The Swiss artists Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012), hailed by The New York Times as "the merry pranksters of contemporary art" and by ARTNews as "the best thing in Swiss art since Alberto Giacometti," worked as a creative duo starting in 1979. Their collaboration included sculpture, photography, drawing, art books, video, and multimedia installations, often using everyday objects to convey humor, irony, or wonder at the seemingly mundane. "Their work is whimsical and amusing," wrote DesignBoom, "transforming the everyday through their warped lens on reality... encouraging viewers to alter their perspective, looking at the world through a fresh lens." Critics have compared their work to such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, and Jean Tinguely.

Fischli and Weiss have been acclaimed worldwide with exhibitions and retrospectives at the Tate Modern, MoMA, The Guggenheim Museum, and Le Centre Georges Pompidou, among other world-famous institutions. They were chosen to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2003, winning the Golden Lion that year.

Their films are a cinematic extension of their decidedly offbeat creative imaginations. In the first two films, the internationally acclaimed multimedia artists, dressed in rented animal costumes, established their characters as "rat" and "bear" in a series of adventures that take them from an L.A. Freeway to the Swiss Alps.

In The Point of Least Resistance, set against a film noir-style Los Angeles background, the animal partners become embroiled in a murder mystery that raises serious questions about the nature of art and crime before spiraling into sublime flights of fancy.

In The Right Way, "rat" and "bear" join forces again on an open-air hike in the majestic splendor of the Swiss Alps that soon finds them at the mercy of nature, not to mention their often fractious relationship and philosophical debates, as they try to make sense out of their experiences and the seeming chaos of the world.

The Way Things Go, without explanatory narration or interviews, records the self-destructing performance of Fischli and Weiss's most ambitious construction. 100 feet of physical interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred Hitchcock. Described by The New York Times as their "masterpiece," The Way Things Go has for more than twenty years been consistently among our most popular and best-selling titles.

Icarus Films is pleased to distribute all three films by Fischli and Weiss. Discover more of our featured filmmakers.