Artists' Cinema

24 x A SECOND

Sunday 25 November
Sallis Benney Theatre 11:30AM

Austrian avant-garde cinema

The essential qualities of cinema – light, movement, space, time – have been rigorously explored by Austrian avant-garde cinema. Probably more than any other national artists’ cinema, these film-makers have engaged with the materiality of film to create a cinema of purity and intensity. Collectively, these Austrian artists have a remarkable and distinguished place within the international history of artists’ films.

This special CINECITY programme is devoted to the work of Austrian film-makers Martin Arnold, Gustav Deutsch , Peter Tscherkassky and the Viennese distributors sixpackfilm. We are delighted to welcome in person Gustav Deutsch, Peter Tscherkassky and Dietmar Schwärzler of sixpackfilm to CINECITY.

These special screenings and presentations also inaugurate the new cinema within the Sallis Benney Theatre. Thanks to support from Arts
Council England, South East and the University of Brighton, this new facility will provide a home for artists’ cinema in Brighton & Hove throughout the year.

WORLD MIRROR CINEMA (11:30am)
(Welt Spiegel Kino)
In his latest found footage collage, Deutsch combines three 30-minute-long films from Vienna, Surabaya (Indonesia) and Porto. Each episode consists of an initial panning shot of a city square or street containing a cinema and the films periodically focus on different parts of the image – an individual, a vehicle, a cinema poster. The passers-by become chance protagonists in a series of micro-tales which report on cinematic and world history. For Gustav Deutsch, the cinema belongs to these “ordinary people” - the supporting actors of history.

Gustav Deutsch Austria 2005.93 mins.

PETER TSCHERKASSKY MASTERCLASS (14:30)
Peter Tscherkassky is a curator, teacher, critic, historian and a founding member of Vienna’s sixpackfilm. His spectacular projects, such as his CINEMASCOPE TRILOGY, explore the limits and artifice of film. He said, “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.” He refers to his method as “manufracture”, a process that involves taking existing film sequences and laboriously reprinting each frame in a darkroom. Through this process, the film frame, sprocket holes and soundtrack become new visual elements in their own right. Critic Christoph Huber described Tscherkassky’s work as, “a paradoxical epitaph for cinema, simultaneously jubilant and sinister: while acknowledging the end of the celluloid era, these works draw their enormous power from effects that can only be created by film.”

The masterclass begins with a screening of:
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine
Austria 2005. 17 mins.

Using montage and printing techniques, this film processes images from Sergio Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Stripped of their original colour, form and meaning, Tscherkassky describes the work as, “an attempt to transform a Roman western into a Greek tragedy.”

CINEMASCOPE TRILOGY (5:15pm)
L’Arrivee (1998)
Outer Space (1999)
Dream Work (2002)

L’ARRIVEE is constructed as a multi-layered study on the meaning of ‘arrival’. The elements include references to the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (1895) and Terence Young’s film, Mayer ling (1968).

In OUTER SPACE, Tscherkassky transforms excerpts from Sidney J. Furie’s horror film, The Entity (1988) into a storm of gasps, crackles, flashes, and trembling clouds as an increasingly haunted portrait of human desolation and the descent into madness. Hyperkinetic, strobing flashes of intense light explode and burn out before dissolving into unidentifiable abstraction.

“My own technique for producing films in the darkroom is basically like that of Man Ray: objects (usually filmstrips, but here also things) put on the unexposed film and re-lit frame by frame. DREAMWORK is my homage to Man Ray and at the same time it’s dedicated to the beginning of the European avant-garde film within the surrealist movement.”

Register to save your favourites.

site designed and built by Studio Tonne

Presented in Partnership with: