Programa 3: Clásicos austriacos

Although Austria is a small country, its contribution to the history of experimental film has been big – a tradition that happily continues hand in hand with the ongoing awareness of this history. This program presents some of the most intriguing works and artistic traditions in the Austrian canon, ranging from Hans Scheugl’s structural gambit – a film “as long as” the street it portrays – to Dietmar Brehm’s tabula rasa of absolute nothingness (no, really!). There are powerful female positions, as represented by famous painter Maria Lassnig (whose film work keeps being rediscovered) and crazy anarchist Mara Mattuschka, there are different sides from the spellbinding work of modest master Kurt Kren, there is our only BDSM martial arts fantasy (by Schipek and Scheirl, the latter now also a star of the art world), there’s the carefully crafted soccer-without-soccer-comedy of Josef Dabernig, and with 36 a miniature marvel of digital animation that manages to overwhelm by elegant reduction.

Program:

Wien 17, Schumanngasse / Hans Scheugl / 3´/ 1967 / No dialogue / 16mm
Selfportrait / Maria Lassnig / 5´/ 1971 / English / 16mm
26/71 Zeichenfilm – Balzac und das Auge Gottes / Kurt Kren / 1´/ 1971 / No dialogue / 16mm
31/75 Asyl / Kurt Kren / 8´/ 1975 / No dialogue / 16mm
Es hat mich sehr gefreut / Mara Mattuschka / 2´/ 1987 / German / 16mm
The Abbotess and the Flying Bone / Dietmar Schipek, Ashley Hans Scheirl / 18´/ 1989 / English / 16mm
Wisla / Josef Dabernig / 8´/ 1996 / No dialogue / 16mm
Black Death Filter / Dietmar Brehm / 10´/ 2003 / No dialogue / 16mm
Black Movie II / Kurt Kren, Marc Adrian / 4´/ 1959 / No dialogue / 16mm
36 / Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Lotte Schreiber / 2´/ 2001 / No dialogue
Plasma / Mara Mattuschka / 11´/ 2004 / 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).