Antiphon

Antiphon

Antiphon is constituted by the same 4 basic elements of cinema, light and darkness, sound and silence, as is my film Arnulf Rainer but it has the opposite form. Negative becomes positive, positive becomes negative, silence becomes sound, sound becomes silence. Six minutes 24 seconds, black and white, optical sound, 35 millimeter film.

(Peter Kubelka)


It was meant to be the highlight of the London Film Festival´s Experimenta Weekend last October, but a broken projector prevented Austrian avant-gardist and experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka from presenting his ambitious Monument Film project – a double projection of his works Antiphon (2012) and Arnulf Rainer (1960), back to back, side by side, as well as superimposed. Both works explore the four cinematographic elements – light and darkness, sound and silence – effectively stripping cinema down to its bare essentials as well as offering `a countermeasure to the dominating emotional motion picture´ (Jonas Mekas). What´s more, Antiphon literally presents the answer to Arnulf Rainer: what was white before is now black; where there was sound there is now silence. Monument Film is a response to what Kubelka describes as the `hostile takeover´ of analogue cinema technology by digital media, and hence might be best understood as a `last call to dogged resistance´. This month, Kubelka will be back in London to accomplish his endeavour, which he himself considers to be a culmination, the grand finale to his cinematic labors.

(Pamela Jahn, www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2013/04/04)


Antiphon can only be screened in combination with Arnulf Rainer!
(= Monument Film)


(Peter Kubelka)