Author: Tyran Grillo

Maria Lassnig: Animation Films (INDEX 033)

| Tyran Grillo

Maria Lassnig’s Animation Films presents one of the great, insufficiently recognized revolutions in 20th-century art, staged not in monumental canvases or heroic gestures but in trembling lines, volatile anatomies, and the relentless honesty of a woman drawing her sensations from the inside out. Predominantly self-taught, expelled from art school in 1943, and overlooked for decades, Lassnig created an animated cinema that Maya McKechneay describes as governed by “changeableness,” an elasticity of form, gesture, and identity that refuses containment. At the center of her drawings and films is Körpergefühl, or body-awareness, the attempt to depict the flesh not as it appears but as it feels. These films, modest in scale yet vast in invention, move between autobiography and a kind of intimate sorcery. They deliver humor and metamorphosis while also releasing long-buried truths, distilled into tactile intelligence rather than argument.

Baroque Statues (1970-74) begins as a dialogue between religious sculpture and the living human body. The camera turns, zooms, and trembles around the saints, mimicking their gestures and completing what the stone cannot express. Regal Baroque music rises, and Lassnig pivots from carved figures to flesh: a woman outdoors, dancing in a costume that hovers between historical pageant and playful novelty. She overlays colors, freezes frames, and distorts movement in an effort to determine the temperature at which stone shades into skin and skin eventually becomes immaterial. Organ music lifts the sequence into a meditation on vitality, on the tension between cultural ideal and interior sensation.

Iris (1971) stages an erotic self-metamorphosis. A voluptuous body emerges from a heap of clothing, forming itself through gesture and breath. The figure is both biological and mechanical, a self-directed organism. Lassnig’s distortions—mirrors stretched into wounds, reflections that resist obedience—enact the struggle to become one’s own image. The soundtrack shifts from contemporary classical into a spectral rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” infusing the animation with a spiritual ache. It is one of her clearest expressions of psychic inside-outing.

Chairs (1971), drawn in felt-tip on paper, turns everyday furniture into sentient beings. Chairs sprout limbs, bodies collapse into seating surfaces, and recliners burst like sacs of tissue. Boundaries between animate and inanimate dissolve. Lassnig reveals how objects injure and absorb us, how the body co-creates its environment. The jaunty gypsy-jazz soundtrack introduces a layer of irony to what is ultimately a haunted deliberation of mortality.

Selfportrait (1971), the first cartoon self-portrait in film history, is Lassnig’s defiant rebuttal to patriarchal modes of representation. She maps failed relationships onto grotesque transformations: a face becoming a heart, a heart becoming a machine, veins linking her to a man who drains her vitality. Yet she insists, “I still love humanity despite my horrible experiences with men.” The film anticipates the surreal body-horror of Bill Plympton but exceeds it in emotional clarity. Lassnig rejects flattering likeness and instead draws a living diagram of pain, humor, and renewal.

Shapes (1972) presents silhouetted figures dancing to Bach’s harpsichord, later joined by starched-cloth stop-motion forms. The result is an animated counterpoint in which shapes stretch and collapse with the music, each silhouette a brief embodiment. Couples (1972) extends this into a portrait of relational struggle. Awkward figures pair and separate, pursuing and avoiding one another. Lassnig uncovers the animal core of domestic life. A man complains, “I have my needs and desires, but you’re not my universe,” only to hear, “Oh? This is life?” Magazine cutouts erupt into Terry Gilliam-style interludes that remind us how romance becomes a collage of need, illusion, and endurance.

Palmistry (1973) interprets fortune-telling as a psychosexual science of misreading. Lassnig layers childhood development, superstition, and self-distortion. The hand becomes a site where knowledge and desire collide, a literal reading of a life shaped by fear, imagination, and longing for impossible relationships.

Art Education (1976) is her most openly feminist work. She stages scenes from Vermeer, Michelangelo, and other canonical male artists, revealing how women’s bodies are objectified, ignored, or disciplined. Then, she reverses the order of things: the model paints the artist, Adam pleads with God to alter him, and Eve’s desires become unanswered questions. Guided by French Baroque music, the film exposes the absurdity of institutional authority and the violence within art history’s gender scripts. “You are Michelangelo’s invention,” Adam accuses God, a line that elegantly reveals how male fantasies pass as divine truth.

Maria Lassnig Kantate (1992), previously included in As She Likes It (INDEX 023) and co-directed with Hubert Sielecki, is the late flowering of this sensibility into song. At 73, Lassnig turns her life into an operatic self-portrait: childhood, art-school humiliations, betrayals by lovers, creative victories, and the joy of teaching, all rendered with humor, vulnerability, and exuberant self-possession. It is the natural culmination of a career devoted to reclaiming the body—its sensations, distortions, humiliations, and triumphs—as the truest site of art.

Across these films, Lassnig masterfully rewrites animation as a form of interior autobiography. She is not concerned with fantasy but with feelings that refuse to remain private: the embarrassment of being seen, the tenderness of self-regard, the absurdity of desire, the slow healing of wounds inflicted by patriarchy, memory, and time. In every frame, she insists that to draw is to inhabit, which is already an act of resistance.

This treasure trove belongs in every experimental cinephile’s collection.

Dariusz Kowalski: Optical Vacuum (INDEX 032)

| Tyran Grillo

Optical Vacuum opens into a territory that is neither fully voyeuristic nor fully clinical, yet borrows from both dynamics to unsettle the viewer’s most basic assumptions about seeing. Dariusz Kowalski poses the provocation at the heart of his project: “If surveillance really does scare society,” he asks, “why aren’t people marching in the streets?” Perhaps because these mechanisms have already seeped into our daily routines. Perhaps because their ubiquity now feels natural. Or perhaps, more troublingly, because we have forgotten how to see what they see. Situated between fascination and dread, Kowalski’s work draws its power from the way it reanimates what is usually overlooked: cameras that watch without intention, spaces in which nothing happens yet everything remains visible, the dull hum of existence captured with no expectation of an audience. His images vibrate with a tension that belongs neither to narrative cinema nor documentary reportage but to the uncanny region between them, where meaning thins to near-invisibility. This atmosphere is sharpened by the spare, icy electronic music of Stefan Németh, which lends each frame a crystalline edge.

Optical Vacuum (2008) clarifies the Kowalskian aesthetic with particular force. For 55 hypnotic minutes, alongside the disembodied voice of American artist Stephen Matthewson—recorded on a Dictaphone and recounting fragments of a life that never reveal their anchor—we watch images extracted entirely from internet camera feeds. Crucially, the words and images never intersect; they pass one another like strangers in a narrow corridor. The diary traces the outline of a subject without a body, while the surveillance footage supplies bodies emptied of subjectivity. The viewer drifts between attachment and estrangement, moving from a mahjong table to a radio station control room, from a Japanese laundromat to Alaskan icefields, from snippets of pedestrian routine to desolate rooms thickened by absence. The most disturbing footage is not that of human activity but of empty spaces: rooms whose only occupant is the camera itself, regarding the void with mechanical patience. Each feed is a miniature cosmos that never asked to be witnessed. Kowalski reveals the macro hidden in the micro, the metaphysical weight of absence, the enormity of unhappening. The effect recalls the vast, impersonal atmospheres of ambient musician Thomas Köner yet remains grounded in the banal infrastructure of online surveillance.

Elements (2005) functions as a companion, turning toward the frozen expanses of Alaska through webcams of the Alaska Weather Camera Program. Intended to track climatic conditions at airfields and remote outposts, these feeds become landscape cinema once reframed by Kowalski. They are, as Marc Ries notes, “horizon films rather than object films,” concerned less with discrete entities than with thresholds, with the way space dissolves at its perimeter. Time-lapse and mechanization erode immediacy, transforming clouds and light into drifting stains on low-resolution surfaces. Snowfields take on painterly abstraction. The smallest shift in illumination feels catastrophic, as if some distant rupture were passing through. Human presence is reduced to traces: tire marks fading into whiteness, a runway half-consumed by drifting snow, a horizon line trembling in ambient pressure.

Luukkaankangas – updated, revisited (2004) shifts its attention to Finland via the webcams of the Finnish Road Administration. Remote roads, blanketed in snow and rarely interrupted by headlights, evoke a world moving without witnesses. Wind skimming across asphalt becomes a form of drawing. The roads seem to register the presence of travelers who never appear. It is as if an unseen hand were composing messages that dissolve before they can be understood.

The bonus films take us further inward. Ortem (2004), an arresting work in its own right, descends into the Viennese metro system. Tunnels, stairways, elevators, and security feeds compose a subterranean organism, something cellular and pulsing beneath the city’s surface. Distorted loops create circuits of motion and memory. At times, the tunnels blank out into a red screen, as if the system itself were undergoing a convulsion. The film ends with trains sliding past in opposing directions and a static wall, a return to the network’s resting heartbeat.

Interstate (2006), composed from thousands of still photographs, provides a final act of distillation. Real-time traffic sounds persist, but the images freeze: rest stops, windmills, gas stations, vehicles suspended in mid-transit. Time advances while the frames remain inert. The effect is spectral, a country glimpsed only in that state between motion and stasis. The highway becomes a long exhalation of images that never congeal into movement, a road movie where the road never bends.

Together, these works propose a distinct way of seeing. Kowalski offers a cinema rooted not in events but in the conditions that allow events to be seen. He gives us a world composed of glances without biological gazes. And in doing so, he raises a disquieting possibility: that surveillance is not terrifying because it watches us but because it reveals how much of the world continues without us, indifferent to whether anyone bears witness or turns away.

Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek: FLAMING EARS (INDEX 031)

| Tyran Grillo

Ursula Pürrer and Hans Scheirl’s Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche erupts as a feverish, low-budget surge of post-Actionist, speculative queer cinema. Scheirl has described the film’s ethic as born of “passion, instant greed, an irresistible physicality,” made possible only through the harsh conditions in which the collaborators lived and worked. That extremity becomes generative rather than restrictive, producing an aesthetic suspended between collapse and invention, flickering amid the debris of a future already lost. The film’s “sheroes,” a term claimed without irony, are not classical heroines but warriors who carve desire from ruin. Their world is one of survival, lust, rage, and refusal: a cyberdyke vision that is gender-warped, tactile, devoted to color, texture, and bodily exaggeration, and resistant to patriarchal legibility.

Set in the year 2700, in the post-apocalyptic sprawl of Asche, the story imagines a city “too big for its souls, an unruly ferocious animal ready anytime to pee into the face of death.” Women carry the force of action, labor, and narrative agency, while the few men on screen perform clerical work, caretaking, child entertainment, and service roles. Power maps differently across bodies, and desire takes on its own logic. Spy (Susanna Heilmayr), a comic-strip artist, becomes our beacon. She sits late at night, sketching eroticized warriors, her quill scratching with urgency while storms lash her windows. Her printing house has just burned, and the rain only externalizes her psychic collapse. “Purity is a long-lost dream,” the narrator observes, and so it is that the film proceeds to strip away whatever illusions might remain.

Spy soon meets Volley (Ursula Pürrer), a volatile “sexed-up pyromaniac” whose fires serve as both erotic vocabulary and survival strategy. Her early scenes take place in a skating rink or some abandoned industrial corner. She masturbates, convulses with pleasure, then casually sets the place ablaze. Fire is not a symbol but the material of desire itself. Into this circuitry enters Nun (Hans Scheirl), an “amoral alien” wrapped in red plastic who moves through the city like a predatory seductress with no regard for human coherence. She eats snails and unnameable matter and loses a hand after devouring what may be an explosive possum. Her appetite is endless, her body a site of ongoing damage and regeneration. She gathers violence, humor, and eros into a single gravitational presence, the embodiment of anti-naturalism.

The film’s handmade quality feeds its atmospheric veracity. Scale models, scratch-film textures, and frenetic edits create a setting where time feels smeared as scenes drift from alleyways to nightclubs, from ersatz shelters to desolate urban expanses. Nothing fully coheres, yet everything builds momentum. Narrative accumulates as fragments, settling like ash after a fire. The city becomes a labyrinth of clandestine passes, erotic combat, and improvised alliances. Caretakers replace mothers, lovers replace authorities, and scarcity shapes every action.

Spy is saved by Volley, not through obligation but through an erogenous and political instinct. Women protect one another because no one else will. Volley and Nun form a symbiotic pair. Nun hunts, returning with scraps and stolen goods to offer. Meanwhile, Volley burns openings for their movement across the city’s ruins. Their relationship hovers between survival and seduction. Each nourishes the other’s hunger, restoring what the city has stripped away. This is a world of pleasures forged in absence, appetites sharpened by deprivation. Their love grows out of hunger, not merely for food or sex but for connection, autonomy, and a sense of embodiment in a world that has lost its coordinates.

The film unfolds as a chain of ritual encounters, improvisations, and ruptures. Women’s speech and action catalyze its current, while men drift at the margins as functionaries, interlopers, or ghosts of earlier orders. Queer futurism here emerges through the raw tactility of bodies, liquids, flames, plastics, and debris rather than through technological sheen. To fight is to feel. To consume is to connect. To burn is to speak.

The final movement spirals into a chaotic montage of destruction—all fires, wounds, collisions, and desperate attempts at sustenance—before settling into a strange and tenuous calm. It is not earned or explained; it arrives the way an afterimage lingers, the trace of everything endured. A world so thoroughly scorched cannot be made pure again, but it can reach a kind of exhausted equilibrium. What remains is the quiet sovereignty of women who fought for the sun with their bare hands and survived the blaze, marked by the flames yet still standing.

Martina Kudláček: Notes on Marie Menken (INDEX 030)

| Tyran Grillo

Martina Kudláček’s Notes on Marie Menken (2006) is equal parts revival and homage, an attempt to restore visibility to a figure whose brilliance shaped the American avant-garde even as her name slipped, mysteriously and unjustly, into obscurity. The director approaches Menken not as a lost saint of the underground but as a complex modernist force whose work wove spontaneity with discipline and lyricism with documentation. “Menken’s films,” writes Christian Höller in his booklet essay, “are not presented as an auratic holy grail but a mix of contemporary document and lyricism.”

Kudláček’s shimmering black and white contrasts with the bursts of color in Menken’s own films, allowing the latter’s sensibility, fluttering and incandescent, to punctuate the cooler investigation surrounding it. John Zorn’s score adds a pulsing undercurrent that avoids nostalgia and amplifies the restless intelligence of its subject.

Menken emerges as a figure of vivid contradictions: a commanding presence who made films of extraordinary delicacy, a private artist whose work entered public circulation only after encouragement from her family, a pioneer whose influence shaped Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Brakhage appears in the documentary and acknowledges that Menken provided the deepest inspiration for his own handheld aesthetics. Her volatile marriage to filmmaker-poet Willard Maas, which partly inspired Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is recounted with a balance of humor and pathos. Their creative ambitions, infidelities, and drunken fights become an off-screen theater that fed directly into Menken’s art. She accepted Maas’s homosexuality, lived amid bohemian tumult, and converted chaos into cue, color, and cadence. Archival material of Menken and Warhol filming each other reveals more than a historical rapport. It shows a shared excitement in experimentation and the way Menken taught him to wield the camera as a kinetic partner rather than a simple recording device.

Throughout, the documentary mirrors Menken’s own style, hovering over surfaces with a sensitivity that echoes her tactile curiosity. Her films were part of what she considered an “extended notebook,” entries in a life lived at the nerve endings of perception. They were unpretentious yet revelatory, the direct expression of a sensibility attuned to visual poetry in the smallest gestures, whether a branch lifting in the wind or a holiday light glinting for a moment.

Four of Menken’s essential films appear here as a miniature retrospective. Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), shot handheld to Lucille Dlugozewski’s surreal score, turns Isamu Noguchi’s sculptures into kinetic events. The camera animates form, tracing contours while inventing counter-contours.

Glimpse of the Garden (1957) offers an intimate wander through the garden and greenhouse of Menken’s friends. Here, the camera breathes, moving between micro-details and broader gestures with a dancer’s intuition.

Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958-61), filmed during a trip to Spain, offers a camera that speaks its own language, responsive to light as if to music. The Spanish guitar and castanets accompany images that oscillate between architecture and gesture, producing a visual prosody that approaches the condition of speech.

Finally, Lights (1964-66), assembled from three consecutive years of filming New York’s Christmas displays between midnight and one in the morning, may be her signature work. It is whimsical, electric, and full of delight yet grounded in an adult awareness of the city’s mingled magic and melancholy. Its frenetic sparkle becomes a translation of Menken’s spirit, playful and restless yet deeply alert.

Notes on Marie Menken performs a double rescue. It retrieves Marie Menken from the margins of film history while returning her oeuvre to the living environment that gave it life. The result is an aesthetic rooted not in simplicity or naïveté but in a cultivated mode of attention that stood apart from the grand, self-serious ambitions of much mid-century cinema. Her world is one in which the camera is a nervous system, a shimmering extension of the body. Thus, Menken appears not as a historical artifact but as an artist whose immediacy still strikes the eye with the force of a fresh brushstroke, whose motion remains contagious, and whose energy continues to ripple outward through the underground she helped invent.

Hans Scheugl: The Seconds Strike Reality (INDEX 029)

| Tyran Grillo

Hans Scheugl’s The Seconds Strike Reality traces a restless artistic intelligence moving at a slant to the avant-garde from which it emerged. Although he co-founded the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968 with Peter Weibel, Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt Jr., VALIE EXPORT, and Gottfried Schlemmer, Scheugl always kept a certain distance from the dominant gestures of Viennese Actionism. Dietmar Schwärzler notes this divergence in the accompanying booklet: Scheugl may have begun as a radical provocateur, but he did not remain one. He moved instead toward cinema as a probe into perception, daily life, and the body, particularly the queer body, which he examined cinematically and historically, long before such subjects received real attention in Austrian film culture. What he retained from his Actionist years was not the shock aesthetic but the courage to investigate the uncharted margins of experience: eroticism beyond prescribed gender roles, the strange temperature of the everyday, and the unstable relation between image and reality.

Wien 17, Schumanngasse (1967) lays out the blueprint of Scheugl’s method. A structural exercise masquerading as a brief road movie, the film hinges entirely on equivalence. The length of the 16mm reel must equal the duration of the drive through Schumanngasse. The resulting document is simultaneously indexical and abstract. Cars wait on the street without owners. Pedestrians drift through the frame stripped of identity. As Weibel observes, the film reveals the impossibility of ever measuring the world in any final sense, since our sense of it is always mediated by the optical and mechanical structures that shape representation. The real Schumanngasse becomes unknowable, dissolved into the rules that depict it.

In Hernals (1967), the seventeenth district of Vienna becomes a small social ecosystem. Everyday rhythms of women with grocery bags, men maneuvering a ladder, and children fidgeting on the sidewalk are complicated by staged interruptions. Scheugl films simultaneously with two cameras, generating parallel versions of the same events. The mirroring is subtle yet disorienting. When Weibel and EXPORT stage a physical altercation in the street, the performance blends almost too seamlessly with the documentary texture, and the moment lands with a force that feels disturbingly real. The film becomes a test of perception: which gestures belong to the world, which belong to performance, and why does the distinction feel so permeable?

Safety Film (1968), a proto-found-footage Western, pushes this instability into more chaotic terrain. Scheugl’s camera prowls the projection screen, disrupting the legibility of a rescue narrative. Scenes from a genre film collide with street shots and negative exposures that flash like X-rays, revealing cowboys’ teeth as skeletal artifacts. The heroic figure returns again and again, yet the editing renders him uncanny, emptied of mythic power.

Sugar Daddies (1968) is a queer love letter disguised as a collage. Laurel and Hardy, perhaps early cinema’s most domestic male couple, repeatedly appear in bed together, their physical nearness recharged into subversion. These scenes alternate with bathroom graffiti from the University of Vienna and candid shots of men urinating under the camera’s intrusive stare. Scheugl’s visible grin signals mischief and tenderness at once, an acknowledgment of queerness hidden in plain sight.

Eroticon sublim (1968) reduces cinema to its most elemental form. An uncut strip of deep crimson is projected in any orientation. Dedicated to “the color of the material,” the film is a meditation on film grain as sensual surface, an erotic presence achieved through simple saturation.

By 1985, Scheugl returns transformed in Der Ort der Zeit (The Place of Time). This masterstroke of durational cinema, and one of the most remarkable works in the INDEX series, moves the camera to the right at regular intervals, as if ticking along to a cosmic metronome. Over 24 hours, it captures an entire ecology of unimportant events. The film opens on two drunk men at a wake, both speaking Japanese, both isolated in their linguistic drift. They ask for the time, complain about empty bottles, and eventually part company. When one encounters passersby who cannot understand him, he looks up and remarks, “The sun is up,” a moment of dry poetry that encapsulates the film’s sense of displacement. After this, the camera continues on its own, indifferent to human intention. It records buildings, trees, train tracks, and snippets of conversation. A woman lounges in a lawn chair while a man speaks to her, and a cello echoes the cadence of his voice. Day yields to night. Darkness fills the frame. Still, the camera moves, as if time itself were the protagonist and everything else merely passing through.

Prince of Peace (1993) brings Scheugl back to his confrontational impulses. Anonymous men seem to be sucked into and expelled from a toilet. A man with a Jesus tattoo returns the viewer’s gaze. Images from gay pornography are scattered among passages of mournful music. Dedicated to a friend who died of AIDS, the film mourns the violence with which such images are consumed, judged, and discarded. The title, evoking Christ, becomes a bitter invocation of a witness who can neither intervene nor heal.

(Calcutta) GO (1993) shows Scheugl at his most observational, offering a wide-eyed passage through the streets of the titular city. Honking cars, voices, and passing bodies accumulate into nothing more, and nothing less, than the sensation of presence. The film’s modesty clarifies Scheugl’s long-standing devotion to cinema that does not impose meaning but lets it gather.

The bonus excerpt from Wiener Underground (1969) presents Scheugl in full post–’68 fervor. He hurls rocks, names influential figures, and tries to define the “underground” as a sensibility tied to feeling rather than ideology. Yet already his future direction is visible: toward a cinema rooted not in revolt but in attention.

Taken together, Scheugl’s films reveal a singular artistic position. He is an Actionist who moved beyond Actionism, a documentarian who mistrusted realism, a filmmaker for whom the seconds do not simply pass but strike. Reality is not recorded; it is encountered, shaken, and lightly annotated by the camera’s drifting curiosity. He reminds us that each moment is already an event, and each image an invitation not to master the world but to experience how little of it can ever be fully known.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta – Obsession: Structuring Time and Space (INDEX 028)

| Tyran Grillo

Ivan Ladislav Galeta treats architecture as perception, rigorously constructed yet permeated by metaphysical play. A pioneer of Croatian media art, he works with meticulous control over frame, duration, and spatial relation, so his films feel less like recordings and more like experiments conducted on the fabric of time itself. Yet this precision never settles into rigidity. As Hrvoje Turković notes, Galeta’s work may be a “meaningful psychological experiment,” but it is also unmistakably free. His creativity speaks in diagrams, animated by curiosity and shaped by questions rather than assertions. What is an image, Galeta seems to ask, and what does it become when it is nudged, delayed, mirrored, doubled, or placed in conversation with itself?

TV Ping Pong (1976-78) offers the clearest proposal. The film begins as a simple tableau of two men playing ping pong but gradually destabilizes the very space in which the game unfolds. A split-screen wipe initially feels like a technical convenience, yet as Galeta recombines the players spatially, placing them back to back on two televisions, superimposing them so that each faces his own double, aligning them side by side, and shifting angles with every hit, the logic of the game begins to fracture. The table, once a stable center, splinters into an L-shape, a cross, and an oblique angle that no longer corresponds to the geometry of lived space. Negative images pulse into view. The ordinary match becomes unmoored from its physical coordinates and reassembled in a realm both cerebral and playful. Galeta demonstrates how easily habitual perception masquerades as natural law and how invigorating it can be when that illusion loosens.

This principle deepens in Two Times in One Space (1976/84), perhaps his most haunting demonstration of expanded cinema. Using Nikola Stojanović’s 1968 film In the Kitchen as source material, Galeta introduces a precise delay of 216 frames between two simultaneous projections of the same footage. A family engages in domestic rituals such as eating, cleaning, and resting, doubled by an echo from the recent past. A hand reaches for a cup before it can grab it; a glance lands where it has already been; a small movement is performed twice, first by memory and then by presence. The delay creates a loop of perpetual arrival and departure, a household haunted by its own temporal afterimage. Nearby, a couple on a balcony professes their love, and their presence becomes strangely entangled with the time warp inside. The film’s emotion arises not from narrative but from the sensation of watching a memory overlapping itself before it has even had time to gel.

Galeta’s interest in temporal recursion becomes more explicitly cosmic in sfaĩra 1985-1895 (1984), subtitled “An Homage to Silent Movies.” He replaces Kubrick’s monolith with Ivan Kožarić’s sculpture EARTHBOUND SUN, an intervention both monumental and tactile. The sun or sphere becomes an object of interaction, tapped and caressed as if the universe were offering a lesson in its own grammar through physical contact. Dedicated to Pythagoras and Plato, the film conjures a vision of time as cyclical and harmonic. Its 72-frame delay produces a rhythm that feels almost biological, a slow, meditative breathing. Galeta writes that sound is silence in this film, and indeed, it brings forth our internal pulse, which anchors our relation to the image.

Water Pulu 1869 1896 (1987/88) shifts the structuring object, a ball in this case, into the center of a water polo match. With Debussy’s La Mer opening the film, a bright sphere floating on the surface becomes an axis around which the surrounding chaos of bodies revolves. Hands reach for it with the inevitability of gravitational pull; the ball rises through the frame as if it were a second sun. Anchored by its constancy, the film transforms the match into a study of centripetal desire, a choreography of approach and withdrawal that yields one of the great masterpieces of experimental cinema.

Galeta’s fascination with recursion and musical structure continues in WAL(L)ZEN (1989), a deconstruction of Chopin’s Waltz Op. 64, No. 2, as performed by Fred Došek. The music is played forward and backward, superimposed on itself until it becomes a fugue of temporal slippages. The melody remains recognizable but troubled, locked in a round where movement and stasis collide. The waltz, meant to turn endlessly, becomes trapped in a hall of mirrors, revealing the mechanism that underlies its pleasure.

The play with geometry reaches a different register in PiRâMidas 1972-1984 (1984). Filming from the back of a train, Galeta transforms the vanishing point, the most fundamental element of perspectival space, into a rotating triangulation. The image turns, folds, and inverts; the horizon becomes a hinge. What should remain the most stable point of orientation becomes fluid, exposing the conceptual scaffolding that quietly organizes our visual world.

Even the bonus track, an introduction to PiRâMidas and the drawings for it and WAL(L)ZEN, reinforces that Galeta’s films are not spontaneous experiments but rigorously conceived visual theorems. The drawings reveal how structure and intuition coexist, how mathematical clarity can merge with a sense of wonder.

Across these works, Galeta emerges as a cartographer of perceptual instability, reorganizing reality through his camera until its assumptions become visible. Time is his greatest collaborator, and we are his faithful allies in chronological skepticism.

Michael Pilz: Facts for Fiction / Parco delle Rimembranze (INDEX 027)

| Tyran Grillo

“On the one hand life, on the other hand descriptions.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche

In front of Michael Pilz’s lens, the world is both witness and companion. The camera does not stand apart; it attunes itself to movements of light across a street when no one cares to notice. Christa Blüminger is right to position Pilz outside the usual pantheon when she writes: “In Pilz two radical cinematographic tendencies merge: the belief in the realistic quality of the filmic image (film as a trace of reality) and that of knowing about the artificiality of the material (film as a way of creating reality.” His works reject monumentality and mastery, cultivating instead a fragile attentiveness that feels almost pre-modern in its patience. He gathers encounters the way some collect rocks, each one carrying a trace of the larger landscape. Nietzsche’s epigraph becomes a quiet challenge as Pilz traces the seam where life and description merge.

Was übersetzt ist noch nicht angekommen (Facts for Fiction, 1996) begins with the kind of mishap only the unscripted can supply. Jeff Perkins, the New York taxi driver Pilz intends to follow through a night, locks his keys inside the cab before they can even begin. This simple inconvenience becomes the gateway to the rhythm of life. Perkins must borrow another taxi to collect a spare key, and already the night fills with negotiations: the cost of the ride, the weight of the workday, the precarious intimacy of two men in the backseat sharing space before they share a story. They grumble about passengers who can afford generosity but withhold it, and they reflect on the strange proximity that arises when strangers climb into one’s moving workplace and either speak freely or retreat into silence.

Once Perkins is back in his own cab, the film finds its heartbeat. Encounters pockmark the night, each one ordinary yet illuminated from within. Perkins has the temperament of a storyteller, although he never performs for the camera. He tells passengers he is curating a Cassavetes festival at the theater where he works part-time, offering such details as if they were incidental. He points out a corner where Billy the Kid once lived, calling him a “tough New Yorker,” dissolving the line between legend and geography. He remembers driving on New Year’s Eve with his ex-wife, both of them already fading from one another, when she asked how he could stand the endless procession of strangers. Perkins answers through memory rather than explanation. “When I first started driving,” he recalls, “I was sure that I’d remember every single person. It was so extraordinary to me.”

He muses about assembling a book of conversations, about the conceptual videos he once made, about Warhol’s house tucked quietly on a nearby block. He prefers things calm and uneventful, the steady cadence of an ordinary life. Driving becomes a way of being in the world. He has lived, traveled, fallen in love, drifted apart, and somehow the cab has been a conduit through which each phase passes. Pilz listens. He gathers the auras of storefronts sliding by, the brief lives of passengers entering and leaving, the throb of the city under cover of night. And before long, we can count ourselves among them.

Parco delle Rimembranze (Part of Remembrance, 1987) distills Pilz’s sensibility into something close to essence. Shot on a fall evening in San Elena, Venice, it meditates on dusk, on the moment when daylight withdraws and the air thickens with the residue of finished labor. A telephone booth glows faintly, footsteps and distant voices unfastened from their sources. The camera lingers without insisting, and the world begins to reveal its own quiet meanings. Pilz films a bench, a path, the last shimmer of light on water, and these modest images assume a gentle tenor in which things feel slightly more themselves. There is humility in this unbroken chain. Nothing demands interpretation, yet everything invites contemplation. Pilz offers no argument, no thesis, only the shiver between presence and memory, between the external scene and the inner life it stirs.

Together, these two films articulate a distinct philosophy: that reality is too much to embrace yet too little to abandon. Pilz does not pin the world to meaning. Rather, he allows meaning to traverse the surface of things, the way the glow of a taxi meter slices through Manhattan streets.

Pürrer/Scheirl: Super-8-Girl Games (INDEX 026)

| Tyran Grillo

Super-8-Girl Games is less an anthology than a shared mythos written by two bodies in constant negotiation. Ursula Pürrer and Hans Scheirl approach the technology not as a format but as an ethic, a domestic instrument capable of registering the tremors of queer, feminist, and trans becoming before those words had cultural shelter. Their films, recorded in bedrooms and kitchens, on rooftops and subways, function as improvised laboratories where the body splits, recombines, mutates, laughs, makes contact, and sidesteps the very categories that would try to contain it. If Vienna Actionism sought transcendence through destruction, Pürrer and Scheirl reclaimed similar spaces for pleasure, comedy, filth, affection, and the joyous collapse of any fixed subject.

The 1985 title film establishes this spirit immediately. Pürrer and Scheirl draw directly onto the emulsion so that halos erupt from bodies, arrows bounce off bare chests, and eyes surge with hand-drawn lightning. Water pours from an armpit, hairs radiate energy, and snakes unfurl from mouths. Each transformation mixes the grotesque with the jubilant. Their bodies exchange not only fluids but lines, gestures, and invented anatomies. The self-recorded soundtrack mutters, bleeps, and pulses, a playful séance conducted by two artists who grasp desire with a candor adults rarely allow themselves.

Das schwarze Herz tropft – Bastelanleitung zu -rinnen (The Black Heart is Leaking – Amateur Constructors Manual for Fluid Gendering, 1985) begins with a single tone, a night scene, a figure in bed pressed against a plant. Humans and flora form an erotic ecology. The imagery shifts to dunes or mounds of salt, a terrain where legs press into the floor as if searching for roots. Exoticized music rises as a table lifts and scrapes across a larger double, as if scale itself could swap allegiances. Paper masks appear, a self confronting itself in disguise, searching for dissolution. The scrape of metal interrupts a dream where parts no longer matter.

Bodybuilding (1984) offers a pirated lesbian porno turned into a meditation on performativity. Flesh flexes and stacks. Mountains rise, literal or imagined, translating effort into topographical farce, both borne from the right of reinvention.

Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelnässend an (Zigzagged Rivulet Sneaks up Shamelessly Wetting Thighs, 1985) enters a feral register. Painted figures creep through nocturnal space, adorned with stones, moving like creatures for whom no taxonomy exists. The soundtrack hints at tribalism, a flawed fantasy yet central to their desire for a sexuality unbound by European scripts. The body is no longer an object but a force, stalking and being stalked through shadow.

Tones change again in Ein Schlauchboot und Austern (A Rubber Dinghy & Oysters, 1985). A subway ride, a diner meal, and a family tableau pass by to the tune of an absurdly cheerful pop song. The contrast creates not irony but a reminder that pleasure saturates the everyday.

Im Original farbig (Originally Coloured, 1986) introduces structure through a menu of distinct sections. Computer-game gestures appear beside paper shuffling, dioramas, and projected images. Each selection proposes a logic before abandoning it. The film becomes an instruction manual for a world that keeps rewriting itself, a choreography of order emerging from play and collapsing back into it.

In The Drift of Juicy (1989), objects, text, and materials act as prosthetics for desire. The body channels its sexuality through adjacency rather than performance. Space itself turns conductive, as if every surface were charged with latent touch.

The program’s energy culminates in 1/2 Frösche ficken flink (1/2 frogs f*ck fast, 1994–96), shot in New York and London. Rooftop nudity, boxing matches, bicycle sex acts, private dances, and explicit home-video eroticism collide in a frantic weave. The electronic soundtrack pulses with the cadence of queer nightlife. Nothing is hidden, nothing is apologized for. The camera stands not outside the scene but inside it, an accomplice.

The bonus work Slocking Walkman (1986) condenses the duo’s ethos into a music video where machinery and beat merge into a loop of gleeful illegibility. It serves as a credo rather than an afterthought.

Across these films, Pürrer and Scheirl cultivate a cinema of impurities: gender leakage, corporeal innovation, lo-fi enchantment, and domestic rebellion. Their practice does not aim to escape the home but to remake it as a site of radical production. The apartment walls become a proscenium for makeovers, the camera a tool that conjures new anatomies. What emerges is not documentation but transfiguration.

Linda Christanell: The Nature of Expression (INDEX 025)

| Tyran Grillo

Linda Christanell’s visual world is a private cosmology, an archive where gestures, textures, and emotional sediments gather. Her films feel handmade in the deepest sense, not crafted for display but touched into being, shaped with fingertips rather than lenses. She overlays, erases, scratches, and turns fragments in her hands until their hiddenness begins to glow. If performance art exposes the body as instrument, Christanell exposes the image as skin, something bruisable and permeable that carries longing within its grain. Her work moves between between domestic stillness and mythic reverberation, and in doing so reveals how easily a drawer of keepsakes can hold, beside a childhood souvenir, a relic of political terror.

This duality appears with particular sharpness in NS Trilogie – Teil II, Gefühl Kazet (1997), where traces of fascist imagery are reworked into a spectral rumination. A dog moves backward through the snow, an uncanny motion that seems both tender and disquieting, placed against the rigid authority of a Nazi uniform. Such a gait feels like the world struggling to undo its own horrors. Arvo Pärt’s Sarah Was Ninety Years Old rises and folds into itself behind the images, giving the film a liturgical pulse, as empty hallways suggest abandoned ideologies. Christanell lingers over the faces of laughing women, over portraits that fade, and over the complacency of those who enabled cruelty. Wolves run through this layered terrain, hunting what cannot be seen, as though history were still pursuing its prey. A view through a train window appears as a tear in the fabric, a momentary aperture of escape. The film’s spiritual quiet is not soothing. It is vigilant, a reminder that memory can be both fragile and predatory.

Mouvement in the inside of my left hand (1978) turns the body into a geological map. Creases resemble mountains, fields, and fault lines. The hand becomes a temporal landscape where the faint words “How long will I live?” emerge before dissolving. The gesture evokes palmistry but refuses prediction. Christanell is not asking for an omen.

Fingerfächer (Finger-Fan, 1975/82) draws such attention into the micro-world. A catalog of objects and small actions unfolds against shifting sound: a drone softens into a cappella murmuring, breaks into a punk-like thrust, then fades into fragile strings. The effect mimics the sensation of rummaging through an old box of belongings where an ordinary object suddenly offers a memory before returning to anonymity.

The body returns in For you (1984), where Christanell presses a hat pin into her palm until the skin dips inward but does not break. The gesture is charged yet restrained. No blood appears; violence remains suspended. The crystal tip of the pin casts a trembling shadow over a photograph, an ode to the boundary between pain and meaning and to the quiet devotion that accompanies every attempt to preserve recall without destroying it.

All can become a rose (1992) explores desire as a transformative force. Water ripples across red leopard print. An embroidered lion shimmers. Something burns. Thus, our regard is shown to alter the material world, not through symbolism but through genuine transfiguration. Under the pressure of fantasy, objects become something they are not.

The compilation reaches a still deeper register with Picture again (2002), where the filmmaker overlays fragments of Double Indemnity with her own documentary footage from Berlin and Madrid. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray hover in suspended tension, their noir seduction stretched into near abstraction. Brief flashes of pornography appear, not enough to arouse but enough to illuminate the underlying architecture of male fantasy within classical cinema. Christanell’s gesture is quiet and exact, a softer yet no less powerful counterpoint to the more aggressive deconstructions of many male avant-gardists in the INDEX series.

Moving picture (1995) revisits Stanwyck, setting her against the textures of Christanell’s own childhood, including house façades, falling snow, wind-scoured eaves, piano phrases that feel half recalled. Birds pass through as if carrying traces of other lives. The film is gentle yet unsentimental, treating memory not as a place of retreat but as a terrain one revisits under shifting light.

The bonus pieces, Change (1978) and Federgesteck (Feather-Arrangement, 1984), are pregnant marginalia. A linen globe turns slowly, a pale breast-like form in rotation. Feathers and small objects pass before the camera in quick succession. Both works seek fascinations with surfaces and the quiet metamorphoses of the everyday, reminding us that even the simplest object can become a site of conversion.

Christanell speaks in languages coaxed from within, each a breath clouding its own windowpane. She studies objects as organs, bodies as relics, images as storehouses of collective trauma. Her films linger on the threshold between sensuality and meditation, between private ritual and public wound. Through their stillness, their repetitions, and their tactile nearness, they reveal that expression is not a display but an excavation, a gradual uncovering of what desire has kept hidden all along.