EARLY HISTORY
Saturday 31 May 2003, at 5pm
London Film School

MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN
Peter Kubelka, 1955, 35mm, b/w & colour, sound, 16 min
Kubelka’s motives for making the film lie in his belief that commercial films do not fully exploit cinematic possibilities. He declares that the place of the plot and its ostensibly disparate scenes, and the time, shall be any time at which the film is shown.
“The primary process of abstraction in Mosaic involves the disintegration of the narrative form. For while Mosaic suggests a story film, or a film with several stories, the extreme disjunctiveness of the film negates a narrative response. Sequences are never developed or completed; Kubelka jumps from ‘story’ to ‘story’, eliminating the sequence-to-sequence events normal to the narrative film. He also cuts in various kinds of materials unrelated to the story in any strictly narrative sense (newsreel footage, a pinball game, etc.). The emphasis in the film, then, is on the shot-to-shot event. Disjunctiveness and discontinuity are keynotes. The relationship of one shot to another and of the shots to the similarly disjunctive and discontinuous sounds is the prime source of excitement of the film. The notion of filmic montage, of the juxtaposition of elements, in this case, based largely on formal (similarities or dissimilarities in movement, rhythm, form, light and dark) relationships, is redefined in this work of striking visual and aural complexities.” —Elena Pinto Simon

SCHWECHATER
Peter Kubelka, 1958, 35mm, colour, sound, 2 x 1 min
The material for the second of Kubelka’s ‘metric’ films came from a commission for a beer commercial. Through precise editing, the imagery is distilled down into a crystal shot of cinematic spirit.
“Schwechater lasts for one minute. It contains practically no plot, or only a negative plot. It contains elements with people who are drinking beer. This plot was enforced by external constraint. I simply was forced to film it. The plot doesn’t add any energy to the film.  Nevertheless the film has an incredible visual energy. This minute possesses more visual energy than any other minute of film I have ever seen. Where does it come from? It is because I have broken with the old aesthetic, the old rules of film making, which say that film is movement. On the screen there is not any movement. Film is only the fast projection of stills.” —Peter Kubelka

FILMRESTE
Ernst Schmidt Jr., 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
A ‘Destruktionsfilm’ in which leftover scraps are combined using a strict system to create a rigorous, concrete film structure.
“Possibilities for making films today: film a script as badly as it is written. Produce a film with the participation of everyone. For films with more than one reel, don’t tell the projectionist which part is to be shown first. Shoot a film without an end, making it longer and longer. Make a feature film that can be played backwards and forwards. Make a silent film. Make an 8mm film. Make inter-media films. Film television. Film. Make a film in 20 one-minute parts, which is then shown with 20-minute breaks in a 7-hour screening. Apply for a subsidy from the Ministry for Education. Hang a curtain in front of the screen and project the film on it. Draw a picture on the soundtrack. With 30 projectors, show 30 films on a screen at the same time. Make a real film (with living actors). Make light shows. Make sad movies. Make expanded movies. Make movie movies.” —Ernst Schmidt Jr.

20/68 SCHATZI
Kurt Kren, 1968, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min
Film made from a photograph of a soldier in a field of corpses. The image is censored, obscured from view for all but a brief moment, by Kren’s manipulation of the camera.
“The source material is a photograph, found in an attic, of an SS officer in a concentration camp, surrounded by corpses. Kren lined up a positive, a negative and an over exposed transparency of the image, mounted them on a window and moved the three images against each other. This produces a blurred image, which preserves only the briefest outlines. As he had no zoom, Kren gradually moves the camera away from the transparencies, from a close up to a wide shot. The wide shot is the only moment where one can recognise the man’s image undistorted, for soon the camera moves back to the close up position.” —Hans Scheugl

13/67 SINUS ß
Kurt Kren, 1967, 16mm, b/w, silent, 6 min
A study of the body, referring both to his earlier films and the photography of Muybridge.
“The images I used are taken from a book on facial expressions and gestures. I also used images of heads from the Szondi tests, then brief shots of Venice and in Prague, taken from a tower, and in the middle, shots of the Destruction In Art Symposium in London, 1966. Mühl and Brus performed a public action there. I have never done such a thing before, mixing many kinds of material, at least not in this way. Nevertheless the film still has unity. When I watch the film, I can sense that it is right. But I can’t explain why.” —Kurt Kren, interviewed by Hans Scheugl

HERNALS
Hans Scheugl, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Time and perspective are disjointed as a series of street situations are shot simultaneously from two cameras and consecutively edited together. Ambient sync sound fortifies the rhythmic cutting.
“In front of the camera: Valie Export, Peter Weibel. In Hernals documentary and pseudo-documentary procedures were filmed simultaneously by two cameras from different viewpoints. The material was then divided into phases of movement. In the montage each phase was doubled. The techniques used in this process vary. Also the sound was doubled, again using different techniques. Two realities, differently perceived according to the conditions of this film, were edited into one synthetic reality, where everything is repeated. This doubling up destroys the postulate: identity of copy and image. Loss of identity, loss of reality (e.g. schizophrenia). One has only to imagine a theater piece, where the actors recite each sentence twice, make each gesture twice, play each scene twice – and one conceives perhaps the monstrosity of our reality, which does not allow for duplications. Time is not stopped, but streched – time as fissure between copy and image, time, which creates space.” —Peter Weibel

FINGERPRINT
Peter Weibel, 1968, 16mm, b/w, silent, 2 min
An extremely rare hand-made film by Weibel, who worked mostly on expanded cinema and multi-media events. In this work, the performative element was the private creation of the film itself.
“One of the few expanded cinema actions made on celluloid is Fingerprint, a one-minute long film, on which Weibel imprinted his fingerprint frame by frame onto the transparent filmstrip. ‘from its fundamental position, fingerprint not only speaks of the world, the representation of the object, the sign, but also of speaks of itself, its object. the film was not created through exposures but through impressions – film not as a trace of light but as a trace of touch.’” —Hans Scheugl quoting Peter Weibel

TEXT 1
Marc Adrian, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min
Combinations of words appear on the screen according to a random system produced by computer. An example of Adrian’s ‘Schriftfilm’ series of text based works.
“With Text 1, Adrian explores the similarity of meaning by presenting a selection of individual words that represent the same meaning in both German and English language. Articulating these upon the black negative space, Adrian embodies them in time and the peculiar receding illusionistic space of the void with each preceding word leaving traces of itself to join with the one that follows. The revelation apparent in this film is not simply that these words are reduced to mere pictorial images at play within an illusionistic field (as each retains its own integrity of meaning), but rather the oppositional duality that each proposes occurs in a ‘post-object’ environment of reading. Quite simply, each code retains its intrinsic relationship to what it represents despite that representation occurring in two distinct forms of language (German and English). The flow of the construction of meaning emanates from Adrian’s proposition through two distinct channels – each retains a similitude in reference to the other, yet each channel of post-situationist articulation remains separate.” —Peter Mudie

BLACK MOVIE
Marc Adrian, 1957, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
One of the earliest imageless films, inspired by Rothko and monochromatic painting. Created using only blank, coloured leader and a pre-composed editing score. 
“In 1957 Kurt bought some coloured leaders. We wanted to make a film but we had no equipment at all. Leader was cheap, but then we didn’t know it wasn’t film material, that it was already exposed. I designed a graphic scheme, in which the composition had some repetitive forms, like a fugue. Then we tried to use this plan to splice together this coloured leader. It held together, but only for one projection. I would have a laundry basket to put under the projector because the film would always come out in parts. Fortunately I had marked the pieces with numbers, so for the next performances we were able to put it together again. Wherever I went with the film to a lab they told me I was crazy to print such a thing. Amongst other things, this was one reason why I had to build my own printer. That film was called Black Movie, because there was nothing black in it. Then we made a second version, there are three or four in all, but the first is the best. These first films were monochrome, and we wanted to keep away from meaning, as with abstract art, but this is very difficult. Within a short time we found out that the brain is built in such a way that whatever you present to perception, it forms a meaning. Later, I had to use a computer to overcome the painful idea that I was projecting my own person into the work.” —Marc Adrian, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2003

DIE GEBURT DER VENUS
Moucle Blackout, 1970-72, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min
An underground animation of still photographs and mirror manipulations forms a meditation on sex and mortality. Soundtrack assembled from cut-up Beatles.
“The basic material consisted of about 30 photos showing some close friends, and a dead pig we had found on a road. The pictures of the pig are used as a symmetric motion-montage. I took proper and left/right-inverted photos which are moved back and forth symmetrically over the central axis. The introduction-scene shows Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” cross-fading the figures at both sides and following the title, also Venus with a symmetrical pig-montage. A detail of B’s picture appears at the end of the film on a wrapper of a lavoratory-deodorant (snif). Three Beatles songs emphasise the performance with their text. The pig is used as a symbol for the woman as a victim. It also stands for any associations to pig as proverbial: poor swine, filthy pig, greedy pig or it may allude to a pigsty or a pig in a poke, etc. The friends appear as two dancing women, two lovers, a cock, a sex-changing head, etc. Some of the photos were shot by Marc Adrian.” —Moucle Blackout

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