Part of Open City Documentary Festival
Curated and introduced by Alexander Horwath.
All film prints courtesy the Austrian Film Museum.
This programme is a somewhat surreal – or childlike – attempt at telling a story of the 20th century.
In a more serious vein, it relates to three different notions of cinematic temporality: it talks about leisure or “free” time (a realm of life usually regarded as the province of movie-going); it addresses “the time of film” (a past era that also produced new concepts of history and memory, both of which are now becoming more tenuous by the nanosecond); and it celebrates our imprisonment in “film time” when experiencing a theatrical projection – the distinct duration of a film, its irrevocable passing at a specific pace of X frames-per-second.
Film is a clockwork, a metaphor that was given some publicity by the most talked-about non-film of the last decade, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2011). As opposed to the latter, however, the works in this program have some relation to life: they end. Before doing so, they exude madness, mystery and joy at a rate of 16, or 18, or 24 times per second.
Another way of looking at this film selection is through the eyes of Amos Vogel, born in Vienna in 1921, who passed away in New York in 2012. I hope that the programme can also serve as a tribute to Amos. Among his many achievements in film culture was a new approach towards placing films with each other in an evening’s programme, freed from their traditional grouping according to era, genre, aesthetic, etc. In addition, the Vienna amateur film shown here – Ha.Wei. March 14, 1938 – is a document of the historical moment that turned 17-year-old Amos Vogelbaum into an exile. (Alexander Horwath)
1/48”
Jorge Lorenzo Flores Garza | 2008 | Mexico | 1’ | 35mm | Silent
Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory (fragment)
Gaumont | Germany, France | 2’ | 35mm | Silent
The Case of Lena Smith (fragment)
Josef von Sternberg | 1929 | USA | 5’ | 35mm | Silent
Mosaik Mécanique
Norbert Pfaffenbichler | 2008 | Austria | 9’ | 35mm | Sound
HA.WEI. March 14, 1938 (archival title)
Anonymous | 1938 | Austria | 13’ | 16mm | Silent
Spare Time
Humphrey Jennings | 1939 | UK | 15’ | 35mm | Sound
Yours
Jeff Scher | 1997 | US | 4’ | 35mm | Sound
Recreation (original French version)
Robert Breer | 1957 | USA, France | 2’ | 16mm | French spoken
Schwechater
Peter Kubelka | 1958 | Austria | 1’ | 16mm | Sound
Anthem
Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 2006 | Thailand | 5’ | 35mm | Sound
Roller Coaster Rabbit
Rob Minkoff | 1990 | USA | 8’ | 35mm | Sound
The Present
Robert Frank | 1996 | USA, Switzerland | 24’ | 35mm | English spoken
