NESTING ENDLESS
A 2021 | 25 min | D: Karl-Heinz Klopf
The film NESTING ENDLESS is an experimental reflection on the two-part furniture object “Nesting Table”, which the Austro-American artist, architect and visionary Friedrich Kiesler designed in 1935. NESTING ENDLESS explores the object, space, architecture and cinematic perception in a kaleidoscopic universe. As if decoupled from space and time, the tracking shot explores the surreal-futuristic table ensemble in a weightless universe of mirrors. In this journey that appears between virtual and real, there are no true-to-scale reference points. An imaginary world of images opens up, which surprisingly dissolves upon arrival in a film studio, as the mirror space opens up to the real space.
CAVALCADE
A 2018 | 5 min | D: Johann Lurf
Can we believe our eyes? The short films of Johann Lurf often explore the enigmatic territory between the real and the perceived, challenging our senses to comprehend visions and sounds taken from the environment around us by means of subtle, beautiful trompe l´oeil effects. CAVALCADE, equally dazzling in 2D or 3D, sees him make a direct intervention into physical space for the first time.
TX-REVERSE
A 2018 | 5 min | D: Virgil Widrich link
What is behind the cinema screen? It is not surprising that cinema-in-the-cinema scenes are often used in horror films. For they irritate and unsettle by reminding us – the immobile viewers hidden in the cosy darkness – of our own questionable position. What if the forces of unlimited imagination penetrate through the canvas into our reality? What if the auditorium dissolves and with it the familiar laws of cinema itself? In a way never before seen, “tx-reverse” shows this collision of reality and cinema and draws its viewers into a vortex in which the familiar order of space and time seems to be suspended.
DACHSZENEN
A 2018 | 19 min | D: Anja Krautgasser link
Women look at a city. From far above, from a standpoint of isolation: an urban space, divided into housing plots, roofs, street structures, blocks—detached living. From off screen, fragmentary characterizations of the looking women, which become interlaced with one another, and could be describing only one single person who seems to be searching longingly, observing herself, while observing.
BULLETPROOF/THE FIFTH WALL
A 2017 | 15 min | D: Peter Kutin & Florian Kindlinger link link
Central to the piece is a massive bulletproof glass pane, which has undergone extreme physical forces, the impacts of which created cracks, cuts, holes, … :
BERG
documentary, 25min, D: Ella Raidel link vimeo
BERG
BERG is a journey with a floating mountain. During the 2015 edition of the Festival der Regionen in Upper Austria, a group of artists made an imposing wooden model of a mountain that was then transported across a lake taking a journey for 10 days. This floating vehicle became a platform for cultural exchange, welcoming musicians, writers and visual artists to collaborate. The film BERG using this experience to create a hypnotic and evocative visual poem.
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IF I HAD LAND UNDER MY FEET
FAST FILM
fiction, 14min, D: Virgil Widrich link vimeo
Fast Film is an animated homage to motion pictures, hand-made by folding 65,000 print outs of film frames into three dimensional objects.
A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy’s secret headquarters. This classic plot conceals an hommage to action movies. In 14 minutes, Fast Film (a play on words, English fast and German fast, meaning “almost”) provides a tour de force through film history, from its silent beginnings to present-day Hollywood. The filmmakers printed out some 65,000 individual images from 300 films, folded them into paper objects, arranged them in complex tableaux, and then brought them to life with an animation camera in a two-year production process.
ODESSA CRASH TEST (Notes on Film 09)
experimental, 8min, D: Norbert Pfaffenbichler link vimeo
When Sergej Eisenstein had a baby stroller dash down the Odessa steps as a furious finale of his fictive massacre in the revolutionary classic Battleship Potemkin, he created one of the most iconic moments in film. The uncontrolled death ride of a helpless baby – the stroller slips away from the mother who has been shot – was simultaneously an illustration of Eisenstein’s montage principles: as ideal contrast to the mechanical rhythm of the soldiers marching back and forth. Many directors have paid tribute to the scene, for example, Brian De Palma as super slow motion shootout side effect in The Untouchables – which was promptly trumped by Leslie Nielsen & Co.’s heroic slapstick use of it in The Naked Gun 33 1/3.
PENELOPE
experimental, 19min, D: Michaela Schwentner link vimeo
This short film examines possible forms of storytelling in an essayistic context. To create her story this contemporary model of Penelope on one hand is knotting and interweaving text fragments (her thread consists of words instead of fabric), on the other hand she and the second protagonist communicate by reenacting several iconic film scenes.
The figure was inspired by Penelope, wife of Ulysses, who now, unlike the ancient figure, has become a voice and as well a story to tell. The modern Penelope has thrown out her husband, and that’s why Ulysses is travelling and therefore absent. The level of narrative is organised partly following the principle of the mise en abîme. The formal level also follows this principle and consists of fragmented images and reflexions.
CONFERENCE (Notes on Film 05)
experimental, 8min, D: Norbert Pfaffenbichler link vimeo
Hitler Dead or Alive (1942, directed by Nick Grinde) summed things up long ago: le moustache, c’est l’homme,at least in the world of images. That’s why the Allied hit squad doesn’t have to rub Hitler out—a close shave would be sufficient, and the Führer’s lackeys, unable to recognize Adolf H.’s bare face as that of their idol, would take care of the rest. Adolf Hitler: The 20th century figure portrayed most often in film and on television is for many great actors a dream role, and for some, such as Bobby Watson and Fritz Diez, the supporting role of their life. That’s fitting for a statesman who had postcards made which showed him speaking to crowds in various poses. These images resembled portraits of stage and screen stars for theater lobby cards. Sixty-five actors portraying Hitler make an appearance in Conference. Notes on Film 05, but the original is never seen. However, one has the impression that a little bit of him is present in every one: A toothbrush moustache and side part are all that’s necessary. Or maybe not. All the Conference Hitlers are from after the 1940s, and Norbert Pfaffenbichler filmed them in Super 8 and black and white from a monitor so that they match.
SEEMS TO BE
experimental, 8min, D: Bady Minck link
A meditation on the certainties of being and perceptual illusions, a circling search in time and space, and at the same time a trompe l’oeil; the spatial dimensions of Morton Feldman’s steady, apparently timeless music are taken literally in the film: The sketched arrangement of a musical ensemble about to perform Feldman’s composition fills with ‘real’ musicians caught in the paper’s two-dimensionality, only to move to the spatiality of the Vienna Konzerthaus. But what is real here, what is a visual fake? Seems To Be dances on this platform of ambivalences, juxtaposing the metaphysics of a solid existential foundation and the agnostic skepticism of an abandonment of being marked by a visual chimera. Godless Feldman, merciless abyss! What we see is looking back at us.
