ACFNY SUPPORTED | FILM SCREENING | THE CLIMATE OF VIENNA – THE AUSTRIAN FILM MUSEUM AT FIFTY
Vienna’s venerated Austrian Film Museum is in many ways a sister institution to Anthology insofar as both institutions share a co-founder (Peter Kubelka), a similar repertory collection/screening series (Anthology’s “Essential Cinema” is mirrored by the AFM’s “What is Film”), and, most importantly, a devotion both to exhibiting and preserving cinema in all its myriad forms. Like Anthology, the AFM pays special attention to those works that are most prone to be ignored or lost: the avant-garde, critically neglected, orphaned, uncategorizable, or otherwise marginal.
For five decades the AFM has been doing invaluable and tireless work through its mind-bogglingly eclectic and well-informed film programming, its invaluable preservation projects, and its ambitious and covetable array of publications (including definitive book-length studies of James Benning, Dziga Vertov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jean Epstein, and many others). Silver anniversary or no, the Austrian Film Museum is richly deserving of celebration, and Anthology is thrilled to pay tribute to them with a series that provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plumb the depths of their vaults.
As admirably diverse as the Museum’s interests may be, they do cohere around several poles, and this series has been curated to reflect some of these tendencies. Multiple programs highlight the Museum’s dedication to marginalized cinema (experimental pieces, trailers, screen tests, and other miscellanea), while others demonstrate its focus on Soviet cinema and on works that portray the upheavals of 20th century Central European history. Features by Benning and Weerasethakul, on the other hand, represent the AFM’s preservation strategy – based on the astute realization that even contemporary works are in danger of loss and decay – of treating recent and present-day international cinema with equal respect as the classics. Though the Museum’s collections and initiatives are too diverse to encapsulate easily, this selection of treasures suggests the extraordinary scope of their efforts.
Co-presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and the Deutsches Haus at NYU.
James Benning
DESERET1995, 81 min, 16mm.
Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.
Coming just before James Benning transitioned fully into the language-less landscape films that occupied him for much of the first decade of the 2000s, DESERET shares these later films’ unfailingly sharp compositional eye and concern with the social and political dimensions of our environment. Rhythmically, though, it has more in common with Benning’s earlier work, while its use of found text and narration place it squarely within a group of films (AMERICAN DREAMS, LANDSCAPE SUICIDE, NORTH ON EVERS) that enact fascinating experiments with image/text counterpoint. Devoting the soundtrack to a narration constructed from ninety-three New York Times articles from 1852-1992, all of them relating to the history of the state of Utah (or “Deseret,” the Mormons’ preferred name for the territory), Benning places this narration in ambiguous interrelationship to his imagery of contemporary landscapes throughout the state. Each shot is timed to a single sentence of the text, but as in all the films of this period, text and image refuse to fit together neatly, remaining distinct tracks that speak to each other in myriad but never easily reducible ways.
–Wed, Nov 12 at 7:30.
Fridrich Ėrmler
A FRAGMENT OF EMPIRE / OBLOMOK IMPERII
1929, 100 min, 35mm, b&w, silent.
Russian intertitles with projected English subtitles.Initially distributed in some countries under the more sober title “The Man Who Lost His Memory,” Fridrich Ėrmler’s FRAGMENTS OF AN EMPIRE divided critics and audiences upon its release but now ranks as a masterpiece of late-silent era Soviet filmmaking. Seventy-five years before GOODBYE, LENIN! rode a wave of success with its post-communist spin on the same idea, FRAGMENTS OF AN EMPIRE tells the tragi-comic tale of an amnesiac First World War veteran who recovers his memory after ten years only to find himself at odds with the new Soviet Russia. Ėrmler regular Fedor Nikitin gives a memorable performance as the shell-shocked (anti-)hero. The actor, who honed his craft with Stanislavskij at the celebrated Moscow Art Theater, was reportedly instructed by Ėrmler to mimic the “eyes of Christ.” Ultimately, as Russian film scholar Sergej Kapterev has pointed out, it is the actor’s hypnotic gaze that becomes an emotional linchpin for the film, binding its diverse elements together – a look that quite literally speaks volumes.
–Thurs, Nov 13 at 7:30.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON / DOKFAH NAI MEU MAAN2000, 88 min, 35mm, b&w.
In Thai with English subtitles. Restored by the Austrian Film Museum and the World Cinema Foundation.“Once upon a time…” is how the fairytale career of Apichatpong Weerasethakul fittingly begins. His first feature is a mix between road movie, fly-on-the-wall documentary, and exquisite corpse – a popular game among the French surrealists in the 1920s. Journeying south through the country from Bangkok, the future Palme d’or-winning filmmaker shares a story with a group of villagers, who then pass it on, gradually expanding and mutating it along the way until it becomes a collective object – the “mysterious object” of the title. Produced on a shoestring budget, the ‘low-fi’ production circumstances of this docu-fiction fantasy accelerated the need for its restoration, less than 15 years after its premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Long unavailable to rent for theatrical screenings, it returns to Anthology Film Archives (where it enjoyed its initial theatrical premiere run in 2001) in this beautiful 35mm print, the result of a digital restoration project by the Austrian Film Museum and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.
–Fri, Nov 14 at 6:45 and Sat, Nov 15 at 3:30.
CO-PRESENTED BY THE GOETHE-INSTITUT NEW YORK
Peter Lorre
THE LOST ONE / DER VERLORENE
1951, 98 min, 35mm, b&w.
In German with English subtitles.This is the sole feature film directed by legendary actor Peter Lorre, and like Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, it’s both a remarkable accomplishment and a tantalizing glimpse of a directorial vision never again to be made manifest. Lorre not only directed but also co-wrote and starred in THE LOST ONE, making it a truly astonishing demonstration of his multi-faceted genius. Taking a brief hiatus from his Hollywood career, Lorre made the film in postwar Germany, basing the story on a news item about the suicide in a displaced persons camp of one Dr. Rothe, a German scientist. Lorre took this seed as the inspiration for a story reminiscent of the role that made him famous – the child-killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – but here his protagonist’s slide into multiple murder is not only mirrored by the brutality of Nazi Germany but actively covered up by the government for which he performs secret research. A haunting film about guilt and the legacy of a society suffused by violence, THE LOST ONE somehow encompasses the expressionism of early Fritz Lang, the classicism of the Hollywood studio era, and the realism of postwar European cinema.Preceded by:Alan Osbiston & Dylan Thomas THESE ARE THE MEN 1943, 11 min, 35mm, b&w. Concept: Robert Neumann.Unknown EIGRUBER-AUDIENZ 1940 1940, 3 min, 16mm, b&w, silentTotal running time: ca. 115 min.
–Fri, Nov 14 at 9:00 and Sun, Nov 16 at 3:00.
Fedor Ocep
THE LIVING CORPSE / DER LEBENDE LEICHNAM / ŽIVOJ TRUP1929, 131 min, 35mm, b&w, silent.
German intertitles, with projected English subtitles.
Restored by the Austrian Film Museum & the Deutsche Kinemathek.
Adapted from an original story by Tolstoj, THE LIVING CORPSE combines elements of Soviet montage and German expressionism towards a tour de force of cinematic staging. An early international co-production drawing on talent from the USSR, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, the film was a worldwide success. The dawn of sound and Fred Niblo’s REDEMPTION (1930), Hollywood’s take on the same story starring John Gilbert, delayed the release of Ocep’s film in the U.S. By the time it appeared there, it was a pale shadow of its former self – heavily cut, with an added music and effects track. This didn’t prevent Variety, in 1931, from calling it “a picture so gripping that, despite its lack of dialog, it will hold any audience.” These words ring truer than ever when we watch THE LIVING CORPSE today. This newly restored print from the Austrian Film Museum and the Deutsche Kinemathek combines footage from six different sources to recreate Ocep’s original premiere cut as closely as possible.
–Sat, Nov 15 at 5:30.
AUSTRIAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA: A FUGUET
here is a rich and quite well-known history of avant-garde and independent cinema in Austria. Like all such histories, it exists not just in a canonical version, but also in ‘other stories’ which often seem to have been written with invisible ink. Apart from preserving the acknowledged masterpieces by Kubelka, Kren, Export, Tscherkassky, Seidl, or Cook, the Film Museum has in recent years also preserved or restored several of these more or less ‘hidden’ artifacts. Some of them relate to the climactic meeting between Vienna Actionism and conceptual or structural film (ca. 1963-69) or to the cosmos of Peter Kubelka (including a document of the moment before Anthology’s Invisible Cinema opened its doors in late 1970). Others – like the Ruttmann-inspired amateur film PRATER, Jörg Ortner’s FUGUE about the disenchantments of modernism, or Alfred Kaiser’s A THIRD REICH (shown in another program in this series) – allow us to discover less charted waters on the map of non-industrial filmmaking in Austria.
Friedrich Kuplent
PRATER 1929, 14 min, 9.5mm-to-35mm, b&w/color, silent.
Restored by the Austrian Film Museum.
Jörg Ortner A FUGUE / EINE FUGE 1959, 13 min, 35mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum. Anonymous Commercials for d-c-fix and INKU GF-Kante 1963/65, 4 min, 35mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Hans Scheugl HERNALS 1967, 11 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by the Austrian Film Museum.Peter Weibel & Ernst Schmidt Jr. SCHNIPP-SCHNAPP 1968, 2 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Peter Weibel FINGERPRINT 1968, 2 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Ernst Schmidt Jr. ART & REVOLUTION / KUNST & REVOLUTION 1968, 3 min, 16mm, b&w/color, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Hans-Christof & Rosemarie Stenzel STRANGULATION. GÜNTER BRUS + ANNI BRUS 1968, 5 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Günter Brus BREATHING IN AND BREATHING OUT / EINATMEN UND AUSATMEN 1967, 3 min, 16mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum. Helmuth Dimko & Peter Hajek KUBELKA IN NEW YORK 1970, 12 min, 16mm-to-video, b&wArnold Schicker WESSEN AURACH, DESSEN TRAUN 1985, 16 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Friedl Kubelka-Bondy SPITTING / SPUCKEN 2000, 2 min, 16mm-to-35mm, b&w, silentJonas Mekas WIEN & MOZART 2001, 2 min, 16mm-to-35mmTotal running time: ca. 95 min.
–Sat, Nov 15 at 8:30.
UNESSENTIALLY ESSENTIAL
“A few words about the two UNESSENTIALLY ESSENTIAL programs in this series. To me, the idea of an ‘Unessential Cinema’ as proposed and realized by Andrew Lampert at Anthology for several years now, is one of the most brilliant in recent film curatorship. While it partly ties in with earlier approaches (Amos Vogel’s programs at Cinema 16 in the 50s or the Netherlands Film Museum’s re-evaluation of its ‘Bits and Pieces’ collection in the early 1990s), this unessentialism has special currency in places like Anthology or the Austrian Film Museum where, for many observers, the search for an essential core of cinema is still a defining part of the institutional DNA. I think this view can be complicated further by showing how relative these two terms are, and that cinema’s strange beauty is always attached to both – historically as well as in the moment of projection, when our learned distinctions between trash and jewelry, anonymity and the masters’ names, recede by the second as the lights go down.” –Alexander Horwath
UNESSENTIALLY ESSENTIAL 1:A TERRIBLE BEAUTY – APPLICATIONS OF CINEMAA hard-to-explain but, we hope, joyful-to-watch program. It features the famous and the forgotten. It looks death in the eye but also celebrates the restorative function of color, tourism, and bodily movement. It doesn’t view cinema as an art (neither in the old 19th-century sense nor in the present-day sense of the art market/art rubbish) – but as a cultural technique that can be applied to a much wider range of desires. A ‘throwaway activity,’ if you will, where the raw and the finely etched are not mutually exclusive. It presents explorers and sculptors, workers and capitalists, two soldiers and a transvestite. It may well be a hieroglyphic program or simply a case of Speculative Surrealism (with dogs-in-lace, kangaroos and koalas, and a young lion on the side). And if you only leave home for the heroes of the Essential Cinema, come see Len Lye’s premonition of today’s surveillance mediascape, catch up with Carl Dreyer’s “masterpiece…a perfectly miniaturized youth horror film and the likely precursor to a subgenre of motorcycle flicks” (Jim Jarmusch), and dance to Dziga Vertov’s attempt at abstract club visuals!
Segundo de Chomón SCULPTEUR MODERNE 1908, 4.5 min, 35mm, stencil-color, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Pathé Revue SANKT GOTTHARD PART V. 1913, 6 min, 35mm, stencil-color, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Pathé LES CHIENS SAVANTS 1908/09, 4.5 min, 35mm, b&w/color, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Colin Ross AUSTRALIA OUTTAKES 1929/30, 12 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Pierre Molinier MES JAMBES 1964/65, 10 min, 8mm-to-16mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum from two 8mm originals at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.Pathé MODERN ACROBATS 1927-29, 8 min, 35mm, tinted/b&w, silent. Restored by the Austrian Film Museum and the Cinémathèque de Luxembourg.Dziga Vertov THE ELEVENTH YEAR – ORIGINAL UKRAINIAN TRAILER 1928, 2 min, 35mm, tinted, silentUnknown BATA SHOE FACTORY, ZLIN 1930-32, 5.5 min, 35mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Len Lye KILL OR BE KILLED 1942, 18 min, 35mm, b&wCarl Theodor Dreyer THEY CAUGHT THE FERRY / DE NÅEDE FÆRGEN 1948, 11 min, 35mm, b&w. In Danish with projected English subtitles.Pathé LA FRANCE PITTORESQUE – QUELQUES COINS DE VOSGES 1914, 4.5 min, 35mm, stencil-color, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Total running time: ca. 90 min.–Sun, Nov 16 at 5:45.
UNESSENTIALLY ESSENTIAL 2:THE CINEMA OF CINEMA
Movies about the movies have rarely achieved blockbuster fame. In the worlds of critical, experimental, archival, and private filmmaking, however, they figure as a top-drawer subject – including, of course, all the films ‘made’ by curators and archivists the very moment when they assign a title, signature, and ‘work status’ to something which previously travelled under the rubric of ‘garbage,’ ‘unused,’ or ‘dangerous to the cinema myth.’ A few minutes of Coming Attractions or miles of outtakes are as much part of this meta-movie category as political-analytical found footage works (such as Alfred Kaiser’s A THIRD REICH) or the scissored-footage compilation made by an unknown Film Museum donor. More often than not, these films feature a dream cast – as witnessed by the two world premieres in this program: the ghostly camera rolls from 1965 and the ‘alternative history’ document from 1967, with Austria’s most beloved actor Oskar Werner in one of Anthony Quinn’s most iconic roles.
Fritz Lang SPIONE – ORIGINAL TRAILER 1928, 5 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Friedrich W. Murnau TABU – TAKES & OUTTAKES 1931/2003, 8-min excerpt, 35mm, b&w, silent. Edited by Enno Patalas from materials preserved by the Austrian Film Museum, Deutsche Kinemathek, and Cineteca di Bologna.Alfred Kaiser A THIRD REICH / EIN DRITTES REICH 1975, 28 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.Unknown UNEDITED: YUL BRYNNER INTERVIEWS TREVOR HOWARD, RITA HAYWORTH, SYLVIA SORRENTE AND ANGIE DICKINSON 1965, 16-min excerpt, 35mm-to-digital. Digitally restored by the Austrian Film Museum.Anthony Asquith OSKAR WERNER ARTIST TEST (THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN) 1967, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital. Digitally restored by the Austrian Film Museum.Unknown A PROJECTIONIST’S SEX FILM COMPILATION ca. 1955-74, 15 min, 35mm, b&w/colorTotal running time: ca. 95 min.
–Sun, Nov 16 at 8:00.
VENUE
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003