la nature vivante

A radical⇌matter film evening

Tuesday 5 April 2022, 8.30 pm
Stadtkino cinema
Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Vienna

Three extreme films whose genesis was anything but easy and with whose production I am closely associated in many ways. For the first two, Im Freien and Vertigo Rush, I was responsible for the technical realisation and in both cases it was a substantial challenge. The premise of Im Freien was that a picture would be taken every three minutes over three months with an analogue 16mm camera. This rigid requirement and the location in Iceland spared neither the material nor the crew and yet Albert Sackl's film has a wonderful lightness and subtle wit that you don't notice these enormous efforts for one frame. Vertigo Rush by Johann Lurf, on the other hand, was the most complex project I have accompanied to date and here, too, the insane technical effort completely disappears behind the brilliant result. The uncompromising nature of this 20-minute tour de force is unsurpassed and anyone who has not yet seen the film can look forward to a unique and intense cinematic experience. I have followed the subtle and enchantingly beautiful film Wind by Martin Putz for years as a loving and critical friend. Here, too, the process of making the film was complicated and by no means straightforward. I have a long history and a deep friendship with all these films and their makers. I myself am a filmmaker and what I always liked most about it was the solidarity and mutual help that doesn't count hours and is ultimately never about money. This programme is a thank you and a reminiscence of this form of cooperation and an encouragement not to be discouraged by commercial constraints and dull utilitarianism as an artist.

Albert Sackl: Im Freien, 2011, 16mm, 23min

Im Freien is to be taken literally as a title, because the camera's gaze is directed at sections of a barren and untouched landscape, which serves as a projection surface to explore the cinematic apparatus, to (de)construct cinematic space, time and movement. Albert Sackl analyses these relationships within the framework of a radical experimental set-up: filming took place during the Nordic summer until the beginning of autumn with a continuous time-lapse interval of one frame every three minutes. In a process of analogue linearity that compresses almost three months into 23 minutes without editing, camera and landscape, enormous technical precision and phenomena such as light, shadow, weather, colour, surface texture or the increasingly long nights that fall in the course of the film come together. This confrontation of a predictable, metrically defined structure and unpredictable natural processes makes use of the environment without losing itself in it or succumbing to its aesthetic fascination. The landscape is both a space of projection and a space of action, and so it seems inevitable that man will invade this cinematic space. Hesitantly at first, barely perceptible, a foot briefly becomes visible, a little later a hand fleetingly. Man, a foreign body in this place, seeks a relationship with the landscape and the camera. And in the end, the title Im Freien seems to turn into the opposite, when a space forms out of the various objects, which may perhaps be a projection space, a material reference to the apparatus that nevertheless always remains the determining factor: that of the cinema. (Barbara Pichler, abridged from www.sixpackfilm.com)

Johann Lurf: Vertigo Rush, 2007, 35mm, 19min

In the interplay of nature and (optical) machine, the hidden becomes visible. The technically complex experimental set-up Vertigo Rush consists of a series of dolly zooms: a sequence of camera movements shot in single frames forwards and backwards, with simultaneous use of zooms in opposite directions. The optical illusion of the space shifting together is intensified by an initially gentle, later drastic acceleration of this pendulum movement - and is gradually handed over to abstraction, transformed into a "dissolving" image. The seemingly simple basic situation unfolds a genuinely cinematographic effect: while the frequency of the - at first subliminal, soon nervously throbbing - sine tone track is constantly increased, the space expands and condenses as if it were digitally animated, while the barely controllable play of daylight leaves its (documentary) traces even in this system of the strictest cinematic regimentation. With the increase in speed (and the onset of darkness) in the second part of the film, the pictorial space narrows into a nocturnal corridor of shock. Vertigo Rush ends in the pure frenzy of perspective distortion, in the controlled intoxication of speed: the serene velocity of the unleashed machine gaze. (Stefan Grissemann, abridged from www.sixpackfilm.com)

Martin Putz: Wind, 2021, DCP, 30min

"We are mad to be filming the wind; filming the impossible is what's best in life. The dream of making the wind tangible has moved artists since time immemorial. And not only Joris Ivens was fully aware of the hopelessness of the undertaking. Martin Putz, too, sets out into the world in search of people and places of the wind - mindful of the fact that only the things that stand in the way of the wind can give an idea of how it works. Without the friction and movement it causes, it remains invisible. You can capture what the wind moves. The raising of the metre-long wings of the wind turbine by crane is like the duel David against Goliath and thus becomes one of the central images in Wind, like the beating of the butterfly's wings in the beguiling science film. Thomas Macho's voice at this point tells of the paradox that the only permanence lies in change, namely in the wind that never stops moving everything. The blind man in Robert Frank's Life Dances On also wants to photograph the wind. He will never be able to marvel at his picture, but in the sheer attempt to record air movements, the breath of the world is also present. (Regina Schlagnitweit, abridged from www.sixpackfilm.com)