Urban architecture and its special character: Lotte Schreiber's filmic homage to a 1960s concrete apartment block in Trieste, underscored by Stefan Nemeth's soundtrack. Dimitri Venkov shows examples from three important periods of Moscow's monumental architecture: Stalin's time, brutalist modernism and today's glass façades. besenbahn creat…
The programme with the title of Howard Hawks' comedy is dedicated to humour in artistic film. Carola Dertnig presents the preconception of women as incompetent car drivers in a way that is ready for the scrapheap. Rauchensteiner deconstructs Rilke's autumn poem in recitative and Hund und Horn observe three mice in a model house made of edible mate…
The conflict between Israel and Palestine is reduced to absurdity in The Men Behind the Wall with the help of the dating app Tinder. Inés Moldavsky uses it to contact men on the other side of the wall, crossing spatial, political and gender-specific borders in the process. Until Hungary's membership, one of Europe's Schengen borders was the…
The Phoenix Tapes were commissioned for the exhibition "Notorious: Alfried Hitchcock and Contemporary Art" at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Girardet and Müller combine recurring motifs from forty Hitchcock films and create a surreal resonance chamber of his patterns of suspense in the montage. Stefan Zlamal decouples the dialogues of two d…
Kurt Kren's very first film in 1957 - the numbers in the film title indicate the number and year of production - is characterised by a serial montage technique with which Kren, together with Peter Kubelka, anticipated the direction later referred to as "structural film" in the USA. Equally pioneering are his precise scores from the following years…
Ernst Schmidt jr. was incorruptible all his life. A companion to VALIE EXPORT, Peter Weibel, and Kurt Kren, he was the cofounder of the Austrian Filmmakers Coop and one of the most important figures of Expanded Cinema in the 1960s and ’70s. He published the seminal book Eine Subgeschichte des Films (A Subhistory of Film) together with Hans S…
Since the political upheaval in Ukraine, countless Lenin monuments have been dismantled. In 2015, Anna Jermolaewa travelled through the country to document the architectural voids and interview passers-by. This was followed by two commissioned works that Sasha Pirker realised on the occasion of an exhibition on Walter Pichler's work at the Museum …
In these three films, places and spaces are animated by ghostly apparitions, reality and the fantastic merge. Ben Pointeker presents another of his mysterious films, the beauty of whose visual composition further intensifies the emotional effect already hinted at. In a Moscow residential complex, formerly built for Stalinist functionaries, Herwig …
Martin Bruch travelled thousands of kilometres for Handbikemovie to film 56 shots solely from the subjective viewpoint of the helmet camera with original sound or music. His multiple sclerosis made it necessary for him to travel independently on this special three-wheeled vehicle, but it was also a daring and fun adventure. The result is an "exper…
The young career of Lukas Marxt (*1983) is remarkable: both because of the recognition he has received in the film and exhibition context and because of his artistic output and the single-minded curiosity with which he approaches his projects. Marxt seeks out inhospitable, remote landscapes and extreme weather conditions to explore the media impac…