“This tiny country in the middle of Europe has seen the growth of an art film tradition over the course of the past six decades that can boast a degree of continuity and ongoing productivity seldom realised elsewhere. In the meantime, it is practically commonplace that Austria’s most important contribution to film history was and is largely created in the field of avant-garde production.”
- Peter Tscherkassky

From the very beginning, Austrian artist film was very closely linked to other artistic disciplines: literature, music and composition, expanded painting, architecture, and performance art.

This programme opens with Arnulf Rainer, a textbook example of structural film (and originally conceived as a portrait of an artist), which brings the mechanisms of cinema to the fore in a musically composed way: light and dark, noise and silence. 

Working with the (naked) body, sometimes one's own, is a significant stylistic element in the visual arts of Austria's (post-war) history; the Viennese Actionists and their followers were particularly influential. The use of one's own body is not only cheap, indeed it costs nothing, but the body functions as the terrain on which we feel the most pleasure, but also the greatest pain. Not least for this reason, working on and with the body is predestined on the one hand to explore the sensory qualities of cinema. But, on the other hand, it is also a political tool to rebel against or attack conservative values. 

The deconstruction of an excerpt from the National Socialist propaganda film Heimkehr (Gustav Ucicky, 1941) by the Institute for Evidence Science, and the cinematic interpretation and representation of Adolf Hitler by Norbert Pfaffenbichler, are the content-related cornerstones of two films at the centre of the programme that can be attributed to the so-called ‘found footage’ genre which has a long tradition in Austrian experimental filmmaking. However, the material is not so much ‘found’ (as the term suggests), but often specifically sought out, as shown by the cinematographically sophisticated horror shocker Outer Space or even Fast Film, a tour de force through 300 different works of film history.

The last animated film by the great painter Maria Lassnig, which was created in collaboration with Hubert Sielecki, traces the artist's autobiographical stages with a great deal of humour and, at the same time, presents itself as an ode to art: “I know it's Art so dear, that keeps me young and clear. Art made me thirsty, now fulfilment's near.” 

- Dietmar Schwärzler
(Translated from the German by Tom Atkins)

Special guests Vienna-based artists Mara Mattuschka, Viktoria Schmid, and Norbert Pfaffenbichler, and programme curator Dietmar Schwärzler of sixpackfilm, Vienna.

Programme

Arnulf Rainer, dir. Peter Kubelka, 1960, 7 min
10/65 Selbstverstümmelung, dir. Kurt Kren, 1965, 5 min
Die Geburt Der Venus, dir. Moucle Blackout, 1970-72, 5 min
Kugelkopf, dir. Mara Mattuschka, 1985, 6 min
Heimkehr 1941/1996, dir. Institut für Evidenzwissenschaft, 1996, 5 min
Conference. Notes on Film 05, dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2011, 8 min
Outer Space, dir. Peter Tscherkassky, 1999, 10 min
Fast Film, dir. Virgil Widrich, 2003, 14 min
Maria Lassnig Kantate, dir. Maria Lassnig, Hubert Sielecki, 1992, 8 min