Programa 5: Wienfilm 1896-1976

Ernst Schmidt jr. was one of the most original figures of the Austrian avantgarde of the 1960s and an eminent historian (together with Hans Scheugl he published one of the first overviews of underground filmmaking). So it seems only fitting that he would belatedly give this movement its first feature-length work (not counting the fictions of Valie Export): Wienfilm 1986-1976 may be the ultimate expression of Schmidt jr.’s always iconoclastic approach, crediting James Joyce as set designer and sporting a cast list that includes Charles Chaplin, Sigmund Freud, Emperor Franz Josef I., and Adolf Hitler, as well as (then-)living artists of all kinds like Export, Otto Mühl, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker or Arnulf Rainer. The kaleidoscopic arrangement of scenes and the witty narration provide a spectacular city symphony as well as a political history lesson from a then-contemporary perspective. Thus, it is also a great document of the consciousness of an era.

DCP (restored copy from 16 mm)

Programm curated by Christoph Huber, with the mediation of the critic and filmmaker Pablo Marín.

Christoph Huber

Christoph Huber (1973) is a curator in the Program Department of the Austrian Film Museum. After getting his degree as DI of Physics at the Technical University of Vienna, he worked as a film critic and arts editor for the Austrian daily paper „Die Presse“ from 1999-2014, before fully joining the cinematheque for which he had previously written the program notes and conceived several film series. He has curated numerous other retrospectives—covering pretty much everything from avantgarde to genre cinema—for cinemas and festivals all over the world. For many years, he was the European editor of the recently discontinued Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope, while contributing to countless other international periodicals, homepages and printed publications. Together with Olaf Möller he has also co-authored books on the directors Peter Kern and Dominik Graf. Ferronian.

Pablo Marín

Pablo Marín (Buenos Aires, 1982) is a critic, filmmaker and professor. He was in charge of the film book collection at the publishing house El cuenco de plata and worked as an editorial assistant at Caja Tegra Editora. He has translated the books Por un arte de la visión: escritos esenciales about Stan Brakhage (Eduntref, 2014), Escritos sobre cine norteamericano, with the writings of J. Hoberman (El cuenco de plata, 2016) and Fluxus escrito (Caja Negra Editora, 2019), among others. As an independent researcher and curator, he has held conferences and programs on Argentine film in the United States, Canada, Spain, Austria, Finland and Switzerland and was a member of the research team for the project ISM ISM ISM: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, by the Los Angeles Filmforum and the Getty Foundation. His films have been screened and earned awards at international festivals and museums. He teaches at the Universidad del Cine of Buenos Aires and has been coordinating the audiovisual archive of the Mariano Moreno National Library since 2014. In 2022 he published the book Una luz revelada: El cine experimental argentino (La Vida Útil, 2022).