Programa 1: ¿Qué es el cine?

The first six works of this program are classic milestones in the history of analogue film: Peter Kubelka was hired to make a conventional commercial for the beer company Schewachter, but built a perfect metric movie from the material instead, while Kurt Kren used his quick cut technique to structurally transform concrete images of tress into fascinating abstract impressions. Stan Brakhage is represented with two very different masterpieces: Window Water Baby Moving is the documentation of (and reaction to) the birth of his child, Mothlight creates patterns hitherto unseen by applying moth wings and other objects to the film strip. Found footage is both the basis for Joseph Cornell’s disarming little poetic fantasy and Morgan Fisher’s ingenious meditation on filmic thinking, bringing together avantgarde and commercial production with an autobiographical approach and his unique knack for paradoxical invention. As a closing counterpoint, The External World presents the hilarious hell of postmodern existence in digital animation.

Schwechater / Peter Kubelka / 1´/ 1958 / No dialogue / 16mm
Window Water Baby Moving / Stan Brakhage / 12´/ 1959 / No dialogue / 16mm
3/60 Bäume im Herbst / Kurt Kren / 5´/ 1960 / No dialogue / 16mm
Mothlight / Stan Brakhage / 5´/ 1963 / No dialogue / 16mm
The Midnight Party / Joseph Cornell, Larry Jordan / 3´/ 1930 / No dialogue/
Standard Gauge / Morgan Fisher / 35´/ 1984 / English / 16mm
The External World / David O’Reilly / 17´/ 2010 / English

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).