Archive Fever ! 3.0–Kinostalgia: Recent Found Footage Film from Austria
Co-presented by the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.
This program gathers a selection of films by Austrian filmmakers working with found footage. Drawing from a range of common subjects – television advertisements, home movies, early newsreels, and particularly, the image of the dictator – these films stage encounters with history, lending visibility to collective memories that are at once nostalgic and counter-nostalgic, familiar and forgotten. Program curated by Johanna Gosse, PhD Candidate, History of Art, Bryn Mawr College.
Tito-Material
dir. Elke Groen, Austria, 1998, 16mm, 5 mins, color
With footage found in a destroyed cinema in Mostar, Bosnia in 1996, Tito-Material shows Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito in diverse contexts – at public affairs, with the Partisans, in “private” while shaving, etc. The film’s construction, created at the optical printer, is also a counter concept to the more narrative models: the marks of war are not primarily made visible on the representational level, but more through the damage done to the film material itself from rubble and dampness, and also through its editing. – Birgit Flos, Film programmer
14. März 1938-Ein Nachmittag
dir. Christoph Weihrich, Austria, 2008, 16mm, 10 mins ,color
The afternoon of March 14, 1938 is captured in a home movie, repurposed as found footage. Scenes of everyday domestic life are suddenly interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Austria. On the date specified in the title, a column of German troops drives through the Viennese suburb of Hadersdorf. Hitler,
sitting in an open car, his arm rigidly outstretched in a Fascist salute, sweeps through the picture for three seconds. Director Weihrich discovered this haunting footage at a flea market and presents it in unaltered form.
Notes on Film 05 CONFERENCE
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria, 2011, 35mm, 8 mins, color
No other historical figure of the 20th century has been portrayed more often on film and by so many different actors than Adolf Hitler. Pfaffenbichler elected close-ups of 65 actors playing Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today and combined them in a shot/countershot manner. In this grotesque and uncanny form, Hitler is presented as “undead”, impersonated by an alarming number of ghosts.
Oceano Nox
dir. Georg Wasner, Austria, 2011, HDCAM, 15 mins, color
Oceano Nox processes a 1912 newsreel that memorialized the sinking of the Titanic. The original material exemplifies both the formality and the poetic nature of documentary aesthetics in the days of early cinema. Close scrutiny and rewriting of the original punctures its newsworthiness and
lays bare its underlying form. – Georg Wasner
Coming Attractions
dir. Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2010, 35mm, 25 mins, color and b/w
Using screen tests for commercials that were not meant to be preserved, Tscherkassky composed Coming Attractions in minute darkroom work. He adopted a variety of approaches in the individual chapters and, understandably, reveled in the absurd character of his raw material. Associations and cross connections are created, some of them mischievous
and others with a deeper meaning. This amusing cinematic cross-section is presented as a cryptic visual poem, or poem of visuals, showing (un)conscious missteps as amusing, lighthearted and playful. – Christoph Huber, Film writer
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth)
dir. Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1996-2003, 35mm, 13 mins, color
Dichtung und Wahrheit contains collected pieces from publicity films with a common element: they show actors before they start and then begin to play what they are directed to represent. Repeated ready-made takes create cycles of symbolic significance, glorified glimpses of the contemporary human condition: the beauty from a hair conditioner, courting and insemination by chocolate-feeding, laborless birth onto a varnished floor, animal and inanimate companions.
To the Happy Few
dir. Thomas Draschan, Austria, 2003, 16mm, 4 mins, color, sound
This film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case, pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with a Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s until the end of the 1980s.
Metropolen des Leichtsinns (Metropolis of Recklessness)
dir. Thomas Draschan, Austria, 2000, 16mm, 12 mins, color, sound
Metropolen des Leichtsinns starts out with a trip that becomes a journey into film itself. After the appearance of self-referential and sexy China girls, some people feel animated to have intercourse, remaining completely out of focus. Intercourse leads to cell-sectioning and birth-giving and a release into space. Being born one may ask “what should I become” (in the German original: was soll ich werden or written on a wheel), the filmmakers answer that pretty realistically with someone blowing his head away. The hit of the bullet in the head triggers beautiful visual effects,
which as well refer to death and decay, and therefore justify the decision. The film then shows various opportunities of how someone could spend his life. But somehow all efforts seem to be in vain and everything is running empty…– Thomas Draschan
