Innovative Film Austria 10/11

Fruhauf, whose Tranquility is a typically lyrical, disquieting and mysterious “mobile
collage” of motifs concerning water, bodies and aviation.
Austrian cinema has an illustrious line of seminal avant-garde masters, including
Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka. They have bequeathed filmmakers worldwide with a
precise (sometimes mathematical) sense of conceptual form – where, as often in
Austrian production, literally every frame counts. Conceptual cinema continually
reinvents itself in the present audiovisual climate – it must do so, in an era where
audiovisual collage has become a merry staple of YouTube, in every mode from
the silliest to the most brilliant. In Conference, part of his series Notes on Film,
Norbert Pfaffenbichler strips back current mash-up experiments to their purest
image-thought form: a series of different fictive incarnations of Hitler on the
screen – Hitler as media icon or sign – from To Be or Not To Be to Der Untergang,
from Alec Guinness to Bruno Ganz.
Somewhere between Impressionism and Conceptualism stands the unique work
of Peter Tscherkassky. His Coming Attractions (premiered at the Venice Film
Festival) boldly draws its inspiration from a body of critical reflection: Tom
Gunning’s theory of a “cinema of attractions”, pure film as a series of “circus
turns” beyond, and often in opposition to, any strict narrative line. Treating, hand
printing and re-editing a series of found fragments (including raw outtakes and
camera flubs), Tscherkassky abstracts a fundamental grammar of “injunctions to
look” that pass through the eyes, the face, publicity objects, the flick of a head …
taking in, along the way, a rich, sometimes deliberately comical history of avantgarde
forms.
In the years since my first exposure to cutting-edge Austrian film, there have
been major explorations in two surprising directions: one path is documentary,
and the other is fiction. The result has been a series of remarkable hybrids,
suggesting new possibilities that are still taking shape in image and sound. On
the documentary side, Sasha Pirker’s The Future will not be Capitalist is an essay
on everyday architectural design practice that embraces its own meandering
looseness. Rose and Jasmine by Michael Pilz is a highly accomplished, pristinely
chiselled piece of contemplative cinema: here, digital note-taking – something
more personal than reportage, although it functions as that, too – is shaped into
a captivating portrait of Iran’s “otherness” in the European gaze. Peter
Schreiner’s Totó, in its own way a modern “cinema of attractions”, burrows deep
into its loose situational premise – an Austrian travels back to his Italian
homeland – in order to liberate the medium’s descriptive capacity, etching faces,
gestures, atmospheres, moods …
12>13 Introduction