Christoph Girardet has worked with Matthias Müller for several years, but also has his own independent artistic practice as a video artist. 'Fiction Artists' is one of his recent projects, in collaboration with Volker Schreiner. It is the perfect mirror-image of 'Play'. Its source material is about a hundred old films, from classics to B-films. This time we do not see an audience, but the artist. We see him as a character in the film, whose life and work were invented. We see countless artists - mainly painters - passing by in the course of twelve short thematic chapters. 'Session' for example, deals with the power balance between the artist and his model, while in 'Picasso' art history appears in the form of namedropping.
With sardonic humour, 'Fiction Artists' presents a number of persistent cliches about the artist as a destructive personality, sex maniac and neurotic. At the same time it is made clear how the cinema embraces and maintains these cliches.