AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE FILM & VIDEO
ALFRED KAISER: DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY
Alfred Kaiser (Austria)
In the second half of the 1970s Alfred Kaiser was entirely unknown to the film world when he went public with two films, namely A THIRD REICH (1975) and A THIRD REICH FROM ITS REFUSE (1977). B oth compilation films bridge the threshold between avant-garde and documentary cinema. Kaiser took footage solely from Nazi era film production to make both films. Their conceptual critique equally serves as an attempt to illustrate and demolish the world of Nazi thought and imagery.
DIETMAR BREHM: BLACK GARDEN
Dietmar Brehm (Austria)
“The moods of his films resemble an atmosphere between the dream and trauma. Brehm treats the dream as a source of strategies for association, similar to the secondary process to which according to Freud all the workings of the unconscious are subject. Dietmar Brehm a master of the grammar of a non-conceptual language.”
DIETMAR BREHM: PRAXIS SELECTION
Dietmar Brehm (Austria)
"Praxis series is driven by a spirit of enterprise that is clearly palpable: Since 1974 Brehm has been sensuously modulating his private iconography in ever new variations, ceaselessly engaged with his ever growing image and sound archive, withdrawn into the interior of an infernal fantasy. There is no posturing behind his cool treatment of the disquieting signs in his work, but rather ennui, a loner life, solipsism. Dietmar Brehm orchestrates implosions and idling states. He could be seen as the...
2016 - PERSONAL CHOICE (Alexander Horwath, Juror)
ERNST SCHMIDT JR.: VIENNAFILM 1896 - 1976 (WIENFILM 1896-1976)
Ernst Schmidt Jr. (Austria)
"VIENNAFILM 1896-1976 constitutes the first feature length film completed by Schmidt Jr. It premieres on January 28, 1977 at the Austrian Film Museum; it is screened at Vienna´s Inter-national Film Festival, the Seventh International Forum of New Cinema in Berlin and the Festival dei Popoli in Florence.”
FRIEDL KUBELKA VOM GRÖLLER - ONE IS NOT ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHY & FILM
Friedl Kubelka (Austria)
Friedl Kubelka is an Austrian photographer, filmmaker and visual artist born in London, England in 1946. The monograph focuses upon individual serial works as combined with contemporary portrait series showing e.g. artists from Senegal which are combined with others from Kubelka’s archive. So as to multiply perspectives, individual portraits are juxtaposed with others (double portraits), or more.
FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER - SILENCE ON THE SCREEN
Friedl Vom Gröller (Austria)
The DVD, SILENCE ON THE SCREEN, is a selection of 19 films by Friedl vom Gröller. It is packaged together with ONE IS NOT ENOUGH PHOTOGRAPHY & FILM for a single price.
GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM IST. (1-12) / DVD-Version
Gustav Deutsch (Austria)
“It is, in a word, glorious... what I feel is the inherent power and mystery of such material, the arrangement of these images and sounds into a definition of cinema constitutes one of the greatest pedagogic films I have seen.... my main reaction is to have my socks knocked off.”
GUSTAV DEUTSCH: NOT HOME. PICTURING THE FOREIGN FILMS 1990-2015
Gustav Deutsch (Austria)
"Over the past half-century, two tendencies have dominated independent, artisanal filmmaking. One of these is the fascination with the material artifacts of cinema´s history: it is often called »found-footage filmmaking« and sometimes »recycled cinema«. Filmmakers working in this vein are often archeologists of cinema, aesthetically and/or ideologically…
KURT KREN: ACTION FILMS
Kurt Kren (Austria)
"Kurt Kren's Action films are the most tangible way of comprehending the nature of Actionist works of art and events today. I’m not referring to the recognizability of an action's dramaturgical details, but rather to the fact that Kren's Action films make it possible to immerse oneself into their structural essence so as to grasp their energetic and aesthetic…
KURT KREN: STRUCTURAL FILMS
Kurt Kren (Austria)
"Kurt Kren´s achievements with regard to the montage of short cuts in his early works was many years ahead of the rest of the (film)world, in both form and content. Kurt Kren was a pioneere: an avantgardist in the classic and best sense of the word. A filmmaker who knows how to think in images like few others in this trade, and who realized these…
KURT KREN: WHICH WAY TO CA?
Kurt Kren (Austria)
“What does it mean to recognize a documentary gesture in Kren’s films? What is being documented? The documentary images that Kren uses in his works do not arise out of a plan, but instead, come from the right moment, a coincidence, a momentary observation, or a seized opportunity.”
MARIA LASSNIG: ANIMATION FILMS
Maria Lassnig (Austria)
Maria Lassnig trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and then spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, where she was exposed to Art Informel and Surrealism. From 1968 to 1980, she lived in New York, where she did pioneering work in film, producing a series of remarkably inventive animations all presented by INDEX for the first…
Maria Lassnig (Austria)
Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her body awareness visible, found additional expression in film in New York in the early 1970s. While several of these films have long since been part of her canonical works (e.g. Selfportrait, Iris, and Couples), many remained unfinished. These "films in progress" can be regarded as autobiographical notes as well as an artistic experiment featuring many of Lassnig's recognizable subjects and methods.
Mara Mattuschka (Austria)
In this broad sampling of works, Bulgarian-born, Vienna-based Mara Mattuschka playfully moves through motherhood to monster flicks – where an alien, out on the town, wreaks havoc of epic proportions. Androgynous star Mimi Minus infuses mischievous humor and strange wisdom into the existence of Mattuschka’s characters.
MARA MATTUSCHKA & CHRIS HARING - BURNING DOWN THE PALACE
Mara Mattuschka & Chris Haring (Austria)
All of these work deal somewhat with a fake factor. PART TIME HEROES handles the star concept, in a larger than life way; RUNNING SUSHI refers to comics and manga. BURNING PALACE, on the other hand, is based on The Art of Seduction. (...) For the human body to remain interesting, one must constantly put it in a different light or in another context. One has to look at the body sideways. With this, one achieves a large choreographic change in perspective, because everything is altered. In another context, one also experiences the body in a new way, already because you view it differently.
MICHAEL PILZ: FACTS FOR FICTION (WAS ÜBERSETZT IST NOCH NICHT ANGEKOMMEN) / PARK OF REMEMBRANCE (PARCO DELLE RIMEMBRANZE)
Michael Pilz (Austria)
“Whether he is working in the so-called documentary or so-called fictional mode, with 16mm, 35mm or high-8-video: for Pilz the central issue is our perception and the film or video is a disposition, a condition for the temporal and spatial organization of a reflection. This refers in the first instance to the mere listening and observing, but also to an…
NORBERT PFAFFENBICHLER: NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM
Norbert Pfaffenbichler (Austria)
While the development of the Notes on Film – series is logical, the expansive directions it takes are baffling. Pfaffenbichler’s unique sensibility finds expression in a growing emphasis upon the comic and the uncanny, whereby his avant-garde and often structuralist approach is coupled with an ever-increasing pleasure in playful experimentation. The source material is...
PETER TSCHERKASSKY: ATTRACTIONS, INSTRUCTIONS AND OTHER ROMANCES
Peter Tscherkassky (Austria)
While engaged in a process of deconstruction, Peter Tscherkassky also recognizes the power of cinema, utilizing its control over space and time, in order to uncover the energies of motion and story, of the violence inherent in both revolt and containment. As the materials of the moving image now undergo transformation, as the very term film perhaps…
PETER TSCHERKASSKY: EXQUISITE ECSTASIES
Peter Tscherkassky (Austria)
Approaching the Exquisite Corpus" was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date. The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film...
PETER TSCHERKASSKY: FILMS FROM A DARK ROOM
Peter Tscherkassky (Austria)
“A confrontation with the codes of narrative-representational cinema is one of Peter Tscherkassky´s constant concerns. If one attempts to distill a constant from his films, then this must surely be the oscillation between the abstract and the concrete, between the dry and the sensual, which is the source of energy of his work. The question of belly or brain…
PETER WEIBEL: DEPICTION IS A CRIME - Video Works 1969-75
Peter Weibel (Austria)
“Why a crime? In literary times the observer could not only observe but also be involved in the action itself and report afterwards with words. With pictures you cannot do this, because you are confronted with the decision: either to act / to intervene or to observe / to make a picture, because you cannot at the…
SIEGFRIED A. FRUHAUF: EXPOSED
Siegfried A. Fruhauf (Austria)
“Siegfried Fruhauf's films cannot be denied a certain hypnotic effect. In them, material battles, mirroring effects, and illusions of perception take place, audio tracks and image interference signals rage; all the structural experiments that the filmmaker dares do not lead to a rigidity in the purely theoretical. Fruhauf's cinema is highly atmospheric and decidedly non-academic. On the contrary, it is radically undogmatic, oscillating between abstraction and objectivity, between punk and classicism.” -Stefan Grissemann
VALIE EXPORT: 3 EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS
Valie Export (Austria)
“Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT has been an influential and provocative figure on the international art scene for over three decades. Her practice includes film, video, photography, text and performance. Initially expanding the Actionist project to confront a complex feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral...
VALIE EXPORT: INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES
Valie Export (Austria)
"Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a...
VISIONARY: CONTEMPORARY SHORT DOCUMENTARIES AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM AUSTRIA
Various Directors (Austria)
“VISIONary sees itself as a communicator for innovative examples of contemporary Austrian audiovisual art, specifically short, experimental and documentary films and music videos. While these works represent some of the most interesting examples of contemporary Austrian art at present, they are rarely seen except at festivals and…
