For someone living in Vienna and having grown up with the little black programs of the Austrian Filmmuseum, with Peter Kubelka's filmic “training course” Was ist Film, with Gustav Deutsch's found footage project Film ist, started in 1995 for the centennial of Lumière's film projections, or with the trailer for Vienna's film festival Viennale in 1999 made by Peter Tscherkassky, it may sound strange that this awareness for avant-garde film is something very specific to Vienna and not to be found everywhere. But this is what I learned in the first six pages of Film Unframed.
The ambitious and elaborate project of this volume edited by Peter Tscherkassky aims high: to write a broad history of the stunningly prolific “tradition” of avant-garde filmmaking in Austria since the 1950s for an international community of film scholars, historians, artists, and amateurs. Tscherkassky is himself an outstanding avant-garde filmmaker—Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) premiered at the Film Festival in Cannes and Coming Attractions (2010) at the Venice Film Festival—part of the “third generation” as he describes it in his very informative and compact historical overview, “Ground Survey. An Initial Mapping of an Expanding Territory” (15–43). And he is not the only filmmaker that contributed to this compendium: Hans Scheugl's film and TV experiments from the late 1960s through the 1990s are discussed by Stefan Grissemann (155–63). Scheugl himself contributes an insightful article on the movement he was part of, together with Valie Export, Peter Weibel, and Ernst Schmidt, Jr. “Expanded Cinemas Exploding” (129–39) shows in detail how the Austrian “Expanded Cinema” related to its “sibling” in the US—and how it differed from it, especially in the refusal of a harmonic worldview. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, characterized as a filmmaker by the film critic Christoph Huber, writes about the filmic works of Marc Adrian. The artistic involvement of some of the authors does not, however, affect the thorough historical and interpretative work done in this book. Quite to the contrary, it confers a specific energy to the whole undertaking.
Film Unframed does not start with theoretical questions about what avant-garde is or is not or should be, but is very dedicated to the material, to the filmmakers and their films, and tries as a first step to trace the history of avant-garde cinema in Austria back to certain events, initiatives, locations, or encounters. So the story, according to Peter Tscherkassky, possibly started in the summer of 1955, at a café in Linz where twenty-one-year-old Peter Kubelka met his older friend Rudolf Malik, a priest very much interested in modern art. The latter agreed to be the producer of his first film, Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955)—and that entailed for Malik raising the funds among his fellow priests (15). At the same time, in Vienna, Kurt Kren had already made experiments with 8-mm and 16-mm film. To complete the “first generation,” a few others must be added to these two pioneers. One is Ferry Radax with his early surrealist film Sonne halt! (1959–62), and another is Marc Adrian whose artistic oeuvre comprises sculptures, abstract paintings, photo collages, literary and theoretical texts, and many experimental film works. But here already, in the more detailed portrayal of these four artists, the concept of “generation” seems only partly applicable. As the contributors point out, the “wildly proliferating, surreal game of confusion” (91) of Ferry Radax's Sonne halt! is hardly comparable to the pure rhythm of construction, and the search for “the characteristics fundamentally and solely specific to film” (65) in Peter Kubelkas “metrical” films. Nevertheless, Kubelka and Radax were working together on Mosaik im Vertrauen in 1955.
The second generation—mainly active in the second half of the 1960s—counted as its innovators Hans Scheugl, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Valie Export, Peter Weibel, and, again, Kurt Kren. In some of his “action films,” Kren cooperated with Otto Muehl and in others with Günter Brus. Under the banner of “expanded cinema,” their experiments continued with “investigations into the vocabulary …available to film” (132) but focused more on its production or reception settings, on transgression of moral conventions, on the bodily and material side of film, and on the critical analysis of the (male) cinematographic gaze.
The third generation, surfacing in the early 1980s, essentially started with Super 8 films. The “protagonists developed a multiplicity of personal styles and individual aesthetics of unprecedented abundance” (29): Dietmar Brehm, Lisl Ponger, Peter Tscherkassky, Gustav Deutsch, Mara Mattuschka, Martin Arnold, to name but a few. But there is one striking common element with many of these artists: a profound interest in the use of found footage and thereby in reflections on image, film, and their histories.
Even more interesting is to see how this rich tradition and institutional framework fosters new works and artistic “investigations” between digital image and analog film, between abstraction and documentation, between sight and sound. Here, Film Unframed certainly is unprecedented in giving equal space for the portrayal of the—not yet named as such—“fourth generation,” young Austrian filmmakers of today. Certainly questionable, but somehow necessary, this section of the book portrays four individual filmmakers, and it is followed by an interesting overview on contemporary film art by Barbara Pichler (295–309).
Only the theoretical framework of Tscherkassky's concluding remarks (310–16), where he places avant-garde cinema in the context of an ever more autonomous art sphere in the process of modernization, may sound a bit naive when read with Bourdieu's convincing assumption that the autonomy of the artistic (or literary) field is a constitutive illusion produced by the field itself.
The book's scholarly quality is high. It offers a rich and almost comprehensive compendium, including an index of the biographies, filmographies, and bibliographies of the filmmakers. But two other elements add to a pleasurable read: (1) the excellent translations provided by filmmaker Eve Heller and by Steve Wilder; and (2) the abundant reproduction of film stills and sketches that certainly do not replace a viewing of the films but present important visual information in addition to the interpretative text.
