Margaret Raspé made her last camera helmet film, Gelb, Rot und Blau entgegen (Against Yellow, Red and Blue), in 1983. In this film, the artist filmed herself not performing housework, but instead painting the triptych that shares the film’s same title. Throughout the film, Raspé investigates the medium of painting from the perspectives of the temporal process of production, the alternation between stasis and movement, the energetics of her hands, and the division of labor between body and mind. The film documents how the artist must continually reorient herself in front of the canvas and in the camera viewfinder: one hand guides the paintbrush freely across the canvas in a relaxed, actionistic, and automatic manner, while the other must concentrate wholly on registering these movements in the small image frame of the Super 8 camera. The film displays only smaller sections of the larger painting, which initially appears dynamic but becomes increasingly static through the continual superimposition and concentration of the three colors.
