Programa 2: Música de cine

One of the defining aspects of cinema is its musicality: rhythm is key to any kind of good filmmaking, and this program showcases some of its most brilliant uses in experimental film—and beyond. For a starter, Rossini’s famous opera is parodied in a side-splitting cartoon battle between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd that compresses the methods of narrative cinema into an avantgardistic coup. No less perfect a fusion of sound and image is achieved with minimalist means by Len Lye’s animation. Bruce Conner’s pioneering collage changed cinema history, its cascade of images presented in counterpoint to a tone poem by Ottorino Respighi. Meanwhile, Marie Menken’s “light music” works in silence. As a special present, I have brought our print of Kenneth Anger’s “magick” ode to Lucifer Rising that contains the original soundtrack by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page —an absolute rarity! An absurd animation by Austrian comic strip genius Nicolas Mahler provides the final grace(less) note.

Program:

Rabbit of Seville / Chuck Jones / 7´/ 1949 / English / 16mm
Free Radicals / Len Lye / 4´/ 1958 / No dialogue / 16mm
A Movie / Bruce Conner / 12´/ 1960 / No dialogue / 16mm
Oh Dem Watermelons! / Robert Nelson / 11´/ 1965 / No dialogue / 16mm
Lights / Marie Menken / 6´/ 1966 / No dialogue / 16mm
Lucifer Rising / Kenneth Anger / 24´/ 1973 / No dialogue / 16mm
Mystery Music / Nicolas Mahler / 5´/ 2009 / No dialogue

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).