Distributors’ Collection: sixpackfilm
If it doesn´t fit
Ernst Schmidt Jr. is one of the little-known but very important proponents of Austrian artist film, internationally speaking and unfairly so. He realised a good 80 films, co-authored the out-of-print encyclopaedia Eine Subgeschichte des Films together with Hans Scheugl in 1974, worked as a busy journalist and co-founded the Austria Filmmakers Coop in 1968; - or created a legendary film magazine, Caligari, which, however, only consisted of two issues. Numerous of his miniatures are also short and witty, taking cinema as an entertainment medium almost literally and at the same time subverting it with artistic finesse. Unhinging something, taking it out of its usual framework, is the central theme of this programme.
While Alfons Schilling sets his studio in Manhattan in vibration and thus whirls the space-time coordinates around, the (also) cross-media artist Moucle Blackout collages photographs to three Beatles songs to create a symmetrical montage that produces a mirror effect: images of a dead pig, portraits and wildly dancing women set the rhythm. In 1944, Kurt Schwitters called his sound poem ‘She Dolls With Dollies’, whose linguistic deconstruction Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern took up a good 50 years later in an audio piece and Karin Fisslthaler interpreted visually in an intoxicating collage. Hüper & Miketta deal with a different kind of tradition, namely that of "Schützenfeste", by interweaving the cultivation of customs, social interaction and pleasure. Pirker, on the other hand, combines feminist film history and cake recipes with political activism in her ode to the 100th anniversary of 16mm material. It should be cheerful. Cheers. (Dietmar Schwärzler)
