Australia's foremost independent filmmaker, Paul Winkler was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1939. He began making films in 1954, and moved in 1959 to Australia, where he has supported himself for years as a bricklayer and restorer of houses. Winkler's artisan training is evidenced in the skill and virtuosity with which his films are assembled, employing complex in-camera masking and multiple exposure techniques developed by the filmmaker himself. Winkler's films, which are in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art, combine color and sound dramatically to produce an unusually emotional effect for abstract films.
Window
“A person is observed ironing in front of a window. This action, which took two hours of real time, is condensed into three minutes. The film is structured like an average feature film: a slow introduction, a hectic middle part, and a surprise ending of ambiguous nature.” --P.W.
• (1979, 3 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)

Bondi
“The film deals mainly with ‘hot' and ‘cool' images. All images are observed through a horizontally divided screen created by in-camera matting. The action is of people-water-heat-sky-sand-buildings-cars-open spaces and other elements about the beach...(Bondi, a very popular beach in Sydney)....” --P.W. “The startling manipulation of pictorial space, the evocative absurdity of combinations are reminiscent of Max Ernst's surrealist collages.” --Amos Vogel
• (1979, 15 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)

Cars
“The first half of the film is silent; in the second half we see the same images - cars speeding along a highway - again, but with sound. The silent part puts the viewer at a safe distance to the material, but once the sound enters a certain kind of shock reaction sets in which forces the viewer to ‘rethink.'” --P.W.
• (1979, 15 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)

Taylor Square
“The camera pans in semi-random movements in long telephoto shots over an area of 1-1/2 miles of streetscrapers. The movements are shown in most cases four times, as four squares on the screen which bounce into each other on their edges.... (This is) reinforced by the soundtrack of bouncing pinball machines....” --P.W.
• (1980, 19 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)

Sydney=Bush
“A confrontation between the city of Sydney and its environment...seductive bush images of native animals and fauna trying to fight off the encroachment by man. A matter of ‘Lebensraum,' or ‘living space'....” --P.W.
• (1980, 14 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)

Urban Spaces
“The film deals with close environmental spaces within the city limits of Sydney...fragmentation of spaces between people and their immediate surroundings.... The filmic images create artificial spaces getting into a kind of surreal realism-claustrophobia....” --P.W.
• (1980, 27 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)