'art' work right now?

FD: I used to always try to separate these two worlds but they're getting closer and closer together. So I'm trying to somehow make my peace with it. The answer depends on the artist I'm working with, obviously. I'm thinking of the video I did for Jamie Lidell, 'The City', and the one that I'm working on for Peaches. What each of them asked for was very interesting to me. The artists can inspire you as well, and this is perhaps what I hope for from the portrait works.

AR: Do you think there's a single important difference between making a music video for someone else and doing a project like this which you've thought up on your own, or is it a difference of degree?

FD: I'm used to motivating myself and to creating everything from zero, so it's nice when an artist adds something, when they bring something to the work and then we start.

AR: It's funny language. You (the artist) are happy when an artist (a musician) brings something to the table.

FD: They don't have to bring something concrete, it's enough when they have an interesting aura. The Virgin Mary is probably the most popular example. Whenever I see her face somewhere I'm moved; but it's the same with some earthly fellows.

AR: You made 'Miss Baghdad' 'from zero' but you didn't need to; you would have had plenty of inspiration from artists wanting music videos if you'd looked for it.

FD: During the process of making 'Miss Baghdad' I was working in a sort of trance. I hated the status quo, so nothing was valid, everything had to change. That gave me enormous energy to finish the project and in dealing with the circumstances in which I was living. I think that has changed - now I commit myself to a sort of "realpolitik " because it's a more reasonable way of reaching your goals. You can scream in a squat house for days but when no one supports you and you are not part of the society no one wants to hear what you scream. I sometimes hate myself for getting that reasonable, but it's not just about the work itself when you want to get a political message across. People have to have access to it. I learned, with 'Miss Baghdad', that if you want to your message to be spread you can't just make a work and leave it at that. You have to be a nice guy and cooperate to a certain degree with people so that it gets shown.

AR: You had mentioned you were interested in avatars.

FD: I like our melting together with technology. It creates a lot of new possibilities. Everything I've wanted to become I now can, and I feel I can develop that. Creating and building new spaces and sets outside of what gravity allows - and outside what society allows - opens a lot.

Frederic D, 'Das kriminelle Kind/The Criminal Kid', 2007
inkjet prints on plastics
390 x 220 cm (approx.), unique

AR: You mentioned that that the portrait format, a still picture of a face or whatever, is outdated. Ana Finel Honigman has this argument that the portrait has been reinvented with online social networking. Looking at the way people construct their images on Facebook and MySpace, etc, I think she has a point.

FD: Yes, but their more precise portrait would be probably the avatar - what they want to be, which is in tension with what they are, their 'real face'. I think both personalities have their right to exist. Or eight personalities do. You can be someone else everyday, and you are probably more you than if you were trying to maintain a single image. I believe in that. Maybe in 100 years or so we will all have 50 characters, some of which are in contradiction with the others. We are very multifaceted if there is nothing to hold us back.

AR: But you're really interested in faces, right? And yet your face is virtually unchangeable, it's a kind of extension of yourself that you're pretty much stuck with.

FD: You're right, I am. As I mentioned, the Virgin Mary's face has a special fascination; the last time I went to the Louvre, I looked at only Madonnas. I don't know why, perhaps because my mother was a nun. I can't explain it rationally, I'm not a religious person. Another face I saw in a drawing on a book cover in Santiago de Chile in 1995 was a sketch by Pisanello, a painter from the early Renaissance. I couldn't forget this image. I was addicted to it and tried for 12 years to find it and to see it again. Last year I discovered the book on ebay America and now it's with me. Isn't it beautiful that a drawing has such an impact on someone who is born 600 years later? I just hope that someone in 2608 falls in love with a piece from my show. I will give it my best, I promise.

All images courtesy Nice & Fit, Berlin / copyright Frederic D

'Portraits Officiels'
FREDERIC D
with FUBBI KARLSSON
Until 20 December
Nice and Fit Gallery
Berlin