Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Suggestion of Least Resistance is based on archive materials which depict The July Revolt of 1927 (Der Brand des Wiener Justizpalastes), a monumental episode still acutely relevant. The animation film is a rhythmic, poetic surge, comparing us, our lives, and our very humanness to burning paper in the breeze. Images of sheets of paper flying through the broken windows of the burning palace are juxtaposed with images of the crowds as they convene and disperse. The music charges these powerful images with its own aliveness and colour.

An experimental short about the isolated, over-civilized man.

Documentary about a farm.

Directed by Lia

At a party, which was organized for Wendy, each person invited brought a photo of themselves. Each photo was filmed according to a strict scheme: each 7 frames, 5 frames, 3 frames and 1 frame (1/24 of a second) long, and then intercut with the other photos. (E.S.jr.)

This film is a combination of body art, re-making and reconstructing a "film genre" from the early era of filmmaking (series "Comic Faces", 1898, Director: G.A. Smith): Making faces in front of the camera. (E.S.jr.)

Through the use of a time lapse effect (single frame shots), the changes in a face covered with a cream cheese mask for 30 minutes are condensed into one minute. (E.S.jr.)

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ - each letter is one frame (1/24 of a second) long and each letter originates from a company sign. The film shows the paradoxical relationship between film and written language. (E.S.jr.)

A nostalgic honoring as well as a reciprocal re-make of the film of the same name by Willi Forst. A setting to film of a 1930s book, literally: page by page. (E.S.jr.)

This is a portrait of Peter Weibel, and at the same time a reflection on the medium film. As Peter Weibel looks silently into the camera (and thus to the audience) his own difficult text on the subject "Nimm eine Handvoll Zelluloid" ("Take a handful of celluloid;" published as Werkstatt Blatt 3, ed. Gottfried Schlemmer) is heard in his own voice. Due to the complexity of human language and the imperfection of the human ear, this linguistic information can only be imperfectly communicated to the audience. A film about the difference between cinema and literature. (E.S.jr.)

Visuals for Edgar Varèse’s Arcana. Performed by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz under the direction of Argentine conductor and composer Dante Anzolini.

A playful take on gendered technology and the mechanisation of society. Adina Camhy traces spiralling stories both personal and societal, mapping out the entangled development of musical and militaristic machines.

Based on the unusual idea that God's anus is visible on nights of the full moon, and determined to make a taboo visible, Friedl vom Gröller does not spare the audience the natural process of evacuation.

Paris in June 2009. The title leads us to expect a personal diary entry made in a city that has often been used as a setting for ideas of love. In Gröller´s short film, which does nothing to conceal the excitement, the romantically charged eroticism becomes a gentle but undisguised form of pornography. The sex act is finally performed with a dildo, an erection does not ensue. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

Friedl vom Gröller invites a stranger to his small apartment in Paris and records his reactions to an unexpected striptease.

The continuation of a portrait of Gaelle Obiegly. The focus of the film is not a portrait, but rather a wide variety of cable cords in a cellar, attached to diverse light sources. A pageboy, a film projector, the person named in the title, and three other women.

Winter in Paris begins with a still-life of a window sill and beautifully detours to a gruesome-erotic allegory of death.

An experimental collage film pieced together from random bits of 16mm film strips.

Europe’s most successful public cultural radio station is struggling. The film follows the passionate radio crew over a period two years as they attempt to reinvent their program. Just when the station begins to regain listeners the right-wing government starts to threaten its independence.

A cinematographic poem based on the director’s journeys in Iran from 2006-2007.

In May 1965, Ernst Schmidt Jr. films the Otto Muehl performances Rumpsti Pumsti and Body Building. In this period Muehl conceives his actionist works almost exclusively for photographic and film documentation. The necessity of a spontaneous confrontation with the public, which plays a major role in Muehl's later actions, does not apply to these works.

Live performance of Philip Glass's opera Kepler (2009) by the Landestheater Linz Upper Austrian State Theater in 2011, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

A slender chair works out while a cushioned one strains. Hand-drawn comedy with early cinema motifs. A woman arrives and sits, finding a perfect fit.

The film discusses the sub-bituminous coal mining process from tree cutting to the renaturation of open-pit mines. Lusatian villages and, with them, the Sorbian culture have been mined for nearly 100 years. 136 villages, 125 of them Sorbian-German, have disappeared since 1924. The film questions the equality of constitutional law and nature protection. A pond where thousands of European fire-bellied toads (Bombina bombina) have been moved serves as an allegory of the lost villages, while an acoustic metaphor for the missing balance between human rights and nature conservation could be found in alternating soundtracks – European fire-bellied toad vs. the background noise of an open-pit mine.

Bouchra Khalili’s meditation on revolutionary histories considers the poet Jean Genet’s secret 1970 visit to the United States at the invitation of the Black Panther Party.

A brief introduction of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. With the emphasis on Der Führer's ambition to clean Germany from harmful, undesirable and degenerate art and culture (Entartete Kunst). Presented by children and teenagers from the Friedrichhofer Commune, Zurndorf/ Burgenland, Austria.

Global Village, digital generation: mysterious sexual assaults, real and virtual identities, a policewoman who becomes obsessed with the hunt…but who is she after? A socio-critical tech-noir debut film, showing the alarming dangers of new technologies.

According to the UNHCR estimates, more than 10,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea during their flight to Europe between 2014 and 2016. dark blue is an experimental documentary in seven chapters about the escape route over the Mediterranean Sea. Uncontrollable waves destroy the chance for a better life. What remains is flotsam that reminds of the ones who drowned. Those who reach the other shore are met by an uncertain future. This film does not tell a story, but grapples with a tragic period of our contemporary history.

A hilarious bouncy rubber ball of heads. Don’t try this at home – even if you can.

The funeral of Reichstag member Franz Schuhmeier.

A mathematician is trying to solve a problem

Chon, a member of the Native Mexican Wirrárika community, tells the story of his cousin Faustino, son of the shaman of an indigenous settlement in the mountains of Nayarit called La Mora. In the 1980s Faustino had proclaimed himself to be god and the community´s spiritual leader, which then had been accepted by his father and the inhabitants. Together with an armed group he menaced and terrorized other neighboring villages. When Chon witnessed his cousin kill various members of their own community, he escaped La Mora and reported the incidents to the police.

A couple were going to get together after the girlfriend had dropped off her package, but the boyfriend will have to keep waiting. The whole day turned out to be an attempt in crossing the distance between nothing and something. Everyone, it seems, was at the post office for philosophy instead of postage.

"With Praxis-1 I began an extensive video series, conceived in a structure of successively numbered scenes, which is parallel to all my other film/video works and paintings. Each part of the Praxis-series is approximately 20 minutes long. Both purely video works and also transformed reflections on a few of my 16mm films are shown after having been put in a new light by means of electronic transformations of the picture." (Dietmar Brehm)

Controlled by the "laws of reflection", this space reveals itself in all its features and movements in correlation to the software. I asked seven composers to write a composition for a specific animation. My interest was their different accesses and methods. Every composer could act freely.

"An aesthetics of complexity: a "dynamic system", which no longer follows the idea of order and simplicity, arises in a zone of permanent transition, within the steady slipping off and passing away of the graphic formations" (David Komary).

I set my sights on the human body and realized things, were moving at last, during my first material action, I soiled a female body with mud, paint, rubbish and paste, and tied it up in old rags and ropes dipped in mud. —Otto Mühl

Once a week in Paris a group of individuals from all corners of the world meet in a small room at Centre Pompidou to participate in free French lessons. Asylum seekers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and students sit side-by-side and immerse themselves in polite, if stilted, conversation. However, tensions and misunderstandings occur as the nuances which each participant attempts to express become lost as they struggle to access the language. But despite their differences - and linguistic limitations - the disparate group of strangers in a foreign land find, in the small gestures and subtle looks between the words, a way towards understanding.

Hallo Mabuse captivates through its reduction, in which a conspiratorial narrative takes place, but even more so, the images themselves appear ambiguous, obscure, untrustworthy. A nod of the head, which seems treacherous in its mechanical repetition, meets the profile of a bearded man who does not appear to react at all in a suggested counter shot. The slight flickering of the image further intensifies the impression of an illicit agreement, of witnessing a crooked handshake. The ringing of the unseen telephone and the constant ticking of a clock lend the events a limited temporality. Something is running out, and in doing so, is also already reaching its end, a ghostly final act, which is anticipated by an explosion and breaks off with the sound of a falling guillotine.

Three men, three cars and three obsessions: automatic is a rhythmical and pulsating tribute to the garage and the engine, but most of all to the car as a fetish. The hot Latin beats fill the garage with music.

Live concert from the austrian Band "STS"

A hipster couple reunites in Vienna and travel to Morocco.

The documentary filmmaker Djordje Cenic sets out on an autobiographical journey that starts in the "guest workers' milieu" of the Austrian regional capital Linz in the 1970s and takes him to his family's war-torn ancestral village in Croatia. In comically absurd as well as tragic episodes describing small victories and major defeats, homesickness and class distinctions, the film offers - using home movies, photographs and current professional footage - deep insights into the filmmaker's family history. It is an attempt to illustrate the balancing act between "up here" (Austria) and "down there" (Yugoslavia/Croatia) that characterizes generations of guest workers. Directed by Djordje Cenic and Hermann Peseckas. - Written by Djordje Cenic

We’re producing ski movies for ten years now, but we’ve never forgotten our roots. We travel the world and we’re inspired by the mountain cultures around the globe. But there is this one place where we felt at home, one place that influenced us the most - the city of Innsbruck! This is a tribute to a decade of friendship, adventures and a place we all call home! your Freeski-Crew.com FelixAlthammer AmbrosFürstaller BastiFärber DanielGassner FloGeyer FloGöller SeverinGuggemoos DominikHartmann BeneHöflinger MarinusHöflinger TobiHuber ChristianJenny TorgeNagel JürgenNigg MarkusObwaller SvenRauber TomRitsch JuliusSchneider PiusSchneider GeorgStückler ChristianStadler SebiMüller BerniLiebl DominikSagmeister PaulKlein MacMinikan AdrianGaiser ThomasTrifonitchev FelixWiemers BastiHannemann

In the small town of Pruchnik in the southeastern part of Poland villagers gather every year on Good Friday to "punish" Judas for his betrayal of Jesus. A larger-than-life straw puppet with a hooked nose is dragged through town, beaten, decapitated, burnt and thrown in the river. The film explores the thin line between pagan and Christian rites while exposing the sometimes brutal and blatantly anti-semitic undercurrents of Christian practice.

Kren shows the cinema (mentioned in the title) during and after film presentations. He uses single-frame and time exposures 5 to 30 seconds long. Sometimes sunlight comes through the open door into the theater changing the colors in the film remarkably. Black spots appear when the lights inside the cinema are turned off. The film is uncut and was recorded with a shoulder tripod over a period of three weeks.

Picture Perfect Pyramid is a 16mm film which in counter-clockwise spirals, circles a large pyramid structure that was built on the outskirts of Vienna in 1983. Using twenty-four positions the film was shot over the course of an entire day, with one shot per hour. The camera moves continuously and almost imperceptibly, covering the surrounding area while the landmark remains centered in the frame. Today the building, a former indoor swimming pool, serves as a venue for various events; from right wing party gatherings to an erotic fair that presents a live show with lights visible even from the outside of the pyramid. In filming the building, a structural approach focused on geometry was used in order to achieve less subjectively motivated images.

Experimental short film.

The raw material used in Blow-Up comprises two shots from an old educational film about first aid: a man demonstrates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a life-size dummy; the dummy's chest rises and falls. Fruhauf introduces this scene into his own métier, turning the "blow-up" metaphor into an image with a false bottom. With the aid of a digital photocopier, the strip of film was reduced in size to a narrow ribbon, and Blow-up shows this transformation in reverse.

A found footage film, which uses an Italian Sixties softporn soundtrack, which is repeated twice. Each time a sequence of images is synched to the soundtrack. The film images are illustrating acts of ocular light perception as well as imagery with strong visual impact. It is a kind of visual test directed towards the viewer.