Author: Tyran Grillo

Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (INDEX 018)

| Tyran Grillo

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented.”
–Martin Arnold

Martin Arnold’s oeuvre grows from a profound distrust of popular narrative machinery. For him, the classical montage is never innocent. It is a device for shaping behavior and disciplining desire, a system that filters the unruly impulses of human life into tidy patterns of sanctioned emotion. His practice revolves around locating this withheld remainder. By tearing apart fragments of studio films and reassembling them through frame-by-frame expansion, reversal, and obsessive repetition, he subjects familiar scenes to what James Leo Cahill terms the “cineseizure,” a state in which the image convulses until its buried drives appear like worms after rain.

Cineseizure is an apt word: a blend of possession and dispossession, mechanical spasm and sexual tremor. Arnold forces films to reveal their unconscious, much as micro-expressions betray horror, disgust, and perversion. Gestures that once passed unnoticed begin to twitch with emotional residue. The screen becomes a site where the smallest flicker of a hand or tightening of a jaw turns into a phonograph needle tracing grooves of repressed histories. In these manipulated spaces, time no longer flows.

Arnold’s reworkings are the truth serum of cinema. They expose repetition as the motor of the medium and repression as its silent engineer. What emerges is not merely a riff on form but the exhumation of realities as much cut out of the sovereign frame as embedded within it.

The trilogy that anchors this experiment reveals how a few seconds of onscreen time contain entire worlds of unspoken (hyper)tension. Arnold extracts domestic interiors, Oedipal line crossings, and adolescent longings, then stretches them into dense diagrams of psychic movement. Gender, childhood, sexuality, and authority become patterns of muscular recurrence. The screen no longer shows bodies acting but bodies being acted upon.

The first of these excavations, pièce touchée (1989), begins with an ostensibly brief moment from Joseph M. Newman’s The Human Jungle and magnifies it into fifteen minutes of convulsive intimacy (if not intimate convulsion). A man attempts to enter his home, while a woman sits reading in the living room. In Hollywood’s fantasy, this is the ideal daily ritual, but Arnold transforms it into a scene of anxious reiteration that strains against its own script. The woman cannot leave the frame without being snapped back into it. Her fingers twitch with illegible agitation. She opens her mouth as if practicing a line she does not believe. The man cycles through the threshold, an entrance that never quite becomes arrival. Even the hallway light participates, flickering in spasms that mirror the scene’s hormonal uncertainty. Bodies merge with furniture. The room turns in on itself. Thus, home life reveals its nervous skeleton, quivering beneath the surface of flesh rewritten.

A similar unease shapes passage à l’acte (1993), which dilates a breakfast scene from To Kill a Mockingbird into a study of familial disarray. A 33-second interlude becomes a chamber of hesitation, rebellion, and libidinal undercurrents too complicated to contain. Atticus’s movements take on a compulsive rhythm. His son Jem mirrors him with unnerving precision, as if domesticity were nothing more than a chain of inherited gestures. Scout slams her fork, and the percussive violence of that simple action ripples through the room. Attempts to leave the house collapse into stuttering rounds, caught as the family now is in an emotional weather system they cannot name.

The trilogy culminates in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), through which Arnold turns the coming-of-age Hardy musicals inside out. What once passed as innocent family entertainment mutates into a network of taboo signals sublimated into song and cheer. Mickey Rooney’s hand strokes his mother’s arm with a persistence that borders on possession. Her breathing grows expectant, her lips forming impossible Möbius strips. Judy Garland’s singing disintegrates into the repeated sound of “alone,” a cry that becomes a wound, a seduction, and an existential refrain. Even the word “love” fragments, the “v” floating like a detached shard of desire. A paternal slap intrudes repeatedly, failing to dispel the fantasy it aims to suppress. By the end, circular breathing turns a single note into an inhuman pulse, as if any erotic charge has surpassed the capacity of the body. Mortality and musical spectacle collapse into a haunting indrawn breath.

Bonus works included on the DVD include Don’t – Der Österreichfilm, which lays Kyle McLaughlin’s crying from Blue Velvet over Austrian footage with a mood that makes cultural memory feel irradiated from within, while Jesus Walking on Screen, with its repeated plea for sight over blackness, distills a hunger for revelation into a single gesture. A miniature trailer for Kunstraum Remise transforms a train’s approach into a slow ignition of desire, while a Viennale spot built from Psycho wrests terror from a scream that refuses to resolve as the shower continues its incessant spray on loop.

Taken together, these works illuminate Arnold’s true concern: not the films he manipulates but the psychic conditions they mask. By destabilizing the flow of time, he allows gestures to confess what the plot once denied. The repression that once held Hollywood in place becomes visible as a trembling scaffold. In Arnold’s hands, film reveals the desires it tried to silence, the violences it displaced, the fears it dressed in gaudy costumes. Through temporal fracture, he returns the moving image to its buried pulse, showing that it remembers more than it ever intended to reveal and that, even with the right interrogation, it always has more to confess.

Leo Schatzl: Farrago (INDEX 017)

| Tyran Grillo

INDEX’s 17th release in its traversal of the Austrian avant-garde surveys the wide sweep of Leo Schatzl, whose terrain is shaped by formal wit, idiosyncratic experiment, and a sustained interest in the marginal and the taboo. Despite being more widely associated with kinetic sculptures and public installations, Schatzl reveals in these videographic pieces an equally rigorous fascination with the mechanics of perception and the social imaginary embedded in ordinary life. Beginning in the 1980s, he developed a near-compulsive interest in mechanizing the familiar by animating everyday objects, setting them spinning or stumbling through systems of automation, and treating them as performers that catalyze dormant energies.

As diverse as the works curated on Farrago are, they share a foundational question: What happens to perception when the quotidian begins to behave in unexpected ways? Schatzl pursues this question through performances, accidental encounters, ritualized acts of destruction, and chronological experiments. Rather than asserting a single theory of daily life, the collection offers a dispersed phenomenology, a meditation on how the ordinary reveals itself once its habits have been disrupted.

The earliest pieces draw on a sense of anxious play. Krieg etc. (War etc., 1983) uses war toys and children’s drawings to stage a miniature theater of militarized fantasy. What might initially evoke childhood imagination becomes haunted by an adult’s awareness of violence, as video game noises puncture the scene and dissolve any cozy boundary between innocence and ideology. The aesthetics of play become the staging ground for questions about how war seeps into fantasy long before it appears on any battlefield.

As his practice evolves, Schatzl turns increasingly toward the elasticity of time and gesture. Max./Extramax. (1986) treats actors as instruments in a responsive game, where delayed glances and slow-motion cigarette puffs strain against the expected pacing of social interaction. The viewer waits for cues that never arrive. Time stretches, and perception becomes a charged medium, as if the work were testing how far the ordinary can bend before it becomes unrecognizable.

This interest in reanimated objects reaches a poignant absurdity with Mobile Matratze (Mobile Mattress, 1988), filmed on the grounds of the Urfahr market in Linz. A mattress, suddenly mobile, careens across the landscape in a spontaneous performance that transforms a piece of inert furniture into a strange companion, a creature caught between intimacy and machine logic. Such theater reveals the emotional residue that can gather around objects under a different affordance.

Schatzl’s inquiry into the self takes a fragmented turn in SW-EGO (1990), where single-frame self-portraits split and fracture across the screen, accompanied by heavy, rhythmic drumming. The face breaks apart, recombines, and dissolves again. The work stages a modern paradox: the desire to unify the self alongside the recognition that it is already scattered across multiple experiential slices.

Throughout the early 1990s, Schatzl begins pushing mechanization into public space. Akzidenz (1991) orchestrates radio-controlled cars that veer into wet concrete. The hardened slabs later appear around the city as sculptural evidence of impact. The gesture functions as both a destructive impulse and an archival trace, a physical index of collision that turns urban space into a memory field. Structured like a television program, it blurs the lines between documentation and spectacle, reflecting on the choreography of industry and risk.

Travel becomes another form of techno perception in T.Z. USA 1991 – going fast slow (1991). Over 10,000 miles are compressed into 10 minutes as a car-mounted Super 8 camera races through restricted zones in the American Southwest. The landscape streams past in a delirious blur, transforming geography into velocity while reproducing the sensation of collecting impressions too quickly to grasp until after the journey ends. Movement becomes a kind of forgetting, and forgetting becomes another way of seeing.

Schatzl’s fascination with process continues in Wall (1992), a fast-motion chronicle of a museum installation that reveals the frantic ergonomics behind an exhibition’s calm facade. The piece begins and ends with an empty room. Between these two quiet moments, creation and destruction accelerate until a final jackhammer strike turns the space into its own epitaph. Schatzl shows how easily institutional order gives way to chaos and how both states occupy the same temporal frame.

Even his more theatrical experiments retain a strange melancholy. Maschinenkampf FX/LS (Machine flight FX/LS, 1992) stages a parody of combat between two custom-built machines in a scrapyard, with viewers watching through mediated streams in Linz, Vienna, and Kassel. The machines clash, but the real drama lies in the blurry images and the debris they leave behind. The scrapyard becomes a graveyard of industrial bodies, relics of innovations that once promised mastery and now echo with obsolescence.

In the mid-1990s, Schatzl turns toward minimal actions that reveal the emotional resonance of the mundane. Oxo Wonder Vision (1996) focuses on two hot plates and soup pots. Condensation gathers, evaporates, and begins again. The sound shifts between clarity and echo. Cooking, usually unnoticed labor, becomes an intimate study of presence and absence, nourishment anticipated but deferred.

The question of mediated identity returns in FAX ME / homerun 1996, in which Schatzl circles the globe while repeatedly faxing images of himself back home to see which will arrive first, only to find that he beats them all, since the transmission is compromised somewhere along the way. The project reflects the tension between global mobility and the tenuousness of individuality.

Toward the end, Schatzl returns to the heightened sensitivity of his material practice. Tabu Zone #2 (1998), filmed in a restricted Austrian village, collects seasonal fragments that slip in and out of legibility. The forbidden space becomes a flicker of sunlight, a passing shadow, a gesture half-seen. Visibility depends entirely on what the camera is allowed to retain. Vanishing Points (2005), drawn from an exhibition of kinetic installations, reveals machines drawing circles and arcs in the air, their motions precise yet mysterious.

In the world according to Schatzl, the mundane is nothing if not uncanny. His videos constitute a tessellation of latent intensities in which gestures accumulate meaning, objects acquire agency, and perception becomes a site of ongoing transformation. In this sense, Farrago reads less as a retrospective than as a philosophy. Through humor, abrasion, speed, and tenderness, the artist shows that the smallest habits and simplest machines carry within them the seeds of wonder and disruption.

Dietmar Brehm: Black Garden (INDEX 016)

| Tyran Grillo

Trauma, Erotics, and the Phantasmatic Image

Hans Schifferle once described Dietmar Brehm’s cinema as a “psychothriller,” a space where horror and sexuality converge in unstable proximity. The term captures both the themes and the underlying structure of his work. Brehm explores the anxiety between erotic fascination and forensic inspection, unfolding one involuntary memory at a time. His background as draftsman, painter, photographer, and collector of images shapes his approach. He draws on decades of accumulated material, ranging from documentaries to action films, ethnographic footage, and pornography. Much of it is anonymous, never intended for circulation. Authenticity remains uncertain, as any scene that appears salvaged may just as well be staged. The results inhabit the uncertain boundary where truth and fabrication lose distinction.

The Black Garden cycle, created between 1987 and 1999, is the clearest expression of Brehm’s aesthetic, through which he distills psychic trauma into bursts of arrhythmia. He explores the conflict between the urge to look and the fear of what the eyes might uncover.

The Murder Mystery (1987/92)
A storm soundtrack establishes an external threat. Images shift between a body placed in a field, a woman receiving pleasure, and a man in sunglasses whose stare stands in for our own. Spatial cues appear and fade. Rooms blur. Bodies change into objects, and objects hint at concealed bodies. The montage forms an interrupted rhythm that never stabilizes. Watching becomes an anxious search for coherence that always slips away.

Blicklust (Desire to Look) (1992)
Introspection takes the form of dissection. A drawing of a dissected eye signals that vision itself is under strain. A bound woman, surgical procedures, a hanging body, insects spiraling toward light, and quiet water form a vocabulary of exposure. Voyeurism manifests with unsettling proximity. Intimacy leaks into pathology. Looking becomes a cut that both reveals and harms.

Party (1995)
An electronic voice announces, “Good morning. The time is six a.m.,” as if awakening the viewer into a misplaced body. Scorpions fight while a man urinates, brushes his teeth, and washes his face. A woman touches herself. Shadow puppets appear. Exaggerated musculature emerges and vanishes. The human and the animal intersect in a series of gestures that suggest control, threat, and self-contact. The scorpions’ combat externalizes Geertzian tensions that haunt the scenes.

Macumba (1995)
The cycle’s most troubling work. Rain provides a sonic surface for images of Black pornography, African hunting footage, and scenes of animal violence. The phallus becomes aligned with pursuit and killing. While the critique of racialized eroticization is evident, the repetition of these images works against itself, collapsing into reenactment. Here is a vortex where representation and violation intermingle.

Korridor (1997)
Footage found in an old Vienna shop gives this one the feel of an accidental confession. Scenes of a man and woman in bed alternate with exterior shots of anonymous buildings. Birdsong and indistinct conversations drift across the soundtrack. A tree against the sky frames the beginning and end. The couple’s intimacy floats without context, unanchored. They seem to inhabit a corridor between identities and moments, never fully present in either.

Organics (1998/99)
The final film gestures toward female centrality, although any semblance of protagonism fades quickly. Masks, explosions, self-pleasuring, X-rays, surgeries, and architectural fragments emerge in clusters that never settle. A stalking gaze tries to impose order but only deepens fragmentation. The result recalls dream sequences by Guy Maddin, though interrupted by abrupt sexual imagery.

Coda: On the Edge of the Unbearable

Brehm seeks no clarity or comfort. His 2000 interview confirms that he creates for himself, guided by instinct rather than audience. This independence gives the work its raw intensity, but it also produces a physical unease that can be difficult to endure, operating at the point where fascination turns into revulsion. Their power arises from that tension.

Black Garden offers no catharsis. It exposes the viewer to a world where eroticism and violence intertwine, where desire corrupts memory, and where bodies function as both sites of longing and threat. The experience lingers not in the intellect but in the nerves, abstract and unmanageable.

What complicates the cycle most is the risk it poses. By assembling images of objectification, especially those involving racialized bodies and women, without a counter-perspective or contextual grounding, they can slip into the very aesthetic of domination they seek to deconstruct. Since much of the footage is drawn from archives of harm, and since Brehm refrains from introducing reflective distance, he sometimes underscores rather than undermines. And so, we are left holding a double-edged sword, one that illuminates the pathology of the gaze and also demonstrates how difficult it is to represent that pathology without repeating it. It also exposes the cost of entering such terrain without safeguards.

Perhaps this is why Black Garden lingers. It does not resolve the unconscious but reveals its pressure points. It invites us not to interpret but to withstand, to remain inside the tremor where desire becomes fear and where the act of looking exposes the viewer in return.

Oliver Ressler: This is what democracy looks like! / Disobbedienti (INDEX 015)

| Tyran Grillo

Oliver Ressler occupies a distinctive position in the landscape of contemporary political media art. With training rooted in the traditions of installation and documentary, his practice evolved during the late 1990s when he frequently embedded topical interviews into gallery spaces. Since 2000, however, Ressler has increasingly produced standalone videos that are lean, incisive, and structurally committed to the voices of their protagonists. Ressler’s method could be described as anti-journalistic. By refusing the conventions of neutral framing and by eliminating off-camera prompting or commentary, he foregrounds the subject’s perspective with uncompromising clarity. The result sidesteps reportage as a form of amnesia. Instead, he occupies that liminal space between art and activism, where aesthetic form amplifies political content, and political content reshapes aesthetic form.

His work aligns with the maxim from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire: “Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.” This ethos is not merely quoted but lived through the polyphony of activists Ressler records. His videos become platforms for articulating dissent not as a reaction but as a constitutive practice. In this vital release, INDEX presents two such works from 2002. Each dissects the evolving tactics of grassroots activism in early 21st-century Europe, examining how the state responds to peaceful, creative, and resolutely anti-imperialist forms of protest.

This is what democracy looks like! revisits the events of July 1, 2001, in Salzburg, when demonstrators protesting the World Economic Forum faced the systematic denial of free speech. Six participants, interviewed a few weeks after the protests, recall the day’s events in detail. Their testimonies reconstruct a climate in which high-level economic negotiations, made behind closed doors by billion-dollar corporations, were shielded from public scrutiny by an increasingly militarized police presence.

The protestors describe being surrounded without warning by police blockades, passports seized, bags searched, and bodies detained without charge. Their accounts resonate with anti-imperialist analysis, as the consolidation of global wealth into fewer hands is mirrored by the consolidation of state power into police enforcement.

Ressler’s framing is deceptively simple: a static camera, an unobtrusive background, and long, uninterrupted speech. Such minimalism elevates the protestors from mere subjects to theorists of their own experience. The viewer encounters partisan reflection as lived thought rather than expert commentary.

The testimonies reveal a pattern of nonviolence met with state violence. Peaceful demonstrators are treated as disruptive threats less for what they do than for what they represent: a democratization of dissent. In this sense, Ressler delineates not only the radicalization of police brutality but the dialectical relationship between state sovereignty and pacifist protest.

The video ends on a note of unexpected accountability: the head of police being fined for unlawful detention, and protestors receiving 200 DM in compensation for personal injury. Ressler resists narrative triumphalism, but this detail underscores the juridical cracks where the arm of supremacy can still be challenged.

Disobbedienti examines the emergence of new activist formations responding to increasingly hostile state tactics. The title refers to I Disobbedienti, a network of Italian activist groups whose lineage traces back to the Tute Bianche (White Overalls), the iconic movement that demonstrated against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001. The Tute Bianche were recognizable for their white protective uniforms that symbolized equality and rendered their bodies at once vulnerable and fortified. Their transformation into the Disobbedienti marked a strategic shift as they shed that armor to blend into crowds. Thus, they adopted more flexible, guerrilla-style actions while remaining fundamentally committed to nonviolence.

Ressler and co-director Dario Azzellini interview members of these groups, revealing activism rooted in leftist traditions: young communists and socialists, labor organizers, proponents of immigrant rights and living wages, and advocates of gender equality. Their philosophy resonates with the Zapatistas in serving as a node of political resistance without separating themselves from the broader social fabric.

The Disobbedienti deployed the “technology of imperialism” against itself, using protective gear, communication networks, and media-savvy strategies to expose systemic abuses. Their efforts spanned cities across Italy, including Bologna and Rome, culminating in an extraordinary dismantling of a detention center in Via Mattei before it even opened. They declared the site a “camp against humanity,” turning the rhetoric of security back upon its perpetrators. The camera captures a “movement of movements,” a coalition not unified by ideology alone but by the shared practice of social disobedience. Their activism is embodied, distributed, and adaptive. It challenges not just policy but the very architecture of obedience.

Taken together, this loose diptych marks a transitional moment in European protest culture, when globalization’s mechanisms grew increasingly opaque and states responded to pacifism with unprecedented force. Ressler’s documents reject the conventions of objective journalism, demonstrating instead that neutrality often masks systemic violence. By centering activists’ voices, he asserts that political knowledge emerges from participation, not from distance.

These works illustrate how democracy, far from being a stable institutional genre, is a contested process shaped by those who would dare to contravene it. Democracy looks like confrontation, like testimony, like refusal. It is the rebuilding of political subjectivity under conditions designed to suppress it. In capable hands, video marks a site of counter-hegemonic discourse, a tool for reclaiming public space from the closure of neoliberal governance.

Who gets to define democracy? Who gets to speak within it? And what forms of resistance must emerge when the answers are no longer shared? Ressler’s work suggests that the future of political art lies not in representing dissent, but in creating spaces where dissent can speak for itself, lest we take it upon ourselves to answer such questions in place of those whose voices must first be heard.

Sonic Fiction: Synaesthetic Videos from Austria (INDEX 014)

| Tyran Grillo

Sonic Fiction presents a cross-section of Austrian audiovisual experimentation at the turn of the 21st century. It emerges from Vienna’s fertile avant-garde electronic music scene, a milieu where glitch, microsound, live electronics, and improvisation shaped not only what artists heard but how they learned to see. These works do not illustrate music. They poke holes in hierarchies of the cinematic, creating what Christian Höller calls a “sound/image coagulation,” a convergence so intimate that neither medium precedes the other. Perception acts as the substrate across which their interaction unfolds.

In this collection, the early digital moment is not approached as emancipation from materiality but as its reconfiguration. Image becomes particulate, granular, and flickering; sound is subjected to a sculptural pressure. These videos share a fascination with reduction and abstraction, yet each arrives there through different processes, including algorithmic play, photographic reprocessing, digital mutation, and the reanimation of everyday materials. The result is a corpus that privileges meditation over spectacle. The cumulative effect is an ecology of cohabitation experiments.

Lia’s hardVideo/G.S.I.L. XIX (2003), with sound by @c, stages this microtemporal sensibility with particular clarity. On dense black grounds, geometric shards loop through cycles of emergence and self-erasure, as if devouring the traces of their own movement. Their fallibility arises from the same molecular field as the sound itself. The piece evokes a logic of survival in hostile terrain—shapes feeding on their own remnants—even as musicality softens its austerity. Erosion as lullaby.

This fascination with elemental processes continues in neon (2003) by Nik Thoenen and Timo Novotny, with Wolfgang Schloegl’s droning soundscape merging into the photographic traces of fluorescent tubes. Filmed installations offer a study of gases igniting and fading, captured on Super 8 at various speeds. The visual beats feel both corporeal and machinic, as though watching electricity remember its birth. A potential industrial detritus transforms into a quiet riff on activation and aftermath.

The shadows of Micaela Grill and Martin Siewert’s trans (2003) imply trees or architecture without ever resolving into legible forms. The viewer is suspended between recognition and disorientation. Siewert’s restrained but incisive soundtrack anchors the images while refusing to explain them, creating a delicate balance between clarity and dissolution. What we are left with is a threshold between the coherent and the barely remembered.

In Thomas Aigelsreiter’s Key West (2002), with sound by Rudi Aigelsreiter, sun-soaked beach footage offers a surface where utopia frays. Vrääth Öhner notes the “persistent fascination of images long succumbed to sound reasoning,” and the video stages this tension of cheerful scenes made uncanny by drones and distortions. The idyllic vision curdles into something fantastic and quietly menacing. Beauty glimmers, then trembles. A Lynchian undertone seeps through the brightness.

Didi Bruckmayr and Michael Strohmann’s ich bin traurig (i am sad) (2004), with sound by F*ckhead, approaches perception from the inside out. A face mutates through 3D software, unable to settle into a legible expression. Sadness appears as an unstable artifact—never captured, always sliding into new contortions. Subjectivity is fluid, vulnerable to the software’s restless grammar.

Karø Goldt’s falcon (2003), with sound by Rashim, begins with a photograph of a Falcon aircraft but pushes it through waves of chromatic transformation. Garish colors flood the contours until the aircraft lays a field of shifting gradients. Power and mobility dissolve into pure chromatic excess. Each retains a ghostly hint of its origin, but the meaning leaks away, replaced by color in motion.

Billy Roisz’s blinq (2002), with contributions from ten musicians (Burkhard Stangl, Akoasma, Boris Hauf, Dieb13, Sachiko M., Martin Siewert, Christof Kurzmann, Toshimaru Nakamura, Werner Dafeldecker, and el), enacts synaesthesia in structural terms. Roisz translates sound files into visual miniatures. The result is a series of geometries that behave not as illustrations but as co-generated events, coalescing into one of the collection’s most conceptually integrated works. In this small chamber, signals revel in each other’s oxygen deprivation.

In cubica (2002), m.ash and sound artist Chris Janka harness the logic of the classic game Snake, unleashing an autonomous cube-snake system that draws paths through three-dimensional space. The music, recalling the resonant intensities of Zbigniew Karkowski or Z’EV, complements the algorithmic wanderings beautifully.

[n:ja]’s frame (2002), with sound by Radian, turns travel into drift. The work resembles the view from a car window moving through a world of processed lights and blurred structures. The soundtrack’s precision shapes the journey as motion without arrival.

Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s SUN (2003), with Attwenger’s sound, dismantles our nearest star through static shots and associative montage. The sun appears green, stripped of expectation. Isabella Reicher describes the effect as “looking the sun in the eye.” The piece constitutes a folk abstraction, a playful yet uncanny engagement with an object that resists representation.

reMI’s zijkfijergijok (2003) turns religious instruction into flashes, softening doctrine with corrupted impulses. Iconography collapses under the weight of technological instability. The churn is frightening: faith rendered as glitch, belief as a system buckling under its own mediation.

Michaela Schwentner’s Jet (2003), with Radian’s soundtrack, closes the circle by dismantling an object of military power. A fighter jet appears only in fragments—tail, cloud, edge—before pixelation consumes it. A struggle for coherence yields to entropy, resulting in a powerful rumination on the fragility of representation in the digital era.

Sonic Fiction is neither exclusively music video nor visual art. Rather, it occupies a diurnal terrain where media co-produce perceptual events. Through reduction, repetition, mutation, and delay, the artists discover a mode that is anything but dematerialized. It is not fiction in the narrative sense but in the perceptual one, a way of imagining through frequency over representation. What it asks of us is minimal. What it gives in return for lack of expectation is incalculable.

Gertrude Moser-Wagner: Concept & Coincidence (INDEX 013)

| Tyran Grillo

Gertrude Moser-Wagner may be known primarily as a sculptor, yet her videos reveal an artist who treats moving images as material phenomena rather than narrative devices. Her formula of “concept and coincidence” is not merely a method but a worldview. Concept is the structure she brings to a site. Coincidence is what the site returns. Her films emerge from the friction between intention and accident, between the framework and the world that slips through its seams. Out of that friction rises the “spark” she often speaks of: the moment when place, sound, body, and camera discover a shared frequency, and experience begins to vibrate in multiple layers at once.

Although her practice ranges across sculpture, installation, performance, and collaborative happenings, her videographic creations remain deeply tactile in their orientation. She treats image as substance, sound as atmospheric pressure, and location as something that must be excavated. Each frame feels unearthed rather than staged, a found object transformed through the conditions of its encounter. This timely DVD, which collects works made between 1987 and 2000, serves as a kind of field notebook, a record of embodied perception. These films do not illustrate ideas but reveal how ideas collide with the textures of real spaces.

The first of these encounters, Lingual (1992), opens with a startling gesture of intimacy: a calf sucking on a human hand. Instead of barnyard ambience, organ pipes fill the air, lifting a primal act into ritual space. Josef Reiter’s sound design turns ingestion into ceremony. The film becomes an exploration of how the world is taken in long before it is spoken. Moser-Wagner compresses the image into narrow, constricted views and then releases it into the full frame, creating pulses of tightening and release. The effect is haunting in its simplicity, suggesting that language begins as touch and that meaning, before it can be articulated, must first be felt.

That sensitivity to spatial breath intensifies in Kiosk (1993), filmed in Skoki, Poland, inside a villa whose architecture seems to fold in on itself. The title is an anagram of the town’s name, as though the building had been scrambled into a linguistic echo. Again, Reiter collaborates on sound, this time evoking the hum of bureaucratic machinery, including ticker tape, typewriter keys, and mechanical exhalations. The imagery, predominantly black and white but punctuated by uncanny bursts of color, transforms the space into an architectural hallucination. Stone windows tilt and stretch, as if the house were confessing its own interior life.

In Luftloch (1987), filmed at St. Lambrecht monastery in Styria, Austria, concept and coincidence intermingle with palpable immediacy. Musicians Andreas Weixler and Se-Lien Chuang generate an aural landscape that interweaves with images of industrial scrap, abandoned buildings, tai chi-esque movements, and bodies echoing through forgotten spaces. The film oscillates between document and spontaneous happening. A communal meal surfaces, then a staircase, then water, then a video of a woman eating fish. Industry seeps into monastic quiet. At one point, glass shatters against concrete; at another, the camera peers through a small aperture onto the street outside, holding interior and exterior together like two lungs sharing a single breath. The entire piece feels sculpted in real time, a performance inscribed into the environment.

Collaboration unfolds differently in Vice Versa / Kraków–Krakau (1998), made with Beverly Piersol. Here, the artists investigate the uncanny linguistic connection between Kraków in Poland and Krakaudorf in Styria. Traveling to both places, they exchanged daily impressions by fax and phone, sending fragments of thought, weather, conversation, and miscommunication. The video is divided into a split-screen dialogue: interviews with a former mayor on one side, drifting landscapes on the other. Faxes, scribbles, and handwritten notes accumulate like sediment across the images. The screen becomes a palimpsest, a layered body of textual and visual residue that foregrounds the limits of naming. Two places share a name but not a destiny. Two artists share impressions but not a home. Language fails even as it connects.

In Ouroboros (2000), Moser-Wagner narrows the gaze on an existential scale. The subject is ROL6, a genetically altered nematode that, once stripped of a particular gene, moves only in circles. Its life becomes a loop without deviation, a literal ouroboros. Andreas Weixler builds a soundscape from Moser-Wagner’s intoned repetition of the title, creating a drone that hypnotizes and unsettles. Under the microscope, the tiny creature turns endlessly, a biological machine fulfilling a script it cannot escape. Yet through Moser-Wagner’s lens, the worm becomes a cosmic figure, a miniature emblem of human existential loops, an organism embodying the tension between agency and determinism.

These films suggest that every act of perception is a negotiation, a delicate interplay between the structural and the spontaneous. Moser-Wagner’s camera collaborates with space rather than controlling it. Meaning arises not from clarity imposed but from fragments, textures, accidents, and atmospheres. The calf’s tongue on a hand, the villa tilting in memory, the monastery breathing through its corridors, the twin cities of Kraków and Krakaudorf speaking across distances, the nematode turning in its microscopic orbit—these are not interruptions but invitations. Each reveals where our conceptual scaffolding falters, letting reality slip in through cracks we did not know existed.

Gustav Deutsch: Film ist. (1-12) (INDEX 012)

| Tyran Grillo

A Cosmology of Light, Motion, and the Memory of the Medium

Where Jean-Luc Godard assembled an archive of quotations and theories in Histoire(s) du cinéma, Gustav Deutsch moves in another direction entirely. He steps back and allows the films to speak in their own native frequencies. In doing so, he returns cinema to an antediluvian state, before the narrative flood. He approaches film not simply as a human invention but as an extension of light itself, something that predates our desire to shape images out of the visible.

Film ist., a lifelong project begun in 1996 and elaborated into the 2004 release, is an ongoing cosmology. Deutsch works as an archaeologist of the medium, excavating scientific reels, laboratory experiments, variety acts, and early spectacles. These fragments form strata through which he reconstructs the primal gestures of motion pictures. Each titled section of Film ist. does not categorize so much as orbit, proposing a constellation of definitions that never settle into consensus.

The film is organized around two birthplaces of cinema. In the first six sections, Deutsch draws on scientific films, in which the medium originally served as a research instrument, breaking the world down into analyzable components. Before the camera told stories, it slowed phenomena, magnified details, and captured movements too fleeting for the naked eye. The second six sections turn toward fairgrounds and variety theaters, the carnival of images that gave film its first audiences.

These two lineages intersect throughout Film ist., not as opposites but as twin strands of the same evolutionary pulse. Inquiry and fantasy are revealed as inseparable aspects of the medium’s DNA. Light observes the world, which performs under its scrutiny. Cinema moves, and so, it moves us. Deutsch constructs not an argument but an ecosystem, an image-world where the medium remembers itself.

The 12 Sections

The journey begins with movement and time, where a sequence of X-ray images reveals the body as an instrument of motion that must be dismantled before it can be understood. Voices of science discuss the nature of film while the camera studies animals and humans alike. Muscle, bone, and gesture become data, delicate and ghostly under the looming field of observation. Movement emerges not as entertainment but as a key to life itself. Watching these fragments, one senses film undoing us by scrutinizing everything to which we are tethered.

light and darkness follow as twin forces shaping the earliest cinema. Lightning tears open the sky, raw electricity dances across a Tesla coil, a mannequin is sacrificed to demonstrate the impact of force. Here, light behaves without human intention, asserting itself with primordial authority. Insects burn in flames; stars flicker at impossible distances; a lunar eclipse swallows the moon. The images feel cosmic, as if film were watching light watch itself, recognizing its kinship with the vibrating atoms that animate it.

With an instrument, Deutsch turns to the ways sound and science intertwine. Cochlear implants, violinists’ muscle memory, vocal cords vibrating through slow-motion magnification: the body becomes both target and generator of wavelengths. Cymatics reveals patterns etched into matter by sound. Crash tests register the brutal choreography of impact. Vibration emerges as the secret sibling of light, another form of inscription. Film listens, and in so doing, it discovers that every image has an echo.

material draws us into the vulnerability of the medium. Film stock decays, bubbling and cracking before our eyes, returning to its chemical origins. Gelatin, silver, dust: the physicality of celluloid asserts itself, surviving only through a fragile contract with time. The scraps are examined like fossils waiting to be reanimated. In this decay, Deutsch locates a memory stored in deterioration itself.

a blink of an eye returns us to the organ that makes cinema possible. Spirals pulse on its surface while the distant rumble of a train approaches. Soon, we see through the train window, the movement doubled by the blink of the eyelid. REM sleep transforms into internal cinema, reminding us that dreaming preceded filmmaking by millennia. The eye becomes both subject and apparatus, examined by the very technology that expanded its reach.

This leads to a mirror, where self-regard becomes both horror and fascination. Ocular surgery unfolds with clinical detachment, unsettling in its lucidity. An eye is removed and replaced with an artificial one capable of recording. Mirrors proliferate, reflecting back at the camera and at each other, multiplying perspectives beyond human comprehension. A monkey examines its reflection, an evolutionary echo of spectatorship itself. Cinema becomes self-conscious, looking at the act of looking.

comic unsettles the mood with voyeurism laced in discomfort. A man peers through a keyhole at an exoticized world he does not understand. The soundtrack wavers, unable to support the ethical tension of the image. Humor arises, but so does unease. Deutsch exposes the mechanics of amusement while confirming how comedy is uniquely suited to carrying the weight of its cultural assumptions.

Then, in magic, cinema reveals its oldest trick: illusion. Special effects blossom from archival footage; bodies disappear and reappear; objects move of their own accord. In these moments, film seems to remember not only its scientific origins but its mythic ones. The medium has always been a playground for the impossible.

conquest interrupts this enchantment with the starkness of colonial imagery. White explorers stride across foreign landscapes with cameras and rifles alike. Their gaze treats the world as territory to be claimed. The framing itself becomes complicit in the violence, revealing how cinema absorbed imperial fantasies into its earliest modes of representation. Deutsch does not editorialize; he simply arranges the evidence and lets the images accuse themselves.

writing and language turns attention to the skeleton of cinema: intertitles, production slates, scene numbers, and other coded marks that scaffold every film. Logos become a hidden architecture beneath the visible. These fragments reveal the labor of classification and control, the systems that shape meaning before an audience ever encounters it.

emotions and passion brings us into the realm of performance. Faces contort; tears fall; desire and fear register across bodies that the camera never treats neutrally. Women, in particular, bear the burden of cinematic affect, their expressions harnessed to dramatize emotion. Deutsch’s arrangement highlights the gendered patterns in the history of performance and the ways cinema teaches us what feelings should look like.

memory and document closes the cycle. Fire devours reels of film; voyages unfold across seas; home movies flicker with the fragile glow of lives once lived. Such footage carries the warmth of personal history and the coldness of its disappearance. Cinema becomes an archive haunted by its own mortality. Everything recorded asserts preservation in the face of mortality.

Bonus Tracks

In Über. Gustav Deutsch, a portrait of the filmmaker presented without translation, the subject remains partly inscrutable, demonstrating that language is only one lens through which a life may be perceived. Lastly, an installation version of Film ist. [1–12] is shown to surround viewers with a ring of projections, allowing them to stand inside a zoetrope of continuous light. To inhabit this circle is to feel momentarily inside the medium’s inner workings, as if observing cinema dreaming.

When Light Remembers Itself

Across Film ist., Deutsch enacts a simple yet radical intervention: he allows cinema to remember itself not as entertainment or technology but as an elemental phenomenon that unveils the smallest gestures and the largest violences. It perceives what the naked eye cannot register, visualizes what consciousness struggles to accept.

In Deutsch’s cosmology, film is all things at once. It is not bound to the history of its machinery. It reaches further back, toward the first human who watched firelight travel across a cave wall and sensed meaning in the flicker. The fire fades, yet its glow remains.

Perhaps the unspoken thesis of Film ist. is that cinema is not ours to define. It is something we inherit from beyond, a continuum of presence and erasure. Deutsch listens because the films have always been speaking. Only now are we learning to hear them.

Manfred Neuwirth: 間 [ma]Trilogy (INDEX 011)

| Tyran Grillo

Manfred Neuwirth arrived at filmmaking through the pathways of journalism and history, both of which left traces in his later work. The instinct to observe, to contextualize, to listen for what a moment is trying to say—all of this shaped his approach long before he cofounded Medienwerkstatt Wien and began building distinct(ive) cinematic worlds. His films feel archival without becoming documents, poetic without drifting into abstraction, grounded in reality yet loosened from the demands of storytelling. If many filmmakers construct coherent worlds through narrative, Neuwirth positions himself in spaces of duration, fragments, and the patient choreography of looking.

This sensibility took on a crystalline form in three works he made from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Together, they form a loose trilogy of observational meditations. Each is composed of equal-length shots that sink into darkness before another image emerges. Such pacing slows the world until time feels elastic, asking the viewer to find the thread that binds one image to the next, to become witness, traveler, and editor all at once.

In Tibetische Erinnerungen (Tibetan Recollections), made between 1988 and 1995, thirty-five shots create a rhythm that resembles respiration. One scene exhales into blackness, then inhales into a new image. What holds the work together is not continuity but gravity, a quiet pull generated by the tension between the political and the everyday. A jolting prologue shows Chinese soldiers arresting Tibetan monks. This violence reverberates throughout the rest of the film in subtle yet persistent ways. Later, a singer appears on television wearing clothing reminiscent of the soldiers’ uniforms. Thus, Neuwirth’s aesthetic gathers force by refusing to forget what the prologue makes visible.

Much of the film settles into a sensory archive of Tibetan daily life. A man on a motorcycle. Butter tea boiling in a kettle on the street. A beer bottle left on a restaurant table. A water pump at work. A taxi weaving through a city that never quite reveals its full shape. These visuals lapse into a state of drift while the soundtrack remains in real time, a disjuncture that heightens awareness and holds the viewer in a kind of suspended attention. Moments turn to recollections, recollections to emotional geography.

Regarding Japan through the lens of manga train, completed in 1998, the method remains consistent, even if the atmosphere transforms. Thirty equal-length shots fade into one another, slowed to a similar tempo, yet the world here feels unsettled, shimmering with impressions that never quite anchor themselves. Rain gathers on concrete steps. Gambling halls erupt in cacophony. Street festivals pulse with color. Vending machines glow under the rain. Temples, train stations, sumo bouts, conveyor-belt sushi, late-night television: each vignette arrives as though remembered by someone unsure where the memory belongs.

In this gentle ache of dislocation, the soundscape becomes essential: footsteps, scattered conversations, the hum of machines, and rainfall that seems to stitch the transitions together. Recurring shots from train windows form a metaphor for both travel and estrangement. At night, the viewer shares the sensation of being suspended between places. The experience feels less like tourism and more like listening to a world that keeps its secrets close to its beating heart.

Turning to Lower Austria in magic hour in 1999, Neuwirth brings this method to the terrain of his own past. The equal-length shots and slow fades remain, but the tone softens into one of homecoming. He lingers on windows, doorways, and narrow rooms, creating thresholds between interior and exterior spaces that echo his own movement between belonging and observation. Lightning flickers across the countryside. A child dips a foot into a wading pool. Towns glow with sparse night lights. Soccer games unfold on fields marked by long familiarity. Forest paths, local celebrations, snowfall, music, farming, industry: everything is filtered through an intimacy that feels newly discovered.

Darkness becomes its own character. Some scenes lie on the edge of visibility, as the viewer first hears what will later be revealed to the eye. Rain appears again and again, threading like a million needles with its patient fall. If the earlier films bear the solitude of a traveler confronting the unknown, this one offers the stillness of someone returning to a once-familiar landscape with the eyes of another.

A DVD bonus track, Barkhor Round, recorded in Lhasa in 1994, amplifies a core element that runs through the trilogy: Neuwirth’s deep attunement to sound. Created as an audioplay rather than a film, it crystallizes his belief that listening is a way of entering space without possessing it. The footsteps, chants, wind, and commerce of the Barkhor pilgrimage circuit spiral around the listener with such precision that the path becomes tactile. It is a heartfelt attempt to hold the world without claiming it, to dwell within sound and image long enough to feel their inherent dignity.

Across these works, Neuwirth builds not stories but temporal architectures. The equal-length shots grant each moment the same duration and, by extension, the same value. What unites Tibet, Japan, and Lower Austria is not comparison or exoticism but a shared vulnerability. All three reveal themselves as unfinished compositions. Neuwirth avoids explanation, instead inviting the viewer to witness the difficulty of encountering a culture without consuming it.

At a time when social media compresses the human experience with bite-sized certainty, this trilogy allows us to remain in the tension of what is not fully known, without the fear of missing out. To let unfamiliarity teach attention. To look without grasping. To listen without insisting on philosophy.

One leaves these films with no answers, only a heightened attunement. Every culture, every landscape, every fleeting moment carries a luminosity that appears only when the eye is willing to slow down. Neuwirth’s cinema creates the conditions for that retrograde, revealing thresholds that might otherwise be missed. Fragile, shifting, and often radiant, they live on in the spaces left behind, happy enough to avoid our gaze altogether.

Lisl Ponger: Travelling Light (INDEX 010)

| Tyran Grillo

Brigitte Huck describes Lisl Ponger as “an artist for whom discourse is not just another fashionable word but a necessity,” and the claim feels almost modest. For Ponger, discourse is not a frame placed around the work. It is the current running beneath it, the carbon dioxide emerging from its lungs. Her practice understands politics not as subject matter but as a condition of vision itself. She examines the edges of perception, the fugitive traces that cling to bodies and landscapes, and the borders where identity dissolves and reassembles. These liminal spaces form the terrain on which her films ambulate.

Ponger began as a photographer, trained in art school and working in proximity to the Vienna Actionists. She documented the performances of Otto Mühl and Günter Brus when, as Huck observes, “women were the girlfriends, models, and in the worst cases, cool action material.” Yet even here, her camera questioned the dynamic unfolding before it. She was never a passive witness to male extremity but an early investigator of spectatorship, already alert to the power games embedded in the act of looking. Her lens asked: Who sees, and who is seen? Who has the authority to cut an image, and what kinds of harm can that maiming conceal?

That line of inquiry gained new momentum when she picked up a Super 8 camera on a 1974 trip through South America. The shift to film felt less like a change of medium and more like an opening into another temporal dimension. Travel became both a physical journey and a metaphor for crossing narrative thresholds. Movement turned into a form of knowledge. By the 1990s, she had begun to braid documentary practice with found footage, reworking her own archive and that of strangers until new patterns of politics and memory emerged. Through this process, a principle took root: these images resist the softness of nostalgia. They are not claimed as memory. They are constructed from real lives but never mistaken for personal recollection. They insist on remaining critical fictions.

This ethic shapes the drifting, tidal structure of Passagen, her 1996 film on the tourist gaze and the vast migrations of the 20th century. Rather than treating these subjects separately, Ponger reveals how tourism and emigration mirror one another, each defined by a transactional relationship to movement. The film follows journeys traced in circular arcs, almost like the lines of skin folded and refolded across generations. New York rises again and again on the horizon, imagined long before its skyline is ever seen. Those who crossed the ocean remember the hunger of arrival and the wages that barely justified the risk. Ponger avoids the lure of spectacle and instead allows calm narration to float over distant footage. The effect is meditative, yet within this quietude, something electric happens. Children return the gaze of the camera without hesitation. Their unguarded looking complicates the adults’ stories and suggests that migration is not simply a matter of the past. It passes forward, carried in the physiognomy of those who inherit it.

A similar tension shapes déjà vu, completed in 1999, where Ponger shifts toward the archaeological mode that would define so much of her later practice. She finds two abandoned canisters of home movies at a flea market, the filmed life of a married couple whose travels glow with the bright, unconscious arrogance of Western tourism. From these fragments, she builds a sharp and layered critique of exoticization. The film begins in darkness with the sound of a crowd and voices speaking in overlapping languages. Their recollections of travel circle around wonder, sentimentality, and the slippery paternalism that so often surfaces in encounters with cultural difference. These voices settle over images of rituals and landscapes that once thrilled the original filmmakers. Yet again, children appear, looking into the lens with a directness that cuts through the haze of jaded projection. Within this confrontation, Ponger locates the harline cracks of desire, authenticity, and the wish to touch a world without being changed by it.

The gaze shifts once more in Phantom Fremdes Wien, her 2004 ethnographic exploration of Vienna’s hidden pluralities. Filmed between 1991 and 1992, it records gatherings across the city: a Philippine church service, a Swedish festival of light, celebrations that arise wherever diasporic communities stitch a sense of home into unfamiliar streets. Ponger narrates with a measured, observational tone that carries the neutrality of an archive yet feels edged with the intimacy of a journal. Her approach lends the work a dual register. It is less an account of events and more a record of her encounter with them, an unfolding dialogue between seeing and understanding. Here, Vienna reveals itself not as a unified city but as an intricate constellation of worlds, each with its own history of labor, spirituality, and migration. Ponger quietly asks what renders someone “foreign” and who gets to decide.

Across these works, her images demonstrate that no picture is inert. Every frame is charged with the systems that shaped it: economies, colonial histories, gendered roles, the machinery of tourism, the patterns of migration that define our global present. Ponger does not merely portray these structures. She reconfigures them, attentive to the way vision itself is conditioned by power. Even her use of found footage carries an ethical undertow. She does not fold these images into her own life story. She keeps them open to critique, refusing to smooth them into sentiment or personal memory.

What her films reveal is a central paradox of modernity. We are always in motion, traveling across borders, screens, and narratives, yet we rarely understand the histories that make such movement possible. Ponger’s cinema encourages us to feel that complexity and to sense how each act of looking enters into a contract with the visible and the invisible. Looking can be acknowledgment one moment, erasure the next. To travel is to step into layered histories that cannot be consumed without consequence.

Her most radical gesture may be the quietest one. The children who return the gaze do not perform. They do not offer their images for use. They encounter the camera without the filters of ideology or expectation. In those brief exchanges, she suggests a way of seeing that refuses dominance, capable of unlearning what it has been taught and allowing the world to remain foreign without turning it into an object.

In such non-invasive hands, the camera acts as a vessel of ethical attention, moving through passages that have never been static. It listens to the stories carried in those movements and offers them not as trophies but as invitations to witness how the world is continually remade in the friction between looking and being seen.