★INDEX FILM
Exquisite Ectasies
Approaching the Exquisite Corpus was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of "exquisite ecstasies". No matter how various the imagery of Blood-Letti…
Praxis selection
Brehm's Praxis series is driven by a spirit of enterprise that is clearly palpable: Since 1974 Dietmar Brehm has been sensuously modulating his private iconography in ever new variations, ceaselessly engaged with his ever growing image and sound archive, withdrawn into the interior of an infernal fantasy. There is no posturing behind his cool treatment of the disquieting signs in his work, but rather ennui, a loner life, solipsism. Dietmar Brehm orchestrates implosions and idling states. H…
Burning Down the Palace
All of these work deal somewhat with a fake factor. Part Time Heroes handles the star concept, in a larger than life way; Running Sushi refers to comics and manga. Burning Palace, on the other hand, is based on The Art of Seduction. (...) For the human body to remain interesting, one must constantly put it in a different light or in another context. One has to look at the body sideways. With this, one achieves a large choreographic change in perspective, because everything is altered. In another…
Optical Vacuum
Nowhere else is talk of the »panoptic era« an eye that sees everything yet remains elusive clearer than in the medium that has taken omnipresence and fleetingness to a global scale: the Internet. On the Internet, the paradigm known thus far for our imaging apparatus has become invalid: there is no longer a single, central perspective, but instead, a myriad of viewing angles that broadcast over webcams, pumping incessant images into the digital data stream. The »vacuum« in the title of Dariusz…
Exposed
The fact that Siegfried Fruhauf´s films have a certain hypnotic effect cannot be denied. Battles of material take place in them, they contain reflections and illusions, soundtracks filled with noise and visual interference signals run riot; at the same time all the structural experiments the filmmaker risks never rigidify in the merely theoretical. Fruhauf´s cinema is extremely atmospheric and decidedly non-academic. On the contrary, it presents itself as being radically undogmatic, alternating …
Notes on Marie Menken
Notes on Marie Menken explores the almost forgotten story of the legendary artist Marie Menken (1909-1970) who became one of New York´s outstanding underground experimental filmmakers of the 1940s through the 1960s, inspiring artists such as Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Gerard Malanga. She was a probable role model of Edward Albee´s "Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and ended up as a Warhol Superstar. The documentary allows a glimpse into her social and artistic st…
Thomas Bernhard - Three Days
Thomas Bernhard - Three Days A Film by Ferry RadaxOriginal version with English, French and Spanish subtitles I Germany 1970, 52 min, Concept & Image: Ferry Radax I Cinematography: Michael Wingens (film), Ferry Radax (video) I Sound: Ben Janse, Editing: Ferry Radax I Editorial Journalist: Christhart Burgmann I Executive Producer: Günther Herbertz, Production: IFAGE-Filmproduktion, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)This portrait of the great Austrian writer combines a brilliant monologue delivered by T…
Korperaktionen Bodyworks 1967 - 2003
Most performance artists developed their actions from painting, or to be more precise, from action painting, to which they also remained visually and conceptually bound. My performances differ from other actions performed in the 1960s, for instance in Vienna and California, firstly, through their relation to media and secondly, through their relation to politics. Writing and the typewriter, photography, film and video are media and apparatus that enable a new écriture corporelle, a new bo…
ViennaFilm 1896 - 1976
"ViennaFilm 18961976 constitutes the first feature length film completed by Schmidt Jr. It premieres on January 28, 1977 at the Austrian Film Museum; it is screened at Vienna´s Inter-national Film Festival, the Seventh International Forum of New Cinema in Berlin and the Festival dei Popoli in Florence. In a statement accompanying the film, the filmmaker himself describes the work as a collage. This term evokes the use of diverse footage, tape splices, and an uneven surface instead of a…
Stones & 20 Action and Destruction Films
Stones & 20 Action and Destruction Films 1965-1979. “If I had to name a single Austrian filmmaker who to this day has not received the international recognition deserved for the artistic level his work attained, I would unhesitatingly name him. When he died in 1988 at the early age of 50, Ernst Schmidt Jr. left behind a body of work that could hardly be more multifaceted, including experimental documentary films, material films, expanded cinema, abstract films, project films, conceptual films, …
VISIONARY - Contemporary Short Documentaries and Experimental Fi
This compilation offers an opportunity for a substantial view of Austrian experimental and documentary film´s varied status quo. The works on this DVD range from subjective to rigidly structural documentary approaches, from abstract music videos and conceptual architectural studies to elaborate computer animations. The amount of formal innovation manifest in all these films and videos is outstanding."A number of the works have enjoyed success at international festivals, in this way helping to en…
The Seconds Strike Reality
Wien 17, Schumanngasse (1967, 3 minutes), Hernals (1967, 11 minutes), Safety film (1968, 6 minutes), Sugar daddies (1968, 9 minutes), Eroticon sublim (1968, 2 minutes), Der ort der zeit (1985, 40 minutes), Prince of peace (1993, 8 minutes), (Calcutta) go (1993, 9 minutes). Bonustracks: 'Wiener underground' (1969, 9 minutes). All of the films collected on this DVD have in common a focused and precise observation of spatial structures. Whether interiors, spaces that have to do with the material or…
Animation Films
'Baroque statues' (1970-74, 15 min), 'Iris' (1971, 10 min), 'Chairs' (1971, 2 min), 'Selfportrait' (1971, 4:30 min), 'Shapes' (1972, 9 min), 'Couples' (1972, 9 min), 'Palmistry' (1973, 10 min), 'Art education' (1976, 8 min), 'Maria Lassnig Kantate-the ballad of Maria Lassnig' (1992, 8 min). Lassnig trained at the academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and then spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, where she was exposed to Art Informel and Surrealism. From 1968 to 1980, she lived in New York,…
Invisible adversaries
Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how sel…
3 experimental short films
Austrian artist Valie Export has been an influential and provocative figure on the international art scene for over three decades. Her practice includes film, video, photography, text and performance. Initially expanding the Actionist project to confront a complex feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral and the conceptual. (Electronic Arts Intermix) 'Mann & Frau & Animal' 1970-73. 'Remote Remote' 1973. 'Syntagma' 1984.
Synaesthetic videos from Austria
A DVD release celebrating the extraordinary young video and electronic music scene in Austria. These are radical avant-garde works that emerge logically from modern electronic music. The images sometimes tie in with the earliest pure abstract avant-garde films, but reveal themselves in everything to be exponents of contemporary digital technology.
Depiction is a crime. Video works 1969-1975
Born on March 5, 1945 in Odessa, Ukraine. Having fled to Austria, he grew up in Ried im Innkreis, Upper Austria. When graduating from school in 1963 he studied French, film and comparative literature for a year in Paris before transferring to medicine in Vienna in 1964, later changing to mathematics specialising in logic. Peter Weibel´s artistic work may be chiefly subsumed under such categories as concept art, performance, experimental film, video art, computer art and generally, so-called “med…