Experimental

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Arnulf Rainer’s images are the most ´reducedª of all — this is a film composed entirely of frames of solid black and solid white which Kubelka strings together in lengths as long as 24 seconds and as short as a single frame. When he alternates between single black and white frames, a rapid flicker effect is produced, which is as close as Kubelka can come to the somewhat more rapid flicker of motion-picture projection; during the long sections of darkness one waits in nervous anticipation for the flicker to return, without knowing precisely which form it will take. But Arnulf Rainer is not merely a study of film rhythm and flicker.Read More »

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Kubelkas achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as his basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema. The fact that a projected film consists of 24 still images per second serves as the basis for his art.Read More »

In the streets of Paris, men and women walk, meet, discuss, avoid each other in the midst of eager traffic.
A film composed with the rushes of Joli Mai unused today destroyed.Read More »

Jonas Mekas wrote:
You see nothing but a white, crystal white plate, and water dripping into the plate, from the ceiling, from high, and you hear the sound of the water dripping. The film is ten minutes long. I can imagine only St. Francis looking at a water plate and water dripping so lovingly, so respectfully, so serenely. The usual reaction is: ‘Oh, what is it anyhow? Just a plate of water dripping.’ But that is a snob remark. That remark has no love for the world, for anything. Snow and Wieland’s film uplifts the object, and leaves the viewer with a finer attitude toward the world around him; it can open his eyes to the phenomenal world. And how can you love people if you don’t love water, stone , glass?Read More »

Arnulf Rainer contorts his mind and body before the camera.Read More »

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Peter Kubelka’s first film, “Mosaik im Vertrauen”, reuses images that the filmmaker did not shoot himself: the film is thus a found footage film that foreshadows films by Bruce Conner, Arthur Lipsett and others. The film partly contains newsreel material from a car race, and various scenes from feature films where meetings between people are in focus.Read More »

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Rat Life and Diet in North America is a Canadian short film, directed by Joyce Wieland and released in 1968. A satirical allegory for the political climate of the 1960s, the film centres on a group of gerbils who are being held as political prisoners by a cat, until eventually escaping to Canada and taking up organic farming.Read More »

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Reason over Passion is one of Joyce Wieland’s most renowned experimental films – a cross-country travelogue, political satire, modernist experiment – which embodies many of the themes recurrent in her rich, diverse and extensive oeuvre.Read More »

In Rohfilm (1968, W. & B. Hein) dirt, sprocket-holes etc. appear independently of a continuous film-strip as aesthetic elements in their own right. Hairs, ashes, bits of tobacco, shredded film-images scraps of paper, sprocket-holes, perforated splicing-tape etc. are glued onto blank film and then re-filmed. The film-strip is then subjected to different reproduction- processes (re-filming from the editing-table, the movieola and the video monitor) and the result is an impression of destruction on a massive scale.Read More »