“I am standing in a beautiful landscape, beautiful landscapes have learnt to profit from their beauty better than those less beautiful landscapes.” 
- Elfriede Jelinek

A short-film programme that builds from film to film, taking up and continuing paratextual or inherent aspects of the previous film.

Peter Kubelka described his two commissioned/advertising films Adebar (a bar in Vienna) and Schwechater (a beer brand) in the 1950s as metric films; they were composed according to a strict blueprint. The clients were not very enthusiastic, but this did not detract from their significance in film history—quite the opposite, in fact. When Friedl Kubelka (aka Friedl vom Gröller), known for her photo-portraits, argued with her then husband, she reached for the camera and let Peter Kubelka look into it, accompanied by her long-time friend Jonas Mekas, surprising him with an affectionate gesture. Who is watching whom here in New York through a mirrored shop window on Astor Place or how a protagonist reacts to the supposed viewers are two very fundamental questions of cinematography that revolve around the illusion machine. Cut.

Austria is a country with beautiful landscapes, which of course also exist in other places. Siegfried A. Fruhauf assembles a montage of postcard images that trace the cliché of beautiful mountain landscapes and take it to the extremes through the editing. 37/78 Tree Again, on the other hand, can be described as a meteorite of experimental cinema: Kurt Kren shoots a tree in Vermont (USA) for 50 days in single frames, leaving unexposed frames free, rewinding them in the 16mm camera and exposing them successively under different lighting and weather conditions.

Viktoria Schmid also uses the same analogue film strip several times in her New York City portrait, NYC-RGB, running it through the camera with three different colour filters (red/green/blue) each time, evoking dream-like images of a view of Manhattan from days gone by. Resonance and Cavalcade play with the magic of cinema, in which amazement and a knowledge gain are equally inherent. Last but not least, Train Again, an exhilarating, virtuosically composed, physical journey through the history of cinema, which also becomes aware of the battle for technologies between man, animal, and machine. 

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

Programme

Adebar, dir. Peter Kubelka, 1957, 1min30
Schwechater, dir. Peter Kubelka, 1958, 2 min.
Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas, dir. Friedl vom Gröller, 1994, 3 min.
Astor Place, dir. Eve Heller, 1997, 10 min.
Spucken, dir. Friedl vom Gröller, 2000, 2 min.
Höhenrausch, dir. Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 1999, 4 min.
37/78 Tree Again, dir. Kurt Kren, 4 min.
NYC-RGB, dir. Viktoria Schmid, 2023, 7 min.
Resonance, dir. Katharina Bayer, 2024, 9 min.
Cavalcade, dir. Johann Lurf, 2019, 5 min.
Train Again, dir. Peter Tscherkassky, 2021, 20 min.