Balagan collaborates with Louise Bourque, filmmaker and film professor teaching at Emerson College and School of Museum of Fine Arts, and SIXPACK (AUSTRIA), the only government funded distributor of experimental films and videos, to present an evening of experimental works from Austria. Along with such established masters such as Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch, the program also features less US known masters of the Austrian avant-garde: Lisl Ponger and Elke Groen.

Happy-End 11min, 16mm, 1996
Director:Peter Tscherkassky

A found footage film about oral rituals, about festive occasions and about a married couple who understood how to enrich and enliven their cosy togetherness. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting cakes, making toasts... Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing woman freezes. It is a deeply ambiguous moment that, from the expression on her face, allows one to think of something close to despair. On something like a modern, alienated, baroque vanity motive, which is still present in the Austrian tradition, and whose abrasion with the sensual certainty of the moment of drinking an egg liqueur gives Happy-End a wider meaning. - Bert Rebhandl

Born in 1958 in Vienna, Austria. Lived in Berlin 1979-84. Studied philosophy. Doctoral thesis: "Film as Art. Towards a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography" (1985/86). Teaches film making at the Academies of Applied Arts in Linz and Vienna. Founding member of Sixpack Film. Organized several international avant-garde film festivals in Vienna and film tours abroad. Since 1984 numerous publications and lectures on the history and theory of avant-garde film. 1993 and 1994 artistic director of the annual Austrian film festival "Diagonale". Editor of the book "Peter Kubelka" (1995, together with G. Jutz).

With more than 20 films since 1979, Peter Tscherkassky is one of Austria's most productive film-makers. What is remarkable, however, is not so much the quantity as the consistent quality of his work. Tscherkassky never allows himself to fall back on certainties, rather, with each film, he is sizing up new territory. Tscherkassky's films are exceptional because he knows how to pair his strict concepts and his consistent exploration of a subject with a visual richness, revealing new, surprising facets of sensuality with every film he makes. - Alexander Horwath

A confrontation with the codes of narrative-representational cinema is one of Peter Tscherkassky's constant concerns. If one attempts to distill a constant from his films, then this must surely be the oscillation between the abstract and the concrete, between the dry and the sensual, which is the source of energy of his work. The question of belly or brain is one which Tscherkassky stopped asking long ago — for ultimately sobriety is the route to ecstasy. - Gabriele Jutz

Film ist. 60 min, 16mm, 1998
Director: Gustav Deutsch

Film ist. is an experimental film in the most radical sense of the word. Most of its material comes from situations where film is only used in clinical tests, either for measuring or observation purposes.

The films by Gustav Deutsch are based on found footage. In his principal work Film ist. images from educational films and science programmes are filtered into a new kind of modern poetry. The trajectories of planets and birds, the movements of microbes and water, x-rays, optical illusions...Deutsch combines unrelated things into mysterious, rhythmic entities by silencing the rationalizing voiceovers accompanying his source material. The lyrical soundtrack, made up of sound effects and carefully chosen excerpts of music, elegantly emphasizes the film’s meditative feeling and gives these “emotionless” pictures totally surprising meanings.

When Muybridge or Marey produced their first scientific films, they not only invented the technique of cinema but also created the purest aesthetics of it. This is the miracle of scientific film, its unfailing paradox. Only at the extreme end of profit-seeking utilitarian research, when aesthetic purposes as such are most sternly rejected, cinematic beauty will follow with supernatural grace. - André Bazin, “Accidental Beauty”

Gustav Deutsch: Born in 1952 in Vienna. Drawings since 1967, Architecture since 1970, Video since 1977, Films and Sound since 1981, Performances since 1983 in Austria, Germany, England Luxembourg, France, Morocco, Greece, Turkey.

Tito-Material 5 min, 16mm, 1997
Director: Elke Groen

Elke Groen’s TITO MATERIAL un-earths film fragments featuring Field Marshall Tito, found in the rubble of a defunct theatre in Yugoslavia, which take on an almost iconic significance with the magnification of every scratch and tear. Dated from 1978, the weathered film shows a public and private Tito.

The material is in the process of decay. Holes gape through the emulsion. Some passages have become completely abstract and only consist of shapes and colors. Groen investigated this strip of film, felt its scuffs, tears and folds and photographed the fluctuating colors as well as the accumulated dirt. She doesn't force the fragment into a unified structure, but instead tries various things out as she goes along. She notes details, enlarges parts of the images (and, thus, also the grain). She lays down short loops, makes the picture flicker, has them hesitate or even come to a stand still. She reacts to the origins and historical context of the piece cautiously. She notes things and comments events that can only be touched on indirectly in this film. The context is inherently emotionally charges, the beauty of the dissolving pictures is sometimes overpowering. The original source was apparently a propaganda film of a system now consigned to the history books, and it made extensive use of pictures from the Second World War. Groien's selection of material uses these images very sparingly. Her film hints at things, no more and no less. - Thomas Korschill

Elke Groen: Born in 1969 in Bad Ischl, Upper Austria. Studied Architecture and Photography in Vienna, Essen and Triest among others. Projections of films and slides at various concerts and clubbings in Austria and Germany since 1994. Photo Exhibition in Tel Aviv 1996.

Passagen 12min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Lisl Ponger

A woman stands alone at the railing of a passenger liner and gazes into the blue. She will remember for us an arrival in New York, the walk of a young couple through China-town, the house boats in Shanghai and the excited children who gather round the visitor with the obscure picture machine. Beneath the pictures the sounds of distant lands can be heard and, in parallel, a montage of various memories and people unfolds. People who at some time either left or arrived in Vienna involuntarily (...).

Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of occidental memory. The pictures, made by observant tourists, are revealed, in their tensile relationship to the soundtrack, as a post-colonial journey. A journey through exactly those countries which long ago have been shrunk together in space and time. Finally the wonderful neon signs of the „Hotel Edison“ and „Radio City“ remind one of the origins of this form of appropriation of the world, of the time of great expeditions, of Benjamin's shop-windows and passages, and of the time when technical apparatus and means of transportation fundamentally altered the perceptions of modern man. - Christa Blümlinger

In a sensitive gestus Lisl Ponger makesclear that, where images are concerned, neither hermetic memory nor immutable innocence exist and that found footage art requires no artificial manipulation to make the seam between privacy and hidden political agendas visible - Robert Buchschwenter

Lisl Ponger: Born in 1947 in Nürnberg. School of Graphic Arts in Vienna, photography class. Between 1974-1978 traveled in Mexico and USA. Films since 1979. Founding member of Sixpack Film. Member of Wiener Sezession. National Prize for Film Art 1994. Lives and Works in Vienna.