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Four Shadows (1978)
Character: N/A
Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.
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23rd Psalm Branch: Part II (1967)
Character: Himself
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.
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Fragments of Kubelka (2012)
Character: Himself
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.
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Scenes from the Life of Hermann Nitsch (2005)
Character: himself
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.
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Tapes (2020)
Character: N/A
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.
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What Is Happening? Art in the Life of Gertie Fröhlich (2024)
Character: Self
n 2018, director Marieli Fröhlich initiated a documentary about her mother, the artist Gertie Fröhlich. The director interviews over 20 artists, friends, and former collaborators whose recollections unveil the themes and the controversy surrounding Gertie Fröhlich‘s status as an artist, uncovering her influence on the Post-War Vienna Avant-Garde starting in her early 20s. As the film unfolds, these contradictions come to a head: Is the existence of the most important Austrian post-war gallery, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, indebted to Gertie Fröhlich, or was she merely the good spirit and secretary? Was her retelling of Greek myths an analogy for her vision of a refreshed matriarchal psyche — a position of equal significance to manifestations and deterritorialization of the body by Austria’s feminist artists? - New Jersey Film Festival
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Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)
Character: Self
Jonas Mekas weaves an elegiac diary film from his 1971–72 return to Lithuania, chronicling a visit to his birthplace of Semeniškiai after decades in exile. Blending personal memory with documentary observation, the film becomes both a portrait of homecoming and a meditation on displacement, family, and the passage of time.
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Cinématon (1978)
Character: N°295
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.
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Paradise Not Yet Lost (1979)
Character: Himself
The film is arranged in six chronologically-ordered parts, each filmed in a different location during Oona's third year.
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Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2011)
Character: Himself
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.
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365 Day Project (2007)
Character: Self
This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1968)
Character: Self
Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
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Cinema Austria - Die ersten 112 Jahre (2020)
Character: Himself
This historical and analytical documentary draws attention to the background of the roots of "New Austrian Cinema" and presents Austria as a film country to be taken seriously.
The audience gets to see rare early works by well-known filmmakers as well as shots of landscapes that served as a source of inspiration and locations that have produced important Austrian films since the end of the 19th century.
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Birth of a Nation (1997)
Character: Self
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
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EXPRMNTL (2016)
Character: himself
Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…
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