Kurt Kren

Description

Kurt Kren was a vital figure in Austrian avant-garde cinema of the postwar period. His structural films—often shot frame-by-frame following elaborately prescored charts and diagrams—have influenced filmmakers for decades, even as Kren himself remained a nomadic and obscure public figure. Kurt Kren, edited by Nicky Hamlyn, Simon Payne, and A. L. Rees, brings together interviews with Kren, film scores, and classic, out-of-print essays, alongside the reflections of contemporary academics and filmmakers, to add much-needed critical discussion of Kren’s legacy. Taken together, the collection challenges the canonical view of Kren that ignores his underground lineage and powerful, lyrical imagery.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Photographers
• Artists
• Architects
• Film director
• General officer
• List of photographers
• History of film
• Artist
• Architect
• Art
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783205530
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Jane Seymour
Cover image: Kurt Kren, 50/96 Snapspots (for Bruce) , courtesy of Sixpack (Vienna) © Kurt Kren estate
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetter: John Teehan
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-551-6
ePDF: 978-1-78320-552-3
ePUB: 978-1-78320-553-0
Printed and bound by Gomer Press Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Not Reconciled – The Structural Films of Kurt Kren
A. L. Rees
1/57 Versuch mit synthetischem Ton (Test)
Simon Payne
Kurt Kren and Sound
Gabriele Jutz
2/60 48 Köpfe aus dem Szondi-Test
Abbe Fletcher
3/60 Bäume im Herbst
Simon Payne
3/60 Bäume im Herbst
Gareth Polmeer
Time-Splits: 4/61 Mauern pos.-neg. & Weg and 31/75 Asyl
Aline Helmke
Strategies in Black and White: 4/61 Mauern pos.-neg. & Weg and 11/65 Bild Helga Philipp
Nicky Hamlyn
5/62 Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc.
Yvonne Spielmann
15/67 TV
Yvonne Spielmann
17/68 Grün-Rot
Simon Payne
Negation and Contradiction in Kurt Kren’s Films: 32/76 An W + B, 18/68 Venecia Kaputt and 42/83 No Film
Nicky Hamlyn
20/68 Schatzi
A. L. Rees
31/75 Asyl
Gareth Polmeer
37/78 Tree Again
Gareth Polmeer
Miscellaneous Works and ‘Bad Home Movies’
Nicky Hamlyn
Vernacular Studies: 49/95 tausendjahrekino and 50/96 Snapspots (for Bruce)
Barnaby Dicker
Colour Frame Enlargements and Pages from No Film
Reprints and Facsimiles
Collected Writings on Kurt Kren
Malcolm Le Grice
Reviews of 31/75 Asyl , 15/67 TV and 28/73 Zeitaufnahme(n)
A. L. Rees
Interview with Kurt Kren
Daniel Plunkett
Notes on Kren: Cutting Through Structural Materialism or, ‘Sorry. It had to be done.’
David Levi Strauss
Interview with Kurt Kren
David Levi Strauss and David Gerstein
On Kurt Kren
Peter Gidal
Lord of the Frames: Kurt Kren
Peter Tscherkassky
Interview with Kurt Kren
Peter Tscherkassky
Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy
Jinhee Choi
Filmography
Notes on Contributors
This book is dedicated to the memory of A. L. Rees, 1949–2014; film historian, teacher, mentor, friend and co-editor.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following for their assistance and support in the preparation of this book: Steve Anker, Martin Arnold, Eve Heller, Aline Helmcke, Malcolm Le Grice, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Steve Polta, Sixpack Film (Vienna), Peter Tscherkassky, Anglia Ruskin University and The University for the Creative Arts.
Introduction: Not Reconciled – The Structural Films of Kurt Kren
A. L. Rees
T his book began from our long-standing enthusiasm for the films of Kurt Kren, who has been a continuing influence on new filmmakers from the 1970s to the present day. It is the first English-language study of his structural films, with newly commissioned reviews and a selection of early documents and essays, some long out of print or available only in specialist journals. Also reproduced here are several of Kren’s filming scores and some pages from one of the limited edition books he produced during his time in the United States in the 1980s. Of the new essays, some are by critical experts in the Austrian avant-garde cinema, and others are by younger writers – mainly filmmakers themselves – who take up new themes, including Kren as a herald of proto-digital art. The films that are covered in these essays were chosen by the writers whom we asked to contribute to the book. Thus, in some instances, individual films have been covered more than once, but this is a testament to the provocative nature of Kren’s structural films, which generate new ideas and approaches even where authors’ accounts stem from close formal analysis.
Our aim was to produce a demi-catalogue of the structural Kren, in which all his main films would be reviewed, along with some more ephemeral ones. Though the jury is still out on some of the minor works, made mostly during the 1980s, we do not think our classification is contentious. The invaluable and essential 3-DVD set of Kren’s films issued by Index (Austria) is similarly divided into Structural Films, Vienna Aktion Films and documentary/minor works, including those made during his ten-year sojourn in the United States, across which he travelled in his car, working as a labourer, demolition man and finally, for eight years, as a museum guard in Houston. This division of the parts of Kren’s oeuvre also mirrors the categorization of his films as 16mm distribution prints from the 1960s onwards.
Our focus is on the structural films rather than on the Vienna Aktionist films that make up the other half of Kren’s reputation and even his notoriety, by his association with the groups led by Otto Mühl and Hermann Nitsch. The recent rediscovery of the Vienna group, including Kren’s role in it, has impelled vivid and impassioned studies by (among others) the filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, the cultural critic Stephen Barber and the artist Paul McCarthy. McCarthy’s championing of Kren in the 1990s as a ‘transgressive’ filmmaker and a personal ancestor ushered in Kren’s post-structural fame, and unlocked him from a formalist film ghetto to which, some argue, he never belonged. Instead, however, it put him into a gallery context in which he never took part. The scandalous mayhem of the Aktionists began in risk and improvisation. Their descendants have long been safely installed in the gallery and institutionally validated in performance art as a genre. From these tendencies – and much else – Kren largely fled, first to Germany and then to the United States before returning to Vienna towards the end of his life.
One consequence of Kren’s status as a transgressive artist, though, is that his Aktion films and his Structural films are now often shown together in screenings and exhibition, although this was the case in the past too, when the films were projected in cinemas and other venues dedicated to experimental film. No one in the 1970s who saw the work from one half of Kren’s output was unaware of the other. The difference today, perhaps, is that the Aktion films have gained a new authority and interest, benefitting from the fascination that this still contentious art movement in post-war Austria holds as one of the origins of today’s performance art. But the relation of Kren’s Aktion films to the Aktion artists themselves is complex. Tscherkassky and other sophisticated analysts of the Aktion films see them as independent works, as indeed did Kren, Günter Brus and Nitsch, who for their own different reasons each denied that the Kren films are ‘documentaries’ of any kind. In some ways the films are antithetical in method to the performances they depict, as Tscherkassy demonstrates, for example by showing in rapid single-frame cuts a live event that originally unfolded in long and slow duration.
That Kren had an important, though occasional, presence in Aktion art is not in doubt. Anyone who has seen Mühl’s memorably coprophagic Scheiss-kerl (1969) is unlikely to forget the brief image of the grinning Kren – who helped shoot the film and took part in it – wearing only a loincloth and waving a handheld camera. However, the Aktion films are not the core of our own interest in Kren, and additionally they have already been discussed from many angles that are not ours, and which are much more sympathetic to them. From our perspective as editors, the psychosexual aggression, and (in the words of one contributor) ‘bathetic sadomasochism’, of the Aktion artists, whether directed towards men and more specifically towards women, fatally undermines their claims to liberation, catharsis and expiation.
In its own time, the direct art of the Aktion group provoked heated and critical response and protest – as intended. More widely, it was part of an international groundswell of live, mixed media and theatricalized art in the United States, Japan and Europe. For the next generation of film and media artists in the 1970s – Peter Weibel and Valie Export, for example – the Aktionist performances were still inspirational examples of excessive art that challenged the repressive tolerance of bourgeois society, and even now many Austrian avant-garde filmmakers incorporate pornographic and violent imagery that recalls the Aktionists. Marc Adrian mixed sexual violence and abstraction in his films for 30 years, seemingly unaware of, or unimpressed by, the social changes from the 1960s to the 1990s that twisted cultural liberation into commercialized sexual exploitation.
This makes the difference all the more striking between the two parts of the Kren canon: their division into ‘structural’ and ‘Aktion’ films. His structural films show no trace of the patriarchy, aggression against women and scenes of violence that characterize at least one continuing strand in the Austrian avant-garde cinema. Rather, and perhaps alone in this regard among his filmmaking contemporaries, his genres are traditional: the portrait, the landscape and scenes of daily life. It is also true, however, that in his classes at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts he made, according to former student Norbert Pfaffenbichler, ‘wordless presentations’ of Shinya Tukamoto’s schlock-horror cyberpunk films and the aptly titled NEKRomantik (1987) by Jörg Buttgereit (Pfaffenbichler 2012: 268, footnote 3). Did Kren show these as examples to follow, or was the act of screening them in a college ‘master class’ a provocation in itself? P