Programa 4: Disidentes austriacos

As a companion piece to my selection of Austrian avantgarde classics in the previous program, I provide a little overview of more unusual approaches. Of course one could argue that many, and even some of the most celebrated Austrian avantgarde filmmakers are mavericks in their own way (which is proven by some overlap), but this personal selection is composed of works that defy expectations, even when they are celebrated, like Kurt Kren’s “impossible” study of nature, time and memory, or Gerhard Friedl’s precise, yet mysterious chronicle of provincial crimes. You will also encounter the most heartbreaking cartoon comedy of all time (by Nicolas Mahler), the finest and funniest variation of Sergei Eisenstein’s famed Odessa Step sequence (by Norbert Pfaffenbichler), and an astonishing emotional three-year diary made from brief daily animations by Gudrun Fürlinger. The final word comes with a controversial short by Ludwig Wüst, in which the narration conjures the images.

Programa:

37/78 Tree again / Kurt Kren / 4´/ 1978 / No dialogue / 16mm
Knittelfeld – Stadt ohne Geschichte / Gerhard Benedikt Friedl / 35´ / 1997 / German with English subtitles / 16mm
Der Park / Nicolas Mahler / 5´/ 2005 / German with English subtitles
Odessa Crash Test (Notes on Film 09) / Norbert Pfaffenbichler / 6´/ 2014 / No dialogue
Five Seconds / Gudrun Fürlinger / 5´/ 2023 / No dialogue
Ecce homo / Ludwig Wüst / 15´/ 2023 / German with English subtitles

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).