Peter Kubelka
The tapes in the program consist of some of Mekas’ earliest cassettes from the 1990s not long after he first began working with video as well as more recent mini-DV tapes from 2010s. The contents of the tapes have not been previously seen in their entirety. The footage provides rare insight into aspects of Mekas’ video-making practice, as well as his activities, thoughts, dreams, and concerns, especially during the later years of his life.
Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
This epic documentary subtly introduces the complex worldview of iconic filmmaker and theoretician Peter Kubelka (born 1934, Vienna). While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of about an hour, focusing on the essence of cinema, his legendary lectures often unfold over many hours. These lectures on “what is cinema” and “cooking as an art form” are frequently illuminated by presentation of archaeological artefacts from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice which explores the evolution of humanity. Martina Kudláček has carefully woven an open-ended portrait which goes beyond the biographical to reveal fresh insights into the phenomenon of film.
A casual, personal portrait of Hermann Nitsch, made with footage I took over the many years of our friendship. Footage includes early performances in New York, images of Hermann shortly after the acquisition of the Prinzendorf monastery, which since has become his main space of activity. You also see Hermann with his Vienna, New York, and Napoli friends, Peter Kubelka, Raimund Abraham, Gunther Brus, George Maciunas, Giuseppe Morra, and others.
Discarded takes from advertising films are presented almost untouched, as documents that unwittingly offer valuable and humorous insights into the human condition. - IFFR
Director Jonas Mekas provides an intimate glimpse of his personal life by constructing a feature length narrative from over 30 years of private home movie footage.
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
An historic event: Peter Kubelka gives a lecture at the Library of Congress.
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
The film is arranged in six chronologically-ordered parts, each filmed in a different location during Oona's third year.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
A 1971–72 documentary film by Jonas Mekas. It revolves around Mekas' trip back to Semeniškiai, the village of his birth.
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
The second part: Brakhage’s layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between “Kubelka’s Vienna” and his own.
Kubelka was asked to do a documentation group of Europe's hunters in Africa, working on it for hours and do the editing very extreme so film live leaving only 12 1/2 minutes, Kubelka also did a revolution in sound synchronization in which he called the "sync events," and also done editing to create an illusion of continuity for a moment, one of the most important experiment film of all time.
An experimental film, the last in Peter Kubelka's trilogy of “metric films”. Each frame of Arnulf Rainer is composed of darkness or light and silence or sound.
In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater 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.
Adebar is the first of Peter Kubelka's 'metric films', in which every element of the composition is precisely ordered and in relation to the gestalt. The film is made up of single units---13, 26 and 52 frames long---which are subjected to a complex rule-system, including a strict use of positive and negative space, that determines their structure within the film.
In his first film work, Kubelka evokes episodes of flirtation, courtship, and break-ups, played out against a series of non-corresponding audio excerpts.
