Austrian avant-garde cinema

Masterclasses / Screenings / Installation

The essential qualities of cinema – light, movement, time, space – have been rigorously explored by filmmakers from Vienna. Probably more than any other national artists’ cinema, these Austrian filmmakers have engaged with the materiality of film to create a cinema of purity and intensity.

Experimental and avant-garde cinema has a status in Austria not really found anywhere else in the world. The country made a major contribution to international cinema in the late '50s and early '60s with the first wave of pioneers including Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren and Valie Export. The ceaseless innovation can be seen in the rich tradition of Austria’s history of radicalism across the arts.

This special programme for CINECITY focuses on two of the key figures of Austrian avant-garde cinema, Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch and we are delighted to welcome both of these seminal figures to CINECITY to present masterclasses.

Since 1996, Gustav Deutsch has been scouring film archives around the globe, retrieving fragments of film including test shots and discarded edits and adding them to an ongoing project called Film Ist. “Like a dream book, Film Ist. makes one imagine an archive that Jorge Borges might have assembled.” (Tom Gunning)

Peter Tscherkassky is one of the world’s most acclaimed experimental filmmakers. His spectacular projects such as The Cinemascope Trilogy are marked by a mastery of technique and intense theoretical approach. His cinema is both jubilant and sinister and while acknowledging the end of the celluloid era, his works draw their power through effects that can only be created by film. “There are three factors that influence my work permanently: working with found footage, working directly on the film stock (together with the possibility of physical manipulation of the film) and, in general, the capacity of the film medium to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere”.

Supported by Arts Council England, Austrian Cultural Forum, Sixpack Film and the University of Brighton