October
20 , Wednesday, 7:30PM,
2004 (reception
at 7PM)
BIG BALAGAN: Peter Kubelka
(in person)
METAPHORIC FILMS
Location:
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Moviehouse II (250 seats)
and
October
21 , Thursday, 6:30PM,
2004
BIG BALAGAN: Peter Kubelka
(in person)
METRIC FILMS
Location:
Museum
of Fine Arts (MFA), 640 Huntington Ave., Boston
Two
lecture/screenings with Peter Kubelka,
one of the most distinguished figures in the history
of 20th century avante-garde and independent filmmaking.
His films are an innovative demonstration of cinematic
possibilities. Moreover, as an artist or theoretician
he has also worked in architecture, literature,
music, painting and cuisine. He has been also
a curator at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna
that he founded in 1964. His teaching on the topic
of food preparation as an art form at the Frankfurt
School of Fine Arts led to an extension of his
title as Professor of Film to that of Film and
Cuisine. Over the past 40 years he has lectured
at museums, universities and institutions throughout
the world, and has been awarded the Austrian State
Prize for his life's work.
"Peter
Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium
– the world's greatest filmmaker which
is to say, simply: See his films! ...by all
means/above all else..." – Stan
Brakhage
"Kubelka's cinema is like a piece of
crystal, or some other object of nature: it
does not look like it was produced by man."
– P. Adams Sidney
Stan
Brakhage about Peter Kubelka: "I
mean, what sort of praise can I give that will
really serve to distinguish these five films
of his from all that only passes for the Art
of Film in current affairs by means of some
football tactic or other? His films exist outside
the art-as-a-game scramble. Each of his films
is what it is — and to perfection... and
with, yes, feeling; but of such a nature as
to render "sentiment" a hard word
or else a word hard to use in relationship.
There is no sentimentality in his works such
as would divide the emotional and sentimental
responses to them. Each works, as he did work
to make each one an expression of his whole
being at the time of making: And thus, no two
of his films are in any way alike — each
film being as distinct from every other as any
moment of a man’s life may be if he lives
it fully... which is to say: To perfection!
His, thus, is opposite to that "perfection"
the academics lay claim to (and can have) through
formal imitation. His is: "I only make
what I like! — not what I might think
appropriate or ideal or perfect, and so forth
— but just what I like as I look at it
again and again in the making: And I know that
film is made of 24 still pictures every second
— so there must be no frame of it left
in the film which is not absolutely necessary
to the whole work: Because that frame will detract
from the total, will have its effect in weakening
my experience of the moment" ... and Peter
Kubelka takes a very long time making each film
a lasting experience of the moment of enjoyment
— so that each can be seen again and again
for increasing fulfillment of the initial experience.
And
his works are sound films. Here, at last, is
a film-maker’s ear that creates in contrapunctual
accord with his eye in the making. He achieves
this, too, through his sense of the perfect
— so much so that if, for instance, Adebar
is projected even one frame out-of-sync the
whole track becomes exceptional "background
music" but in no sense the experience of
his making... and if the projectioning is perfectly
sync-ed (the distance between gate and sound-reader
exactly 26 frames) the experience is an indescribably
new one for any with eyes and ears to see/hear
it. He has even created a film (called ARNULF
RAINER) whose images can no more be "turned
off" by the closing of the eyes than can
the soundtrack thereof (for it is composed entirely
of white frames rhythming through black interspaces
and of such an intensity as to create its pattern
straight thru closed eyelids) so that the whole
"mix" of the audio-visual experience
is clearly "in the head", so to speak:
And if one looks at it openly, one can see ones
own eye cells as if projected onto the screen
and can watch ones optic physiology activated
by the soundtrack in what is, surely, the most
basic Dance of Life of all (for the sounds of
the film do resemble and, thus, prompt the inner-ear’s
hearing of its own pulse output at intake of
sound).
These
films must, very truly, be seen and very truly
seen and heard to be believed!"
METAPHORIC
FILMS
| METRIC
FILMS
Mosaik
im Vertrauen
(1955)
"Experience
has shown that the film is meaningful to an
impartial observer; yet the intellectual Alpbach
audience found that it was "a sequence
of images having no meaning, accompanied by
music and noises that do not fit with the
images." Some people even expressed the
view that it was the decadent work of the
devil. It is true that the sequence of images
is discontinuous (disjointed) and that the
sound and image do not run synchronously,
i.e. the spoken word does not need to come
from the mouths of the performers. The emotional
tensions which arise here, and which Kubelka
orchestrated with absolute mastery, are incomparably
stronger than any "normal" film.
The sequence of images leaps associatively,
is sometimes interrupted by secondary events,
sometimes unfolds in the reverse order to
the way things ordinarily occur, and thus
the story is put together enigmatically like
the stones of a mosaic. Neither can there
be any other film in which the sound has such
a powerful autonomous existence as it runs
parallel to the image. One has to listen very
precisely in order to differentiate between
the foreground, middle ground and background
of the sound. Kubelka's motives for making
the film lie in his belief that commercial
films do not fully exploit cinematic possibilities.
He declares that the place of the plot and
its ostensibly disparate scenes is the screen,
and the time shall be any time at which the
film is shown". – Alfred
Schmeller, 1958
Pause!
(1977)
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"His
triumph is really quadruple. First triumph:
Pause! is an ecstatic work. Second triumph:
With the perfection and intensity of his work
he dissolved the audience’s swollen-up
expectations which had grown out of normal
proportions during the ten years of waiting.
He enabled us to receive his new work in its
newborn nakedness. Third triumph: His dissolving
of Arnulf Rainer. Arnulf Rainer himself is
an artist of unique originality and intensity.
His face art, which constitutes the source
of imagery in Pause!, is
a chapter of modern art itself. I have a particular
aversion to film-makers who use other artists
and their art as materials of their films.
These films never transcend their sources.
During the first few images of Pause!
I had an existential fear. Kubelka
had to consume and to transcend not only Arnulf
Rainer but also — and this constitutes
his fourth triumph — to transcend the
entire genre of contemporary art known as
face art. A few more images, and my heart
regained itself and jumped into excitement:
Both Rainer and Art disintegrated and became
molecules, frames of movements and expressions,
material at the disposal of the Muse of Cinema.
I am not saying this to diminish the person
and art of Arnulf Rainer: His own greatness
cannot be dissolved, in his art. But here
we speak about the art of Peter Kubelka, and
in a work of art, as in the heavens so on
earth, there is only one God and Creator."
– Jonas Mekas
Unsere
Afrikareise (1966)
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"Kubelka’s
most recent film before Pause!
is Unsere Afrikareise, whose
images are relatively conventional "records"
of a hunting-trip in Africa. The shooting
records multiple "systems"—
white hunters, natives, animals, natural objects,
buildings — in a manner that preserves
the individuality of each. At the same time,
the editing of sound and image brings these
systems into comparison and collision, producing
a complex of multiple meanings, statements,
ironies... I know of no other cinema like
this. The ultimate precision, even fixity,
that Kubelka’s films achieve frees them
to become objects that have some of the complexity
of nature itself — but they are films
of a nature refined and defined, remade into
a series of relationships. Those rare and
miraculous moments in nature when the sun’s
rays align themselves precisely with the edge
of a rock or the space between two buildings,
or when a pattern on sand or in clouds suddenly
seems to take on some other aspect, animal
or human, are paralleled in single events
of a Kubelka film. The whole film is forged
out of so many such precisions with an ecstatic
compression possible only in cinema."
– Fred Camper
Dichtung
und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) (2004)
Boston Premiere!
"Dichtung
und Wahrheit"contains collected
pieces from publicity films with a common
element: they show actors before they start
and then begin to play what they are directed
to represent. Repeated ready-made takes create
cycles of symbolic significance, glorified
glimpses of the contemporary human condition:
the beauty from a hair conditioner, courting
and insemination by chocolate-feeding, labourless
birth onto a varnished floor, animal and inanimate
companions. It was my aim not to shape the
found material perfectly into an unambiguous
message but to preserve the full richness
of archaeological information. My point of
view has changed from the contemporary artist
into an observer looking into the distant
past." – Peter Kubelka
METAPHORIC
FILMS
| METRIC
FILMS
Adebar
(1957)
"Kubelka's
achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage
one step further. While Eisenstein used shots
as his basic units and edited them together
in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has
gone back to the individual still frame as
the essence of cinema. The fact that a projected
film consists of 24 still images per second
serves as the basis for his art. This idea
has different materializations in different
Kubelka films. In Adebar, only certain shot
lengths are used — 13, 26 and 52 frames
— and the image material in the film
is combined according to certain rules. For
instance, there is a consistent alternation
between positive and negative. The film’s
images are extremely high contrast black-and-white
shots of dancing figures; the images are stripped
down to their black-and-white essentials so
that they can be used in an almost terrifyingly
precise construct of image, motion, and repeated
sound." – Fred Camper
Schwechater (1958)
"In
1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short
commercial for Scwechater beer. The beer company
undoubtedly thought they were commissioning
a film that would help them sell their beers;
Kubelka had other ideas. He shot his film with
a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply
pointing it in the general direction of the
action. He then took many months to edit his
footage, while the company fumed and demanded
a finished product. Finally he submitted a film,
90 seconds long, that featured extremely rapid
cutting (cutting at the limits of most viewers’
perception) between images washed out almost
to the point of abstraction — in black-and-white
positive and negative and with red tint —
of dimly visible people drinking beer and of
the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern.
This "commercial" may not have sold
any beer in the twenty years since it was made,
but I (as someone who hates beer) have vowed
that if I’m ever in Austria I’ll
drink some Swechater, in tribute to what i consider
one of the most intense, most pure, and most
perfect minutes of cinema anyone has ever achieved."
– Fred Camper
Arnulf Rainer (1960)
"Arnulf
Rainer’s images are the most "reduced"
of all — this is a film composed entirely
of frames of solid black and solid white which
Kubelka strings together in lengths as long
as 24 seconds and as short as a single frame.
When he alternates between single black and
white frames, a rapid flicker effect is produced,
which is as close as Kubelka can come to the
somewhat more rapid flicker of motion-picture
projection; during the long sections of darkness
one waits in nervous anticipation for the
flicker to return, without knowing precisely
which form it will take. But Arnulf Rainer
is not merely a study of film rhythm and flicker.
In reducing the cinema to its essentials,
Kubelka has not stripped it of meaning, but
rather made an object which has qualities
so general as to suggest a variety of possible
meanings, each touching on some essential
aspect of existence." – Fred
Camper
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