EARLY HISTORY
3 June—8 July 2003
UK Tour Program 1

UNSERE AFRIKAREISE
Peter Kubelka, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
“I play with the emotions and try to tear the emotions loose from people, so that they would gain distance to their emotions, to their own feelings.”
“I know of no other cinema like this. The ultimate precision, even fixity, that Kubelka’s films achieve frees them to become objects that have some of the complexity of nature itself – but they are films of a nature refined and defined, remade into a series of relationships. Those rare and miraculous moments in nature when the sun’s rays align themselves precisely with the edge of a rock or the space between two buildings, or when a pattern on sand or in clouds suddenly seems to take on some other aspect, animal or human, are paralleled in single events of a Kubelka film. The whole film is forged out of so many such precisions with an ecstatic compression possible only in cinema.” —Fred Camper

SCHWECHATER
Peter Kubelka, 1958, 16mm, 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

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

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

MANN & FRAU & ANIMAL
Valie Export, 1970-73, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 8 min
“Instead of the holy trinity: father, son, holy spirit, instead of the profane trinity: mother, family, state, instead of the social trinity: father, mother, children the film treats the real trilogy in 3 sections. What unites man and woman (not uniquely for sure, but what is being concealed) is the history of nature.” —Valie Export
“The earlier films of Valie Export, one feels, were motivated by the author’s desire and needs to investigate her own subjectivity, with the audience as a necessary part of the transference and polemic. Mann & Frau & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures. Thinking about my ‘quite erotic’ tag of that film, I realise that as a viewer I am experiencing a sexuality like that of childhood – one motivated by curiosity, a prosaic pleasure in looking, but free from fantasy. It is quite unlike the experience of ordinary pornography which is invested with the erotic almost exclusively through its symbolisation of power.” —Joanna Kiernan

SYNTAGMA
Valie Export, 1984, 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min
“Syntagma is like a rigid gaze directed at oneself as if one were two persons; staring at oneself and the camera staring at oneself. Through these two eyes only the staring can be perceived, reflections of identity, the mirror as something impenetrable, like a veil being scrutinised. The more the mirror reflects, the more it moves into oblivion like an impenetrable object even if it makes imprints of itself on pictures.” —Valie Export
“The connection of the elements of a picture implies its structure and its possibility, its form of representation.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 2.15
“According to this view, the representing relationship which makes it a picture also belongs to the picture.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.1513
“This short film consolidates not only the great variety of avant-garde techniques accumulated over two decades of work in Expanded Cinema, video and photography, but also the insights gleaned from her body work in performances, actions and installations. At the same time, feminism both as methodology and personal experiential stance, which had left an indelible mark on Export’s art during the 1970s, continued to be the single most important impulse and thematic source in her work in the 1980s. The reappropriation of the female body from its perceived sense of alienation has been at the forefront of Export’s feminist concerns. The female body, thus perceived, is in fragments, split and ruined, lacking cohesion, “the site not only of an anatomical but of discursive lack”.”  —Roswitha Müller, quoting Kaja Silverman “The Acoustic Mirror”

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