The found footage works of Austrian filmmakers Alfred Kaiser (1940 – 1994) from the 1970s (DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY) and the later films of Virgil Widrich (VIRGIL WIDRICH – SHORT FILMS [1998-2019]) are lesser known than those of Gustav Deutsch and Peter Tscherkassky, but are equally significant in their own right. Kaiser’s films illustrate and demolish the world of Nazi thought and imagery, while Widrich’s films explore time and space, especially the illusion of 3-dimensionality in cinema.

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). Both compilation films bridge the threshold between avant-garde and documentary cinema and were enthusiastically received by audiences and film critics alike upon their release. Kaiser took footage solely from the era of Nazi film production to make both films which each have a running time of just under 30 minutes. He constellated an evocative montage of image and sound from an abundance of excerpts gleaned from cultural, industrial and feature films, as well as propagandistic Nazi newsreels and amateur movies from the 1930s and 1940s. A THIRD REICH and A THIRD REICH FROM ITS REFUSE are multifaceted compositions that derive from an analytical collision of image and sound metaphors. In brief, their conceptual critique equally serves as an attempt to illustrate and demolish the world of Nazi thought and imagery. Kaiser’s early film work was unquestionably influenced by Peter Kubelka’s oeuvre (see FRAGMENTS OF KUBLEKA). As with Kubelka’s films, the interplay of image and sound provide serious and reciprocal commentary from the very start. In Kaiser’s A THIRD REICH, sexual metaphor becomes legible in the offensive war rhetoric of the Third Reich. The audio and sound contrasts are presented in counterpoint: “So it is, when the German air force strikes” is combined with the image of dancing chorus girls, and mottos spoken by children (“This early practice only makes the master”) is followed by imagery of gunfire and sharpshooters aiming at women doing gymnastics. Essentially, Kaiser’s montage undermines and consistently exaggerates the original intention of the material, exposing imminent contradictions.

FILMMAKER ALFRED KAISER — FILMMAKER ALFRED KAISER

In A THIRD REICH FROM ITS REFUSE, Kaiser develops image/sound constellations in a different manner, resulting in a highly emotional filmic reflection. In this movie, the spoken word is almost entirely absent. Nazi images are mainly combined with popular hits of the time with citations of famous propaganda songs, pushing latent aggression and frivolity to the limit.

Sadly, beginning in the 1980s, Kaiser was forced to give up all hope that he would be able to produce any more films in Austria. He abandoned filmmaking, withdrew to the countryside, concentrated on writing, music, and painting, and died suddenly at the age of 54; his passing went unnoticed by the Austrian public. This DVD publication also includes the bonus film 21 WATER COLORS: HITLER SERIES 1974/75, in which Kaiser draws upon several painting styles, historical photographs, and specific works from art history. An accompanying booklet includes the essay, “A Voice in Opposition to the German Spirit” by filmmaker, journalist, professor and curator Constantin Wulff.

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FILMMAKER VIRGIL WIDRICH — FILMMAKER VIRGIL WIDRICH

Austrian artist’s Virgil Widrich’s relationship with the cinematic process – his interest in the construction and materiality of film as both subject matter and narrative framework – was nurtured in his childhood experiences. He grew up in a household with connections to the opera and theater communities. At age 10, his parents give him a Super 8mm camera, with which he proceeded to make amateur films, incorporating special effects of double and triple exposures and stop-motion animation. These early experiences planted the seeds of ideas which would structure his future film work.

Each of Widrich’s films is rooted in different aspects of artistic, cinematic, and scientific research. The primary components of Virgil Widrich’s work are clips from motion pictures and images on paper, through which he experiments with manipulation of space and time (especially the illusion of 3-dimensionality in cinema) in varied fashion, as well as exposing the process of creation. Thus, quite a number of the films in this DVD edition contain companion works (also filmed by Widrich and his collaborators) about the “Making of” specific films (TX TRANSFORM, 1998 and TX REVERSE, 2019; COPY SHOP, 2001; FAST FILM, 2003; and BACK TRACK, 2015). In employing single-framing animation techniques in most all of his movies, Widrich’s experiments parallel the filmmaking process of artist Jeff Scher (who himself animated drawings and paintings on paper via a rotoscoping process).

In the found footage vein, Widrich works with a remix sensibility when he edits together images from hundreds of movies into the same film. In BACK TRACK, he generates 3D clips from (2D) commercial films of the 1950s and 1960s by shooting with a still camera and projecting onto glass. He translates the resulting medley of images into a hand-built three-dimensionality. The visual levels physically collide, and dream and reality superimpose and dissolve, resulting in an audiovisual hall of mirrors in beautiful black-and-white. FAST FILMwas made by digitizing and printing 65,000 images (sourced from more than 300 movies) which Widrich transforms into three dimensional objects that fold, rip, vibrate, layer on, and shatter through one another, resulting in a chase film to end all chases.

In formal terms, COPY SHOP comprises about 118,000 photocopied digital film stills, which Widrich animated on the editing table and filmed in 35 mm. It is the story of a man who works in a copy shop and photocopies himself until the whole world is made up only of him. A feeling of ineluctable madness arises from the process of mechanical reproduction and the concomitant mass duplication of the ego. This film was nominated for an Oscar in 2001. In TX TRANSFORM, Widrich attempts to develop a new configuration of the body and objects in movement; he inverts their respective axes during the recording process, which allows the spectator to read their displacements in time instead of space. This creates disturbing visual effects as well as narratives, such as the co-existence of the present and future of an action, or image, within the same shot. (This is also a technique he employed in TX REVERSE). The accompanying booklet essay “Virgil Widrich’s Accumulated Images” by Nicolas Thévinin further elucidates Widrich’s filmmaking processes and provides insightful analyses of his films.

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