COUNTING THE WAVES: A SUMMARY OF ACTIVITY

1950s

Independent filmmaking emerged in Austria in the early 1950s. For a long period after the Second World War, artists in its capital city Vienna, deep within central Europe, were isolated from the developing artistic cultures of the western world. With no domestic tradition of auteur cinema, the idea of film as means of personal expression was rooted more in the country’s history of radicalism in painting, architecture, literature, music and philosophy.

Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955) by Peter Kubelka is widely acknowledged as the first truly avant-garde film to be made in Austria. Though earlier films by Herbert Vesely (beginning with und die kinder spielen so gern soldaten, 1951) and Kurt Steinwendner & Wolfgang Kudrnofsy (Der Rabe, 1951) started to move in this direction, Mosaik certainly represented a giant leap in cinematic thinking. Ferry Radax, a Surrealist photographer who assisted on that film, subsequently worked for several years on the surreal, quasi-narrative Sonne Halt! (1959-62). Marc Adrian and Kurt Kren (working individually and in collaboration) began to experiment with coloured leader and pre-composed editing scores in 1956-57. As the decade ended, Kubelka established his theory of ‘metric film’ with Adebar (1957), Schwechater (1958) and Arnulf Rainer (1960). These three works explore rhythm and formal composition from a fundamental position that cinematic articulation occurs in the space between two adjacent frames.

1960s

During the 1960s, Vienna’s most active group of artists were the Wiener Aktionisten, whose unprecedented, provocative actions shocked contemporary society by engaging with the ‘politics of experience’. Using nudity, ritual and violence (and quantities of raw meat, blood and other seminal fluids) they confronted modern taboos and challenged conventional attitudes toward the human body. Many of these happenings were documented, notably in key works by Kurt Kren, who developed a hard, rapid editing style that astutely translated these uncompromising activities onto film (e.g. Mama und Papa (1964), Leda mit dem Schwan (1964), Selbstverstümmelung (1965)). Artists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Otmar Bauer also shot or participated in their own films of the ‘actions’.

With Kren as the direct connection to the first wave, a second generation of filmmakers began to investigate the medium, contributing to what would later become the international structural / materialist film debate (here directly connected to the material actions of the Aktionisten). 1967 was an intensely productive year: Kren made Sinus , TV and 20. September (the legendary “eating, drinking, pissing, shitting film”), Hans Scheugl made Wien 17 Schumanngasse and Hernals, and Ernst Schmidt Jr. made Filmreste and began the Farbfilm trilogy. The following year, Gottfried Schlemmer made his own uncompromising statement by shooting a 10-minute fixed view of a primitive digital clock in 8h01-8h11.

At the Palais Palffy nightclub on 26 January 1967 a film screening gave birth to Austrian expanded cinema as Peter Weibel, with no conventional films to show, presented Action Lecture No. 1 and Nivea, combining projection and performance. ‘Film happenings’ were innovative and spontaneous, often relatively inexpensive to present and in vogue with the cultural landscape of the underground. Valie Export and Peter Weibel, working either together or alone, embraced this new genre, building their performances on political and theoretical frameworks, with communication and technology at the core of many projects. Tapp- und Tastkino, Cutting and the more whimsical Exit and Ping Pong date from 1968. There was a distinct sense of one-upmanship in the conception of many expanded works: Hans Scheugl attempted to make the final statement with zzz: hamburg special – a length of thread wound through the projector for any format (preferably 35mm CinemaScope).

Export, Kren, Scheugl, Schlemmer, Schmidt Jr. and Weibel founded the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative in early 1968, fired up with enthusiasm generated by the international festival at Knokke-Le-Zoute that New Year. They began to regularly exhibit abroad, participating at festivals and on the flourishing cooperative circuit. But by 1969, the movement was already losing impetus as the Coop lost key distributing members to Karlheinz Hein’s semi-commercial Progressive Art Productions (based in Munich), and several moved out of Austria. To continue the activities in Vienna, Franz Fallenberg (aka Falmbigl) founded the Kuratorium Neue Österreichischer Film, organising screenings and alternative distribution.

Outside of the Coop circle, Franz Novotny, Michael Pilz and Gerhard Rühm were among those also making films during this period. Marc Adrian used early computers to bring randomisation into his working practice, and made several films with text as the only visual content. In the late 1960s he entered a period of formalist diary films that had psychoanalytic bias. He has taught in Austria, Germany and the USA and continued to work consistently through to the present day. Peter Kubelka worked for five years on the precise sound and image editing of Unsere Afrikareise (1966) and subsequently made his first journey to the USA, where he became a central figure in the international avant-garde and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives. Together with Peter Konlechner, Kubelka had already established the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in 1964, in direct opposition to the policies of the state Filmarchiv. This film museum, whose exhibition space was the screen, collected and exhibited the great works of cinema with particular emphasis on avant-garde history.

1970s

The next decade brought lean years for Austrian filmmaking. There were a few, almost resigned, pieces of expanded cinema in 1971 – Schmidt Jr. made Umweltschutz (Environmental Protection) which was sent to a festival with the instruction that it be thrown away (it was) and Kren shot the funeral of his friend Klemmer and threw the exposed reel into the open grave – but overall, the tide of enthusiasm and activity that dominated the late 1960s was soon dissipated around the turn of the decade.

Kren continued to make many short films, settling first in Germany in 1971 before relocating to the USA in 1978. Weibel began to work with video before becoming a multi-media installation artist and theoretician. Valie Export was likewise multi-disciplinary; her evolving performance activity incorporated developments in video and live transmission, though she also continued to make film. Having created … Remote… Remote… and Mann & Frau & Animal, (two radical affirmations of female sexuality exploring her body and physical/emotional reaction to pleasure and pain, both 1973), she was the first recipient of a new funding scheme which allowed her to make Unsichtbare Gegner (1976), the initial part of a trilogy of feature films. Schmidt Jr., also received such an award from the Bundesministerium für Unterricht und Kunst and, working together with many friends, produced the documentitive collage Wienfilm 1896-1976 in 1977. In 1974 Hans Scheugl and Schmidt Jr. published an extensive two-part lexicon of the international underground and experimental film movement. The long out-of-print “Subgeschichte des Films” (Subhistory of Film) is still widely coveted.

There were few new filmmakers creating short films during this time. The painter Maria Lassnig made a succession of personal animations in the USA throughout the 1970s, later returning to Vienna where she taught and founded the Studio für Experimentelle Animation in 1982. In the documentary field, Wilhelm Gaube created portraits of Austrian artists and Alfred Kaiser reappropriated Nazi newsreel footage in the sardonic compilation film Ein drittes Reich (1975). Under the influence of a fatal cocktail of Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, Dietmar Brehm started work in Linz in 1974, commencing a monumental body of work in 8mm and 16mm. Many were turning to the newly accessible super-8 format by the end of the decade, kickstarted by the rough and ready punk aesthetic of do-it-yourself. One of the most productive was Robert Quitta, who made Film ist Fest, a series of 150 short films, between 1977-79.

1980s

Throughout the 1980s, a third wave began to appear, including Linda Christanell, Gustav Deutsch, Norbert Gmeindl, Renate Kordon, Wolfgang Lehner, Bady Minck, Bärbel Neubauer, Lisl Ponger, Johannes Rosenberger and Arnold Schicker, many of them working in the smaller gauge. To harness this new surge of activity, a revitalised Austria Filmmakers Cooperative was initiated by Hans Scheugl, Moucle Blackout and others in 1982. Inspired by the active super-8 scene he observed in Berlin, Peter Tscherkassky began filmmaking, captivated by the grainy image produced by the format. Using repetition, recycling footage and often manually exposing and printing the filmstrip, he dives straight to the core of the medium, making Urlaubsfilm (1983), Motion Picture (1984), Manufraktur (1985) and tabula rasa (1987-89).

Valie Export realised the short Syntagma (1983) and a third feature Die Praxis der Liebe (1984), as well as producing several documentary projects for Austrian television. Mara Mattuschka’s films, such as Kugelkopf, Der Untergang der Titania (both 1985) and Es hat mich sehr gefreut (1987), are performance based, sharing some surface similarities to the earlier work of Export and Aktionismus. Appearing in character as Mimi Minus, language and the female body are at the centre of her filmic inquiry. In 1989, Martin Arnold made pièce touchée, the first of a celebrated trilogy of films in which he applied analytical step-printing to ‘found’ Hollywood footage, bringing hidden meanings from apparently benign material. Kurt Kren abandoned filmmaking and worked as a guard at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Ernst Schmidt Jr. died destitute in Vienna, 1988.

1990s

Sixpack Film was established in 1990 to promote the work of Austrian filmmakers to international film festivals, in many ways as a direct response to the present state of the Austrian Coop at that time. The founder members Martin Arnold, Brigitta Burger-Utzer, Alexander Horwath, Lisl Ponger and Peter Tscherkassky recognised the need for a more stable and proficient distribution outlet following the phenomenal success of pièce touchée on the festival circuit. The organisation soon expanded into a distribution outlet and started to organise events, fostering a new surge of activity throughout the decade. This in turn inspired the next wave of filmmakers including Joseph Dabering, Thomas Korschil, Hannes Langeder, Thomas Steiner and Virgil Widrich. Many who emerged in the 1990s were students of the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst Wien and Kunsthochschule Linz including Alexander Curtis, Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler, Siegfried Fruhauf and Norbert Pfaffenbichler.

Meanwhile, in Frankfurt, students of Peter Kubelka’s classes at the Städelschule (including Kerstin Cmelka, Thomas Draschan, Albert Sackl, Bernhard Schreiner, Georg Wasner and Günther Zehetner) develop into an active group, absolutely committed to the film medium. In 1999 Peter Weibel became director of the ZKM centre for new media in Karlsruhe, Germany, while Valie Export continues to lecture at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln. Kren had returned to Vienna in 1990 and died there in 1998.

Dietmar Brehm assembled his magnum opus Schwarzer Garten (1987-99), a brooding sequence of horror films utilising his ‘pumping screen’ technique. Tscherkassky continued his exploration of process with Parallel Space: Inter-View (1992), Happy End (1996) and then his multiple award winning CinemaScope trilogy L’Arrivée, Outer Space and Dream Work (1998-2001). With the Film Ist. project of tableaux films and live events that reappropriate footage from the early years of cinema, Gustav Deutsch became a major presence on the international scene.

Johannes Rosenberger and friends founded Navigatorfilm in 1992 as an independent production company for the development of creative documentary films. Joerg Burger, Andreas Horvath and Martina Kudlacek and are also active in the documentary genre, while Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel and Kathrin Resetarits make a more personal style of film essay.

A mid-1990s retrospective film series curated by Steve Anker for San Francisco Cinematheque toured extensively, prompting a worldwide revival of interest in the pioneering work of Austrian filmmakers. Independent filmmaking went through another incredibly productive period, built upon the foundation of its rich history, impassioned teaching and comprehensive critical writing, and often subsidised by the forward-thinking .KUNST bundeskanzleramt funding body.

The Present

While many artists continue to work with film material as an aesthetic choice, by the end of the 1990s young students of film and media were embracing the now affordable and rapidly advancing digital video technology. Michaela Grill, Jürgen Moritz, [n:ja], reMI (Renate Oblak & Michael Pinter), Billy Roisz and Michaela Schwentner are innovators of this energetic new field. These contemporary artists have developed a dynamic movement that is respected on an international scale. Their works, often created in collaboration with electronic musicians such as Christian Fennesz, Radian and Martin Siewert, are collectively celebrated in the series of “Audiovisions” touring packages from Sixpack. Martin Arnold has also created digital work, applying compositing technology to ‘industrial’ cinema in the context of his Deanimated installations at Kunsthalle Wien. Independent filmmaking activity will continue, though the variety of mediums used by the artists will doubtless become more diverse.

Mark Webber, 2003

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VALIE EXPORT. EXPANDED CINEMA: REMOTE LECTURE
Saturday 31 May 2003, at 3pm
London Film School

The lecture text, which has been especially prepared by Valie Export, will be read by Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

“The concept and the intention of my early work in Expanded Cinema was to decode reality as it was manipulated in film, to transport the cinematographic apparatus into the installation of time and space in order to break out of the two-dimensionality of the flat surface. The deconstruction of dominant reality, the deconstruction and abstraction of materials, the attempt to find new forms of communication and to realise them were also in the centre of my analysis. My work was concentrated on breaking with the traditional form in cinema, the commercial-conventional sequence of film production, shooting, montage, projection, and to replace them in part with aspects of reality, as new signs of the real. Presentation, product, production, reality form a unity in Expanded Cinema.” —Valie Export in conversation with Roswitha Müller, in her book Fragments of the Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1984

INTERRUPTED LINE
Valie Export, 1971-72, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
“A line is filmed through the windshield of a moving car and proceeds on the rear mirror. The movement coming from the other direction and the ongoing movement is visible, both only interrupted by the driving car. The shifting interruption on the space-time line has the size of a car. The cinema as a car, the car as a joint of time (curvature between future and past), the cinema as an interruption of the normal time.” —Valie Export
“The camera is stationed in the back of a moving car and focuses on the dividing line ahead. At the same time, the frame includes the rear-view mirror, in which the dividing line is continued behind the car. The car functions as the interruption of the space-time continuum, as “the seam of time, a bend between future and past”. Metaphorically, the car stands for the interruption of the everyday flow of time by the time of the film.” —Roswitha Müller

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

… REMOTE … REMOTE …
Valie Export, 1973, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
“Human behaviour in contrast to machines (animals) is influenced by events in the past, as far back as these experiences may lie. Therefore there exists a psychic paratime parallel to the objective time, where the prayers of anguish and guilt, the inability to win, deformations which rip open the skin, becoming aware of oneself, have their constant effects. I demonstrate something which represents past and present.” —Valie Export
“… Remote… Remote… was one of the films categorised by a considerable number of women as typifying despicable excesses and extreme violence. People frequently reacted to the film with horror, incomprehension and scorn. In showing emotion, gentleness and sensitivity as female qualities, there was no place for aggression – cutting and violently opening were equated with male behaviour; having to penetrate in order to possess. When Valie Export shaves and trims herself, the sight of her provokes fantasies, revolving around acts done to the body. Yet there is nothing dreadful about a woman trimming her body, especially in the places where she enhances the glamour imposed on her body by the civilising influences of the world around her. And the fact that you have to suffer to achieve beauty has always brought a knowing smile to a woman’s lips. The way in which Valie Export grooms herself however, involves unconventional touching and violation which goes beyond the familiar sight of a woman ‘harmlessly’ doing herself up. This triggered, and continues to trigger, huge defensive reactions among many women. Such a reaction represents the easiest way of emphatically rejecting something that has got right under the skin. No-one is allowed to encroach into the recesses of our private existence, in which the damage suffered and our own self-mutilation remains safeguarded behind a front of normality.” —Renate Lippert

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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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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DIETMAR BREHM. SCHWARZER GARTEN.
Saturday 31 May 2003, at 8pm
London Film School

THE MURDER MYSTERY (2ND VERSION)
Dietmar Brehm, 1987/92, 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min
“In about 1987 I wanted to make a film more for the audience than previous films. When working on The Murder Mystery, I hesitated which style to give the film. Not that The Murder Mystery was to be a slick film, quite the opposite. But the question for me was what to show, and with what kind of clarity? Not with regard to the sharpness of the film, but more the relationship between the time structure and the determination of content; the question was what did I want to show, and how did I want to show it? In any event, I wanted the film to be optically manipulated using the ‘pumping screen’ technique. In previous films (eg Kopfstücke) I formulated more abstracted structures and blurred films, which drive the viewer from the film image into his own world of presentiment. The Murder Mystery was to be more direct. I had some fantastic super-8 material, partly found, partly bought by chance. In addition, I had some pornographic material with an ideal scene. I devised a plan, whereby I ensured that I had enough room to manoeuvre in order to hallucinate my way cinematically into the prepared material. Nevertheless, this plan had to retain a rigorous structure; it was not to become indistinct. I filmed approximately another 30% in addition to this outside material, and then filmed myself into the montage of the scenes. An effective sadistic-pornographic matrix was generated.
“The Murder Mystery was to be deceptive. The story of The Murder Mystery begins to speak in the minds of the viewers.” —Dietmar Brehm

BLICKLUST
Dietmar Brehm, 1992, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“In 1991 I received a non-identifiable + worn out super-8 S/M Porno film, which shows a woman tied up in various manners + I couldn’t resist. I knew that I had film material of surgery + I mixed the tied-up woman with the surgery material confrontationally + still a few more + and to 2/3 of a drawer of found footage until Blicklust-end.
“The ‘pumping screen’ films The Murder Mystery + Blicklust are the first two of a planned six-part series which reflects on sexuality + violence + which will possibly be combined under the title “Dietmar Brehm Horror”. Title of next episode: Party. Basically, I show in this series what I always see on TV. The TV set is one of my favourite sources. I like to watch TV without sound + with other manipulations. And I watch restlessly the real + fake dead bodies. They are always there + I have simply gotten used to the fact that TV is a pump of corpses. In fact, I like better the filtered reality than the actual one. I prefer distance rather than closeness. At the moment, Yugoslavia + Somalia produce a mountain of corpses, others next. According to schedule. The planet is a planet of destruction. The bullet flies without contact somewhere + all around the area of inexplicability + sometimes I have the feeling that all is a process of decay of bodies alive + I suspect that all the structures of society, as well as the way their function, are legalised diseases of the mind. Everything should work differently. Parallel to the film work, which tackles the problem of sexuality/violence, a matrix develops in several short and longer films, in which various cinematographical manifestations of light will be investigated + next to filmic considerations are a few considerations to graphical and painting work on paper surface and on screen.” —Dietmar Brehm

PARTY
Dietmar Brehm, 1995, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“Sometimes I film so that the actors seem to belong to the undead. The construction of the Found-Footage-Party shows Russian, Japanese, American and my own material which is hallucinated into a matrix in which functioning and non-functioning body parts appear as optical lubricant shadow labyrinth whilst simultaneously we hear someone shaving.” —Dietmar Brehm

MACUMBA
Dietmar Brehm, 1995, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“Sometimes the camera films of its own volition. Macumba shows an optical tangle in 13 scenes. As a start signal one hears a double hammer blow arising from a black screen, a sound like the nailing shut of a coffin. Macumba develops slowly out of the black. A black porno couple on the telephone in London. Then they meet on a snake in a park and are, together with Kalahari Bushmen, mixed to a film matrix which is as incomprehensible as real life. Throughout Macumba the sound of rain can be heard.” —Dietmar Brehm

KORRIDOR
Dietmar Brehm, 1998, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“At the end of 1996 in an old shop in Vienna specialising in film materials I found a tin with indeterminable pieces of 16mm film showing much wear and tear. They dated from the late 60s. After a cursory glance I thought ‘yes’. The found footage material was ideal for the horror series.
“I prepared the film for compilation using mirror projection and filmed myself in detailed structures through the light axis. For the introductory sequence I chose the top of a poplar tree and a neo-gothic house. The lighting of the body scenes as filmed is very harsh, whereas I shot the poplar top and the neo-gothic house both over and under-exposed. Then I mixed associative tones throughout the corridor. The first version cut showed the bodies in a state which was too excited and then I began to structure the film with black frame sequences of varying lengths.
“The man who is lying in bed with the woman who appears dead was perfect for the start of the body scenes. I concentrated the lens on a very narrow view and allowed the horde of found-footage actors to react with each others. I wanted to construct a insidious / traumatic phenomenon in which the head and body glide through the picture again and again and are extinguished in the black frames. At the end a man whips a man and an actress is tied up. The top of the poplar tree appears under-to-over exposed while a hand glides through the picture twice.” —Dietmar Brehm

ORGANICS
Dietmar Brehm, 1998/99, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“Since 1996, parallel to all the other paintings and film work I made hundreds of pictures each with the title “Organics”, and each on the same size of paper – 61 x 43.5 cm. It is from this drawing phase that the film Organics developed. I already had the perfect found-footage lead whom I named ‘Hey Joe’. Round ‘Hey Joe’, who appears repeatedly as an observer, I constructed a matrix of body details which are broken up by a number of explosions.
“Organics begins with the observation of a Zorro mask and a distorted / veiled woman’s face. A shot of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris develops into a women’s foot scene which leads to a longer kiss scene punctuated by an explosion, falling leaves, a tank, touching hands, a hand in a plaster cast, bunches of grass and a dark cellar door. After observation of a skeleton detail, the found footage actors become involved in slowly feeling each other’s body. A man swings a necklace back and forth like a pendulum, a head being bandaged, attempts at face make-up, details of operations… in a flickering, pumping screen light until, in the end, ‘Hey Joe’ centres the picture briefly with his penis. After the hand movements which follow, the veiled face of a woman appears again, longer this time, to be observed by ‘Hey Joe’ until the film floodlight is turned off. The Organics soundtrack is pared down to a few slow note combinations.” —Dietmar Brehm

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MARTIN ARNOLD. THE INTERRUPTED IMAGE.
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 3pm
London Film School

REMISE
Martin Arnold, 1994, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
Advertising trailer commissioned to promote the Kunsthalle Remise arts centre in Vienna.

JESUS WALKING ON SCREEN
Martin Arnold, 1993, 35mm, b/w, sound, 1 min
Advertising trailer commissioned for the “Jesus Walking on Screen: Jesus on Film 1898-1993” season at Stadtkino Wien.

DON’T – DER ÖSTERREICHFILM
Martin Arnold, 1996, 35mm, b/w, sound, 3 min
Arnold’s contribution to the “100 Years of Cinema” anniversary is based on footage from a bizarre post-war propaganda film that intends to demonstrate tradition and national pride in order to regain Austrian independence from the UFO flying ‘World Police’.
“Don’t was commissioned for the 100 years of cinema celebrations in Austria. I don’t think it’s a great piece, it’s a bit too much like Bruce Conner, but I enjoyed playing with the footage. The original film was such a stupid movie. It’s called 1 April 2000 by Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1953), and was the first film produced in Austria after the war. I think the church and all kinds of institutions to get together some money for it. Back then, we still had the allied forces in Vienna; what we call the contract of the free state of Austria was signed in 1955. The film was shot in the period when the Austrian’s didn’t have any government, we were controlled by the allied forces and this fact is reflected in the film, people were already fed up because they wanted to have their own government. In the story they decide not to obey the allies any more, so the allied forces call upon the World Police for help, and the World Police are in flying saucers. The Viennese show the World Police how nice they are, how beautiful the women are here and how good the wine tastes, to convince the World Police they should be free again to make the allied forces leave. It’s so crazy it’s unbelievable!” —Martin Arnold

DEANIMATED: THE INVISIBLE GHOST
Martin Arnold, 2002, video, b/w, sound, 56 min (excerpt)
What remains of a feature film if the cast are removed ? What remains of the plot if the protagonists are removed ? Digital compositing techniques were used to erase characters from a 1950s murder mystery starring Bela Lugosi, creating a study of absence and the void.
“I had always wondered how an empty feature film would look; a feature film without actors. The idea was always on my mind, but with no possibility to do it. Nowadays, working with computers and graphic design software, it’s possible at a level where it’s affordable, though of course it meant I had to change my way of working. I had an invitation from Kunsthalle Wien, and so I told them about this erasure project and that it would be nice to set it up in an empty theatre. The idea is that you’re confronted by an almost empty screen, actors only show up from time to time, and I also wanted to have a space where you would have too many seats, to reinforce this feeling of emptiness. With only one or two people in the room, they would really feel alone, at an empty movie.” —Martin Arnold

PIÈCE TOUCHÉE
Martin Arnold, 1989, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min
The celebrated trilogy in which Arnold applies avant-garde techniques to found Hollywood footage. The dazzling frame-by-frame manipulations expose the unconscious psychology hidden deep within harmless ‘industrial’ cinema. At turns enlightening, intense, sexual and profoundly amusing.
“Arnold’s original material is a piece of ‘found-footage’ from the 1950s. 18 seconds long and very typical for the period. A quiet take: a living room, a woman in an armchair. Her husband opens the door, kisses her, then moves out of the picture accompanied by a disturbing pan, his wife follows him. In Arnold’s film the sequence takes 16 minutes. Cadre by cadre, it becomes an exiting tango of movements. But pièce touchée is more than just a matter of forms. The reflections, distortions and delays it displays challenge Hollywood’s stable system of space and time.” —Alexander Horwath

PASSAGE À L’ACTE
Martin Arnold, 1993, 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 min
“With passage à l’acte it was still done in an analogue way, this was still the time of non-linear editing systems became available. I was working on a flatbed and I had the image track with each frame numbered, and I had the magnetic sound with it. I tried to figure out what was going on in the image, let’s say between frames 10 and 15, and what’s going on in terms of the sound at that point, which noise comes up when. Essentially, I was always moving between the optical printer and the flatbed, to listen to the sound. I had to discard many things because sometimes the image was good but the sound didn’t work at all, and sometimes the sound was really nice but the image was boring. It was a long process to get the moments together where both sound and image made sense to me.” —Martin Arnold

ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY
Martin Arnold, 1998, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
“In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which, together with pièce touchée and passage à l’acte, forms a sort of trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold’s campaign of deconstruction of classic Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The process links in with the other two films. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these ‘single cells’ and a new rhythm – a kind of cloning procedure – Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous doppelgänger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles. In Alone… the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates to sheer lust. Since passage à l’acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the soundtrack along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone… is the eerie, rasping “silence” of sound film, pregnant with suppressed tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full, living present is seemingly at its strongest – in the screen presence of Judy Garland singing – one senses the machine, and, implicitly, death, at work.” —Dirk Schaefer

The installation Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost will be exhibited at the Fact Centre, Liverpool from 4 July to 24 August 2003.

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RECENT HISTORY
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 5pm
London Film School

TRADITION IST DIE WEITERGABE DES FEUERS UND NICHT DIE ANBETUNG DER ASCHE
Gustav Deutsch, 1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
An elegy to nitrate film material. Image by Deutsch, sound by Fennesz.
“Some found footage – made of cellulose nitrate – the material
Fire – a threat to nitrate film – its theme
A quote – from Gustav Mahler – its message
The soundtrack – by Christian Fennesz – as the bridge” —Gustav Deutsch, 1999

LA SORTIE
Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 1999, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
Reduction into abstraction though the printing process. In memory of the Lumière Brothers and the workers leaving the factory.
“The first film of cinematographic history shows workers leaving a factory. The title of this work, which is 50 seconds long and bequeathed to us by the Lumière brothers, is La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine. There are three known versions of the work. In the hardware and software of the cinematographic ‘machine’ resides much of the specifically mechanical charm of the industrial age. In one sense it is a paradox that the Lumières began film history with workers leaving the factory instead of giving place of honour to them working on the production lines. Over a hundred years later Siegfried A. Fruhauf has made a fourth version of La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine. This remake gives short shrift to the unconscious irony of the Lumière films. Fruhauf needs six minutes to run through the current fate of industry. Fourteen workers are present here: five on the (optically) vertical axis, the rest cross the horizontal axis in the background. Their movements form a cross – a symbol of death as a ballet méchanique. The initial image is transformed into almost abstract black and white surfaces, harnessed Sisyphus-like to a lunatic dance of repetition. Fruhauf increases the acceleration of the striding workers in discrete steps until they are tearing along – the capacity of the film tested to its outer limits – until it can’t take any more. Maximum acceleration leads to stasis – after the acceleration throughout the film comes the logical consequence – the last frame – the freeze frame. Nothing more can happen. The model (literally) of progress collapses. And instead there is paralysis. A dead-end. The workers are motionless, and with them the factory. Rien ne va plus.” —Peter Tscherkassky)

MOVING PICTURE
Linda Christanell, 1995, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Variations on a view from the filmmaker’s window mysteriously merge with a photo-portrait of Barbara Stanwyck. Film loaded with introspection, ageless like a box by Cornell.
“My starting point is the astonishing experience of the changes in one and the same picture. The motive of the film is the view out of my studio window in Schönlaterngasse. I have observed the transition from street to sky over a longer period. Changes in the day, the seasons and my inner psychological state bring movement to the frozen frame. The inner changes are a particular point of emphasis in the film. The experience of the freeze frame view is overlapped by material corresponding to the psychic layers of consciousness. I imagine various motives in the street – for example, glittering water with flying white seagulls, a portrait of Barbara Stanwyck, a scene from Berlin and one from San Francisco.” —Linda Christanell

31/75 ASYL
Kurt Kren, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
A pastoral scene fractured by a complex series of masks. Real time is superimposed in filmic time / real landscape is reconfigured into an artificial panorama.
“It was the first time that I had lived in the countryside and I didn’t like it that much. I was always a city slicker. Maybe I went slightly bonkers. Maybe I wanted to tear the whole thing apart. Technically, I shot the film in 21 days. Every day I would run the whole film through the camera, but as I said only once a day. In front of the lens there was a cut out mask with five holes in it. Through these holes the film was exposed. The holes changed with every day. All the holes together, throughout the 21 days would open up the full frame. In some holes it rains, in others the sun is shining, in others it snows. It was done in Saarland, close to the French border.” —Kurt Kren, interviewed by Hans Scheugl

ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Kerstin Cmelka, 2000, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
A secret garden, composed of dreams.
“Et In Arcadia Ego is a ‘painterly’ film, and even its title reinforces this impression. This formula and its variations “conjure up a vision of unsurpassable happiness which is turned backwards toward the past”, wrote Erwin Panofsky in his essay Et In Arcadia Ego. Poussin und das Elegische (1936), which traces the long tradition and gradual change in the significance of the Arcadia motif in fine arts from memento mori to a symbol of “melancholy pregnant with memory”.” —Isabella Reicher

SEMIOTIC GHOSTS
Lisl Ponger, 1990, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
Footage collected on travels around the world is assembled as a powerful inquiry into photographic language. “In my films I have confronted the question of what a frame is, what movement and light signify. There is no story, the story is the pictures.”
“In one interview about Semiotic Ghosts, Ponger once made the following comparison: “The narrative feature film compared to the associative film is like the verbally speaking human being compared to the one who uses sign language to communicate.” As an inspiration for Semiotic Ghosts she named a 19th Century Swiss book on the pedagogy of how to educate the deaf. To function as an equal to the spoken word, sign language, besides basic and distinctive meanings, must to go through a process of conventionalisation to establish itself. Therefore the myth of the universal and the ‘naturally given’ does not exist. But there is no doubt, that sign language makes use of shape, size and movement. It expresses itself imitatively and is therefore universal. It therefore has also greater iconic potential than the verbal language. The second shot of the film shows the 1st Egyptian Blind Women’s Orchestra. Only in the third take, the one of the ‘grim reaper’, the sound comes in. By privileging the image over the sound, it establishes the hierarchy of the senses from the outset. But on a closer look we have to learn that this is not the case. First of all the sound follows exactly the image in which the seeing became precarious, awkward (through watching the blind girls) and secondly Ponger uses a soundtrack which is appropriate, like no other, to transmit the idea of the ‘polytonal’. To the end of the film we hear the sounds produced by the tuning of the instruments for the Blind Women’s Orchestra. Each of the different instruments sound for themselves, representing the richness, the reservoir, the paradigms, only at the end, a sense of unity evolves.” —Gabriele Jutz

DIAN, PAITO
Bernhard Schreiner, 2001, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
Personal notebook from a journey through Taiwan: the natural landscape and a visit with friends.
“Nomadic images, creatively free and influenced only by his own conventions, highlight the unusual effect of Bernhard Schreiner’s film. Schreiner records images and sounds of events of apparent secondary importance while he is travelling. In this way his films ‘describe’ the atmosphere. Often deserted spaces and squares are ‘registered’ in various ways: through brief, quick takes and successive alternating edits which lend the shots an almost tactile quality, Schreiner is able to pin down something that is impossible to describe in any other form, and this forms part of his artistic personality as well as the imaginative reality of the viewer. These moments of ephemeral beauty are perceived by Schreiner in a way that is both sensitive and cautious, filmed and edited in a way so they can turn back on the screen before the eyes of the viewer, intact and well-conserved. —Thomas Draschan

ÄGYPTEN
Kathrin Resetarits, 1996, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
At first a sensitive essay about communication between the deaf; the gestural actions of signing are intimated for the uninformed. But by equating sign language with film language, Resetarits forges a quiet demonstration of the power of cinema.
“Ägypten is a film which is almost silent. A film about deaf mutes, or rather about their sign language – a language which, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, links the symbolic terminology of words with the mimetic and analogous representations of graphic gestures. Sober black and white scenes show how ‘shark’, ‘widow’, ‘Marilyn Monroe’, a James Bond sequence, a Viennese song or the account of a treasure hunt undertaken by two holidaymakers looks in sign language. It is a very modest indication, an introduction to an unfamiliar way of experiencing the world, where one sees the sounds without hearing them.” —Drehli Robnik

TO THE HAPPY FEW
Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
The Splice is Right. A highly charged cosmic mandala, fusing found footage with Bollywood music.
“The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s (invisible woman) until the end of the 1980s.” —Thomas Draschan, 2003

OPUS 7
Alexander Curtis, 1993, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
Composition and perspective are broken down as the camera view is flattened into its geometric forms. A magic lantern trick for viewer and projector.
“Film – Perspective – Geometry. An ironic self-portrait and a sentimental look back at the early and prehistory of Cinema” —Alexander Curtis

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PETER TSCHERKASSKY. FROM SUPER-8 TO SCOPE.
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 8pm
London Film School

TABULA RASA
Peter Tscherkassky, 1987/89, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
A mediated disruption of voyeuristic desire.
“The target of tabula rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the precondition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz (based on the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan) has established in theory is rendered as film in tabula rasa. At the beginning we can recognise only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera itself is located between our gaze and the object. The body of the woman keeps moving back and forth between revealing (as a picture) and covering, swinging from figurative to the abstract. tabula rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our view.” —Gabriele Jutz

PARALLEL SPACE: INTER-VIEW
Peter Tscherkassky, 1992, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
The ‘physics of seeing’ and the ‘physics of memory’ in a flickering condensation of space and time.
“Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo 24 x 36mm is exactly the size of two film frames. Originally, I had a strict, formal concept. The visual space of the Renaissance locked in the optics of the film and still camera. In front of our eyes the landscapes of the film spread out and allow themselves be conquered; a constellation which is then subverted by letting the hardware and the software slip minimally. If I take a photograph with a strict central perspective (the vanishing point in the middle), it gets smashed when projected. The spatial lines plunge towards the lower edge of one frame, to be ripped apart at the top of the next. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces that have a correspondence with each other. Soon these spatial constructions were not enough. I began to interpret the content of both spatial halves – to lead the spectator’s separation from the surrounding reality into another sequence of binary opposites: listener-speaker; viewer-viewed; public-private; man-woman; sensuality (emotion)-reason; sexuality-taboo, and so on. In addition, I took the psychoanalytic setting and drew a comparison with the cinema setting. In both cases there is a narrator who does not see or know his listener. Filmmakers, in common with the analysists, produce a very intimate flow of pictures which are met with highly concentrated attention but still fall into the anonymity of the audience…” —Peter Tscherkassky

L’ARRIVÉE
Peter Tscherkassky, 1998, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 2 min
“L’Arrivée is my second homage to the Lumière Brothers. First you see the arrival of the film itself, which shows the arrival of a train at a station. But that train collides with a second train, causing a violent crash, which leads to an unexpected third arrival: the arrival of a beautiful woman – the happy ending. Reduced to two minutes L’Arrivée gives a brief but exact summary of what cinematography (after its arrival with the Lumière train) has made into an enduring presence of our visual environment: violence, emotions. Or, as an anonymous American housewife (cited by T.W. Adorno) used to describe Hollywood’s version of life: “Getting into trouble and out of it again.” —Peter Tscherkassky

OUTER SPACE
Peter Tscherkassky, 1999, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 10 min
“Outer Space begins over the sound of a film projector. The image – luminously grainy, scratched black and white – is canted, off-centre, as though projected onto a wall from a worn-out print. A woman approached a house, hesitates, and reaches for the doorknob. As she walks through rooms, the visuals gradually degrade – the frame films with multiple exposures, and at times the images look as though they’ve been selectively exposed, certain areas of the frame burned with light, others obscured. With an electrical buzzing, the physical space surrounding the woman starts to break up: windows and mirrors shatter, images bleed into each other and disintegrate, until finally all that remains legible are sprocket holes and the optical track: the celluloid itself.” —Alice Lovejoy, 2002

DREAM WORK
Peter Tscherkassky, 2001, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 12 min
“The images, the afterimages, the negatives circle each other in a maelstrom in which the classic psychoanalytic view of the conscious mind’s unconscious function is gradually lost in a higher logic of neuronal chaos. And then, guided by Man Ray’s rayograph technique, they reassemble in a para-dream which – paraphrasing Freud – could be described as a pictorial mental image. In the same way as in an actual dream, Dream Work does not contain individual and unconnected images; although each one is radically arbitrary, the context is so compelling that an alternative is inconceivable – unless taken from a different universe, of course. But this is the best of all possible worlds, regardless of how terrifying it seems.” —Bert Rebhandl

HAPPY END
Peter Tscherkassky, 1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Reworking home movies from decades passed, revealing a celebration of private ritual, tradition and joy.
“Happy-End is a found footage film: the re-working of someone else’s home movies from the 60s and 70s. The sequences selected are taken from many hours of the staged private life of ‘Rudolf” and ‘Elfriede’, pivoting on demonstrative celebrations, alcohol and cake consumption together. Who watched these two before Peter Tscherkassky’s (and then our) gaze fell on their gaiety? Who stood behind the camera? I think that the theory that they themselves are responsible (in expectancy of their own spectatorship – look, it was so wonderful there) misses the mark. Neither is it a hidden camera, since Rudolf and Elfriede turn to it laughing, gesticulating and with glass in hand. It must be their child, a child who never enters the picture himself, except in the form of a symbolic doll and recurring mirrors which evidence his doings. I think that Rudolf and Elfriede fell in love in the summer of 1952 as Annie Cordy’s hit could be heard from every speaker – “Bonbons, Caramels, Esquimaux, Chocolats”. In 1958 their son was born, shortly after a first movie camera was bought. At the beginning of the 70s the son took over the direction of the annual celebration films. He also captured on film the sexual joy that hovers lightly between the sparkling wine and the Sachertorte. Twenty years later the child, by now a grown man, sees these rediscovered films again.” —Alexander Horwath

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THE ESSENTIAL FRAME: RECENT HISTORY
4 June—9 July 2003
The Essential Frame UK Tour: Programme 2

TRADITION IST DIE WEITERGABE DES FEUERS UND NICHT DIE ANBETUNG DER ASCHE
Gustav Deutsch, 1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 1 min
An elegy to nitrate film material. Image by Deutsch, sound by Fennesz.
“Some found footage – made of cellulose nitrate – the material
Fire – a threat to nitrate film – its theme
A quote – from Gustav Mahler – its message
The soundtrack – by Christian Fennesz – as the bridge” —Gustav Deutsch, 1999

PARTY
Dietmar Brehm, 1995, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
“Sometimes I film so that the actors seem to belong to the undead. The construction of the Found-Footage-Party shows Russian, Japanese, American and my own material which is hallucinated into a matrix in which functioning and non-functioning body parts appear as optical lubricant shadow labyrinth whilst simultaneously we hear someone shaving.” —Dietmar Brehm

PARALLEL SPACE: INTER-VIEW
Peter Tscherkassky, 1992, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
The ‘physics of seeing’ and the ‘physics of memory’ in a flickering condensation of space and time.
“Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo 24 x 36mm is exactly the size of two film frames. Originally, I had a strict, formal concept. The visual space of the Renaissance locked in the optics of the film and still camera. In front of our eyes the landscapes of the film spread out and allow themselves be conquered; a constellation which is then subverted by letting the hardware and the software slip minimally. If I take a photograph with a strict central perspective (the vanishing point in the middle), it gets smashed when projected. The spatial lines plunge towards the lower edge of one frame, to be ripped apart at the top of the next. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces that have a correspondence with each other. Soon these spatial constructions were not enough. I began to interpret the content of both spatial halves – to lead the spectator’s separation from the surrounding reality into another sequence of binary opposites: listener-speaker; viewer-viewed; public-private; man-woman; sensuality (emotion)-reason; sexuality-taboo, and so on. In addition, I took the psychoanalytic setting and drew a comparison with the cinema setting. In both cases there is a narrator who does not see or know his listener. Filmmakers, in common with the analysists, produce a very intimate flow of pictures which are met with highly concentrated attention but still fall into the anonymity of the audience…” —Peter Tscherkassky

ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY
Martin Arnold, 1998, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
“In his new film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy which, together with pièce touchée and passage à l’acte, forms a sort of trilogy of compulsive repetition, Arnold’s campaign of deconstruction of classic Hollywood film codes finally turns to film music. The process links in with the other two films. The family scenes, which in the original last only seconds and are not particularly notable, are surgically sectioned into single frames. Using repetition of these ‘single cells’ and a new rhythm – a kind of cloning procedure – Arnold then creates an inflated, monstrous doppelgänger of the original cuts lasting many minutes. The hidden message of sex and violence is turned inside out to the point where it simply crackles. In Alone… the crossing of three harmless teenager films gives birth to an Oedipal drama in which not only mother love mutates to sheer lust. Since passage à l’acte, and contrary to other found-footage filmmakers who choose to remove their work into the realms of silent nostalgia, Arnold has re-worked the soundtrack along with the image. Because of this what one hears in Alone…is the eerie, rasping “silence” of sound film, pregnant with suppressed tension. And exactly at the point where the illusion of full, living present is seemingly at its strongest – in the screen presence of Judy Garland singing – one senses the machine, and, implicitly, death, at work.” —Dirk Schaefer

SEMIOTIC GHOSTS
Lisl Ponger, 1990, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
Footage collected on travels around the world is assembled as a powerful inquiry into photographic language. “In my films I have confronted the question of what a frame is, what movement and light signify. There is no story, the story is the pictures.”
“In one interview about Semiotic Ghosts, Ponger once made the following comparison: “The narrative feature film compared to the associative film is like the verbally speaking human being compared to the one who uses sign language to communicate.” As an inspiration for Semiotic Ghosts she named a 19th Century Swiss book on the pedagogy of how to educate the deaf. To function as an equal to the spoken word, sign language, besides basic and distinctive meanings, must to go through a process of conventionalisation to establish itself. Therefore the myth of the universal and the ‘naturally given’ does not exist. But there is no doubt, that sign language makes use of shape, size and movement. It expresses itself imitatively and is therefore universal. It therefore has also greater iconic potential than the verbal language. The second shot of the film shows the 1st Egyptian Blind Women’s Orchestra. Only in the third take, the one of the ‘grim reaper’, the sound comes in. By privileging the image over the sound, it establishes the hierarchy of the senses from the outset. But on a closer look we have to learn that this is not the case. First of all the sound follows exactly the image in which the seeing became precarious, awkward (through watching the blind girls) and secondly Ponger uses a soundtrack which is appropriate, like no other, to transmit the idea of the ‘polytonal’. To the end of the film we hear the sounds produced by the tuning of the instruments for the Blind Women’s Orchestra. Each of the different instruments sound for themselves, representing the richness, the reservoir, the paradigms, only at the end, a sense of unity evolves.” —Gabriele Jutz

ÄGYPTEN
Kathrin Resetarits, 1996, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
At first a sensitive essay about communication between the deaf; the gestural actions of signing are intimated for the uninformed. But by equating sign language with film language, Resetarits forges a quiet demonstration of the power of cinema.
“Ägypten is a film which is almost silent. A film about deaf mutes, or rather about their sign language – a language which, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, links the symbolic terminology of words with the mimetic and analogous representations of graphic gestures. Sober black and white scenes show how ‘shark’, ‘widow’, ‘Marilyn Monroe’, a James Bond sequence, a Viennese song or the account of a treasure hunt undertaken by two holidaymakers looks in sign language. It is a very modest indication, an introduction to an unfamiliar way of experiencing the world, where one sees the sounds without hearing them.” —Drehli Robnik

TO THE HAPPY FEW
Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
The Splice is Right. A highly charged cosmic mandala, fusing found footage with Bollywood music.
“The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s (invisible woman) until the end of the 1980s.” —Thomas Draschan, 2003

OPUS 7
Alexander Curtis, 1993, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
Composition and perspective are broken down as the camera view is flattened into its geometric forms. A magic lantern trick for viewer and projector.
“Film – Perspective – Geometry. An ironic self-portrait and a sentimental look back at the early and prehistory of Cinema” —Alexander Curtis

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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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