INDEX

Alfred Kaiser: Decomposing Nazi Phraseology (INDEX 050)

| Tyran Grillo

When Alfred Kaiser first unveiled Ein drittes Reich (A Third Reich, 1975) and Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall (A Third Reich from Its Refuse, 1977) near the close of the 1970s, his name carried none of the institutional weight that often cushions difficult art. Yet these films announced themselves with startling authority, assembling from the wreckage of Nazi image culture a pair of works so rigorous, so corrosively lucid, that they seemed less edited than excavated. Kaiser worked exclusively with material produced during the Third Reich itself, fashioning a cinema of diseased memory from propaganda reels, industrial films, amateur footage, educational shorts, and features. The achievement recalls the dialectical brilliance of Jean-Luc Godard at his most severe, especially in its use of sound and its archaeological chill. Every splice is a brush uncovering bone. Each cut reveals another layer of ideological sediment hardened into spectacle.

What emerges across both films is a study of seduction. Kaiser does not merely expose propaganda as deception. He understands that fascism first enters the bloodstream as longing. The camera under National Socialism adored surfaces with devotional intensity. Flesh, architecture, wheat, steel, children, rivers, flags, and clouds: all of these projection surfaces glow with the fatal glamour of belonging. Kaiser takes them seriously enough to let them betray themselves. He grants them space to speak in their own poisoned tongue until their ecstasies curdle into confession, séances conducted in the language of seduction itself.

Born in Vienna in 1940, Kaiser came of age among artists determined to confront the psychic debris left scattered across postwar Europe. He moved within a circle that included Hermann Nitsch and Peter Kubelka, the latter becoming both mentor and catalyst. Kubelka’s influence stretched beyond aesthetics into the very material conditions of Kaiser’s practice. Under the auspices of the Austrian Film Museum, which Kubelka co-founded, Kaiser gained extraordinary access to archival holdings from the Nazi era. Constantin Wulff’s illuminating liner notes for this INDEX edition recount how the museum organized its landmark retrospective “Propaganda and Counterpropaganda in Film from 1933 to 1945,” a program juxtaposing works from Nazi Germany with Allied propaganda films. The series dissolved comforting moral distances between victor and vanquished, insisting instead on a universal machinery of persuasion. One senses Kaiser absorbing this revelation as a grammar lurking within modernity itself. 

At the museum, Kaiser studied these archives frame by frame at the editing table, touching history at its cellular level. The process must have resembled an encounter with a haunted alphabet. He had already wrestled with Nazi aesthetics through painting and writing, most notably in his extraordinary Hitler watercolor series produced between 1974 and 1975 (included here as a DVD extra), where the dictator’s likeness was filtered through the vocabularies of art history, from classical portraiture to pop art vulgarity. Yet cinema gave Kaiser something painting could not: the tremor between image and sound where ideology often hides its deepest impulses.

A Third Reich unfolds like a hallucination narrated by the regime itself. An arrow plunges into the sea. Wheat fields writhe beneath invisible winds. Bodies appear less human than agricultural, cultivated toward some impossible purity. Kaiser arranges these elements with terrifying precision, allowing associations to bloom and decay within the viewer’s mind. The Reich’s obsession with fertility and physical perfection acquires a mythic texture, as though fascism dreamed of transforming society into one endless reproductive ritual. Men become engines. Women become vessels. Childhood stretches toward militarization with dreadful inevitability, every stage of life absorbed into the geometry of obedience.

The brilliance of Kaiser’s montage lies in its refusal of explanatory comfort. Meaning accumulates through pressure rather than argument. Trees crash violently to the ground while voices extol unity and destiny. Soldiers grin with frightening innocence as war approaches. Factories pulse with infernal vitality. Steel glimmers as sacrament. At one moment, the interior of a cathedral appears while gunfire echoes across the soundtrack, the holy collapsing seamlessly into mechanized death. Elsewhere, calf slaughter collides with laughter, flesh reduced to material amid communal joy. The regime’s rhetoric of life, truth, freedom, and labor becomes nothing more than a vain repetition. Words lose semantic stability and become rhythmic instruments designed to anesthetize thought itself. By the time cries of “Heil!” erupt into darkness, our endurance is tested.

Kaiser understood that fascism aestheticizes continuity above all else. It promises a seamless world where contradiction dissolves into collective purpose. Masculinity flows from boyhood into soldierhood without rupture. Industry merges with nationalism. Sexuality merges with reproduction. Nature merges with conquest. Even death becomes assimilated into a narrative of purification. The horror resides partly in the elegance of the construction. National Socialism dreamed of eliminating ambiguity from existence. Kaiser restores ambiguity to every frame as a necessary contagion.

A Third Reich from Its Refuse pushes these ideas into stranger and more intimate territory. If the earlier project resembles an autopsy, the latter behaves like a fever dream assembled from cultural leftovers. Spoken slogans recede. Definitive montage structures collapse. Pop songs drift across sequences of fascist pomp with unnerving tenderness, producing emotional dissonances that feel almost unbearable. Kaiser reportedly wished the film screened only within a “private circle,” an instruction that lends an atmosphere of forbidden correspondence passed secretly between survivors of some psychic catastrophe. 

The camera circles beauty obsessively. Women exercise gracefully beneath skies emptied of consequence. Hitler appears smiling, delighted by his own reflection mirrored in adoring crowds. Consumption becomes ritualized, whether of food, entertainment, labor, or bodies. Everything shimmers with the narcotic glow of satisfaction. Yet beneath this choreography of pleasure lies an abyss. Kaiser reveals how fascism feeds upon the human desire to escape uncertainty. The regime offers paradise through simplification and meaning through surrender.

What makes the proceedings so unsettling is their musicality. Historical horrors return with altered emotional coloration, as though the unconscious were remixing memory itself. The effect resembles wandering through a ballroom erected atop a mass grave while old love songs continue to play from another room. Kaiser understands that ideology rarely survives through terror alone. It survives because it learns how to dance.

INDEX’s timely release restores these monumental works with extraordinary care, allowing contemporary viewers to encounter something startlingly singular within the history of essay cinema and found footage experimentation. Kaiser’s achievement extends beyond political critique into something far more difficult to articulate. He reveals a battleground between revelation and hypnosis. The moving image can illuminate consciousness or dissolve it. Projection becomes a moral event.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of Kaiser’s films lies in their refusal to reassure. They offer no triumphant distance from the past, no comforting implication that modern viewers stand safely outside these mechanisms of enchantment. The Reich appears here not as a historical anomaly but as concentrated dream logic, one expression of humanity’s endless appetite for coherence, purity, and transcendence. Kaiser peers directly into that appetite without blinking.

In the end, we are left with the peculiar silence that follows after language has exhausted its disguises. One begins to sense history not as chronology but as atmosphere, something breathed unconsciously across generations. Kaiser reminds us that civilizations often perish long before their buildings collapse. They decay first in metaphor, in tempo, in the stories they tell themselves while marching toward catastrophe with radiant smiles upon their faces. And when the masks fall away, the skeletons left behind look no different than those of their victims.

Peter Tscherkassky: Exquisite Ecstasies (INDEX 048)

| Tyran Grillo

Images often arrive clothed in certainty. They glide across the eye with a quiet authority, suggesting that what is seen is whole and already understood. The world appears to organize itself within the frame, its contradictions softened, its fractures sealed beneath a luminous surface. Yet this coherence is a delicate fiction. Beneath it, something restless persists, a tremor that resists being made smooth. Peter Tscherkassky’s cinema lives in that tremor. His creations expose the fragility of suspended disbelief, allowing the image to stutter in recognizance.

Emerging from the lineage of the Austrian avant-garde, Tscherkassky has always treated film as both medium and wound. His practice, grounded in the physical manipulation of celluloid, fevers his gaze. He dissects footage with a tactile intensity, pushing it toward states of convulsion and rupture.

In Aderlaß (Blood-Letting, 1981), the screen opens into a darkness that feels less like absence than anticipation. Sound arrives first, jagged and insistent, as if the apparatus itself were clearing its throat. The question “What language do you speak?” reverberates not as inquiry but as accusation. Communication falters, dissolving into laughter that feels almost violent. Here, the moving image becomes an act of self-interrogation, a ritual of undoing. The invocation of “murder as the only real artwork” lingers not as provocation alone but as a symptom of artistic despair. Blood seeps into the frame, not metaphor but material. One begins to wonder whether movement produces film or whether film produces movement. What remains in this interrogation is a flicker that feels terminal, witness to its own extinction.

With Liebesfilm (Film of Love, 1982), Tscherkassky turns to intimacy, albeit stripped of fulfillment. A kiss approaches endlessly, rehearsed 522 times without consummation. Desire becomes mechanical, an algorithm of longing caught in a loop. Each repetition erodes meaning yet intensifies sensation. Love reveals itself as a structure of hesitation, a choreography of almosts. The bodies lean toward each other, again and again, yet never arrive. What should be a culmination becomes a suspension. The male gaze lingers in that gap, feeding on deferral. Lips remain unlocked, not out of restraint but because closure would end the system that sustains them.

Urlaubsfilm (Holiday Film, 1983) complicates the act of looking more directly. A woman moves through a field, undressing with a gesture that might initially invite voyeuristic comfort. But then, her gaze meets the camera, and with it, the viewer. The illusion fractures. To look is suddenly to be seen looking. The image begins to mutate and open portals within itself. A second frame emerges like an eyelid lifting from the surface. Gradually, visibility recedes. Flesh dissolves into abstraction. What remains is not the body but its residue, held precariously in memory. The gaze loses its object and confronts its own voraciousness.

By the time we reach tabula rasa (1989), the gaze has become predatory. Cowboys lurk in the brush, archetypes of surveillance and control, their attention sharpened to a point. Yet what they see refuses coherence. The image slips and folds into textures that evade recognition. Skin becomes landscape. Cloth becomes terrain. The female body, when it appears, resists fixation. She is neither subject nor object but a shifting locus of desire that cannot be pinned down. The camera reveals itself as complicit, even parasitic, driven by a hunger that consumes its own vision.

This trajectory finds a kind of culmination in The Exquisite Corpus (2015), a work that gathers decades of experimentation into a dense, almost tidal structure. Drawing from found footage, including a 1960s nudist film, Tscherkassky constructs a landscape where bodies and film stock merge into a single unstable organism. A couple sails toward an island, though their arrival feels illusory. A thunderclap fractures the image before frames multiply, invert, and overlay themselves in a choreography of excess. Flesh becomes pattern. Movement becomes echo. Erotic gestures lose their charge, not through repression but through saturation. The more the body is shown, the less it can be possessed.

Natural elements intrude. Leaves, flowers, woven textures. These are not mere decorations but reminders that cinema, too, is subject to decay and transformation, even as it pulses like a living thing. Tscherkassky’s frame-by-frame method becomes a form of devotion, an insistence on tactile reality. In an era of digital smoothness, he retains the scars of the past, resisting the flattening of experience into seamless flow.

Across these works, the POV is never stable. It shifts from voyeur to participant, from observer to accomplice. It reveals itself as constructed, fractured, and, above all, unreliable. Tscherkassky implicates the viewer in the act of looking, exposing the desires and violences embedded within it. What emerges is not simply a critique of representation but a reconfiguration of perception itself. The films suggest that seeing is always entangled with absence, that every image carries within it the trace of what cannot be shown.

And perhaps this is where Tscherkassky’s work ultimately leads beyond myth and beyond even the body. The gaze, stripped of its certainties, becomes something quieter and more elusive. Not a tool of mastery, nor a site of pleasure, but a fragile relation to the unknown. To look is to risk losing the ground beneath perception. To see is to encounter the limits of seeing. In that encounter, something almost philosophical stirs. Not an answer, not a conclusion, but a question that lingers like an afterimage, asking what it means to inhabit a world that cannot be fully brought into view.

Phil Solomon: Still Raining, Still Dreaming – Film meets video game (INDEX 054)

| Tyran Grillo

It is tempting, almost reflexive, to speak of an artist’s output as a body of work, as though its existence depends on assembly, arrangement, and, ultimately, externalization. Meanwhile, Phil Solomon’s cinema metabolizes audiovisuality at its most internal. His films are residues of contact, impressions left where perception has brushed against the world and recoiled. They seep from life, haunted by the fragile choreography between presence and disappearance.

Born in 1954, Solomon came of age artistically at SUNY Binghamton in the 1970s, studying under figures such as Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka, whose engagements with the materiality of film left an indelible mark. His own sensibility, however, slips beyond questions of influence. It pursues a kind of inverse archaeology, digging toward a vanishing point of the medium. Though often associated with found footage, even that term falters under scrutiny. As Eve Heller suggests, what he found remained inseparable from what had already been lost. His images carry the weight of retrieval, though never restoration. They arrive wounded, already slipping away.

This INDEX edition, gathering his final works, reveals a fascination with largely digital environments while remaining tethered to the tactile ghosts of celluloid. Solomon’s engagement with video games, particularly the Grand Theft Auto franchise, delineates sites of profound reorientation. These virtual landscapes, designed for velocity and spectacle, are slowed, hollowed, and made to mourn what he once called “the inevitable ineffable,” a phrase that captures a peculiar sort of alchemy. Seemingly disparate elements coalesce into something uncannily coherent, insofar as it exerts pressure toward a center that cannot be named.

Crossroad (2005) inaugurates this phase with an unresolved chord. GTA’s protagonist, CJ, drifts through rain and foliage, accompanied by an impossibly floating bouquet of flowers devoid of recipient. Everything hums faintly around him. Thunder cracks. A train sounds in the distance. Nothing answers his movement. He runs, stops, waits, stretches his limbs as if testing the fact of his own existence. The environment offers only indifferent signals. A bird crosses the sky. A plane cuts overhead. These nods to continuity are almost cruel, reminders that life persists elsewhere, just beyond reach.

Solomon’s collaborator for this project was his dear friend Mark LaPore, who died suddenly shortly after its completion. What follows in In Memoriam (Mark LaPore) unfolds as an extended meditation, stretched across three works drawing deeper from the well they tapped in GTA. In Rehearsals for Retirement, the digital realm saturates with grief. Rain falls with unnatural persistence. Acts are interrupted, deferred, dissolved into blackness before they can resolve into purpose. A hearse glides through fields where wheat stalks pierce its interior, a glitch that reads less like error and more like revelation. The laws of nature bend, fracture, and rearrange themselves, yet death remains unaltered, immovable, the single constant in a system otherwise given to distortion.

Last Days in a Lonely Place expands this desolation outward, layering fragments of dialogue from Rebel Without a Causeagainst a world emptied of its inhabitants. The cosmos looms with indifferent permanence. A cinema marquee stands blank, awaiting spectators who will never return. Figures drift toward one another but never meet, their trajectories misaligned by forces that remain unseen. Machines operate without operators. Vehicles sink without resistance. The environment continues going through the motions, stripped of intention. Meaning has migrated elsewhere, leaving behind a mere scaffolding of function.

In Still Raining, Still Dreaming, Solomon turns his gaze toward the overlooked margins of the game’s architecture. Spaces designed to be passed through become sites of prolonged attention. A magician performs for no one. Pedestrians move without identity, their individuality folded into patterns without flesh. Sound drifts in and out of earshot, marking an internal logic that resists interpretation yet insists on affect. What players once bypassed in pursuit of action becomes, under Solomon’s eye, the true locus of experience.

John Powers writes that these works mourn not only LaPore but also the passing of film as a material form, the replacement of chemistry with code. Solomon’s digital skins nevertheless bear the scars of physical media, their anomalies echoing the traumatic memory of scratches and burns in bygone emulsion layers. An underlying inquiry remains: What does it mean to fend for oneself in a context already at odds with itself?

This question finds a different articulation in Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (2013), where Solomon turns to the Elder Scrolls universe of Skyrim, stripping away characters to leave behind a landscape without bloodshed. The voiceover, drawn from John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” drapes the eyes and ears in inexorable meditations. Snow falls. Mist gathers. A lone figure moves through a forest that seems to recede the more it is perceived. An icon whispering to itself, an object of contemplation that resists interpretation even as it invites it.

The Emblazoned Apparitions returns to analog processes, though not as a gesture of nostalgia. Here, a molecular transformation implodes, turning the familiar into abstraction (and vice versa). The tunnel motif recurs, suggestive of both passage and enclosure, a space that leads forward while folding inward. Film reveals itself as an artifact of entropy that documents what it records along with its own disintegration. Technology thus becomes inseparable from mortality, each frame a testament to impermanence.

Across these works, Solomon’s cinema resists containment. It offers no conventional narratives, yet it avoids pure abstraction. It occupies an unstable territory between states, hovering on the brink of recognition and dissolution. His legacy lies in a mode of attention, an insistence on lingering where others would move on, on dwelling within the unresolved.

To encounter these films is to be drawn into a space where time loosens its grip, where cause and effect give way to something more diffuse. In this sense, Solomon’s work persists as a kind of afterimage, a presence that remains even after the screen goes dark. Perhaps it resides there, in a space where seeing becomes indistinguishable from remembering, and remembering from forgetting, until even those distinctions dissolve into something more elemental, a flicker without origin, a trace without end.

Es war eine Herausforderung, diesem Namen gerecht zu werden / It was a challenge to do justice to this name: Moucle Blackout – Films 1969 – 1998 (INDEX 053)

| Tyran Grillo

Constellations in Shadow

Across the canvas of Austrian avant-garde cinema, where names such as Kubelka and Kren have long been rendered in sharp, declarative strokes, the work of Moucle Blackout flickers with a quieter, though no less vibrant radiance. Her work breathes in a mirrored room, only to be released again in altered form. To encounter her oeuvre is to step into a field of delicate resistances, where form unsettles authority and vision unfolds through a patient, almost subterranean insistence.

Born Christiane Engländer in 1935, she embarked on her creative self-examinations through sculpture and design. As Brigitta Burger-Utzer observes, she moved within the orbit of the Vienna Group during its formative years, witnessing a burgeoning experimental culture that, despite its radical aspirations, remained curiously closed to women. While the men gathered, wrote, filmed, and declared, she watched, listened, and absorbed.

That threshold, neither inside nor entirely outside, became fertile ground. Instead of echoing the gestures of her contemporaries, she cultivated another trajectory, one that slips between categories. Her studies at the IDHEC in Paris between 1957 and 1958 opened a corridor of possibility, while her chance encounter with Marc Adrian (whom she later married) introduced her to the tactile processes of making films by placing a camera in her hands, an act that now carries a faint mythic glow. From that moment, experimentation became atmosphere, and together they explored development, color manipulation, and the mutable chemistry of the image. As she later remarked in conversation with Michaela Grill and Isabella Reicher: “I enjoy filmmaking, and this pleasure becomes visible.”

The name Moucle Blackout itself embodies that same playful opacity. “Muckl,” a childhood nickname, was combined with the enigmatic “Blackout” at Adrian’s suggestion into a conceptual eclipse. The moniker suggests a break in the flow of light. It also invites a loss of consciousness, as if meaning might shift under prolonged attention.

Thresholds, Absences, Openings

Her earliest independent films have been lost, a disappearance that feels less accidental than symptomatic. The marginalization of women within international avant-garde histories leaves behind many such absences that echo louder than presence. What remains begins, officially, with Walk in from 1969.

Blackout has long resisted the notion of meaning as a finished object. “I wanted the films to remain open to interpretation, but not too easy to decipher,” she explains. “It is not about serving the audience things ready made.” The viewer dwells at risk of uncertain, entering a building under construction where the floor may shift beneath each step.

Her filmography, though concise, unfolds across a spectrum of forms. Structural rigor dissolves into moments of chromatic delirium. Color pulses with interior life. Elsewhere, fragments of bourgeois ritual appear as rehearsed performances, their naturalness gently undone. Her palette is one of perceptual instruments, recalibrating not only what is seen but the conditions under which seeing becomes possible.

Arindam Sen suggests that Blackout’s work invites a rethinking of history itself, less as a sequence of monumental gestures than as an accumulation of small, deliberate acts. Each project becomes a step, quiet yet exacting, within a trajectory that often remains obscured. Recognition arrived late. Only in 2014, at the age of 79, did she receive a retrospective in Villach, a gathering of decades that had persisted without spectacle.

To place Moucle Blackout alongside figures such as VALIE EXPORT opens a dialogue between distinct strategies. Whereas EXPORT confronts with immediacy, Blackout allows the image to tremble until its surface betrays its instability.

Her work resides in intervals. Between frames. Between disciplines. Between recognition and obscurity. Photography, collage, object-making, dance: all is fair game. Each medium becomes a site where perception is tested.

Filmic Apertures

1. Walk in (1969, 16mm/digital, 5 min)

Although this is a structural film, it also functions as Blackout’s critical response to structural film, a gesture that flirts with imitation yet resolves into something more internally corrosive. The canonical language of repetition is taken up only to be bent inward, its apparent neutrality revealed as a mechanism capable of entrapment. From Marc Adrian’s entrance into their shared apartment to his measured sitting, the careful filling of a pipe, and the slow ignition of smoke, each action arrives with the promise of ordinary continuity. That promise dissolves almost immediately. The gesture fractures, breaks apart, and multiplies itself into rhythmic segments that refuse to align into forward motion. Seven hundred twenty frames are shuffled into a temporal labyrinth, where progression loses its footing and begins to circle itself.

The duplication process leaves visible scars across the filmstrip. Scratches cling like residue from a failed attempt at preservation, as though the act of repetition itself had worn down the material. Adrian appears caught between intention and interruption, his small domestic ritual transformed into a loop that cannot conclude. What might have been an act of unwinding instead becomes a tightening coil, a choreography of deferred release. Blackout’s notion of “the impression of manic behavior” lingers, though it feels less like mania than a quiet suffocation. The accompanying music hovers delicately, never resolving into comfort, its presence amplifying the unease.

2. Die Geburt der Venus / The Birth of Venus (1970-72, 35mm/digital, 5 min)

Here, the titular birth opens onto a charged terrain where pleasure and violence occupy the same visual field without settling into hierarchy. Photographs of exuberant sexuality among friends are interwoven with the stark presence of a pig carcass discovered on a roadside, a juxtaposition that resists easy symbolic closure. Flesh appears in multiple registers, one animated by desire and agency, the other reduced to inert matter, abandoned and exposed. Through motion montage, the images slide symmetrically across a central axis, mirroring themselves into shifting patterns that hover between abstraction and recognition. The repetition produces a visual grammar that both unifies and destabilizes, suggesting correspondences that remain perpetually unsettled.

The pig emerges as a mutable figure, at times evoking victimhood, at times broadcasting pure form, while the human bodies retain a sense of volition that resists reduction. Songs by The Beatles weave throughout, their presence feeling less like accompaniment than revelation. “Tell Me What You See,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” circulate throughout, each track inflecting the visual play with shifting tonalities in a field where liberation and vulnerability remain entangled.

3. Stoned Vienna (1976-79, 16mm/digital, 20 min)

Stoned Vienna unfolds as a portrait of a city caught between preservation and disintegration, its surfaces layered with histories that refuse to settle into coherence. Emerging alongside Ernst Schmidt jr.’s Wienfilm 1896-1976 (see INDEX 044), it echoes another cinematic project while maintaining its own distinct pulse, as though two parallel observations had briefly intersected without fully merging. Vienna appears at once monumental and fragile, its historical architecture standing beside modern interventions that already seem fatigued, their promise of progress tinged with obsolescence.

A wax doll named Dolly occupies this landscape, a figure that condenses the city’s condition into a single uncanny presence. She is handled, displayed, and displaced as a surrogate for a Vienna that is both preserved and manipulated. Double exposures have their say, negative and positive collapsing into one another until the city itself becomes a shifting surface. Male comportment hovers between care and absurdity. Apartment blocks scroll past in relentless succession, their repetition suggesting a form of urban anonymity that absorbs individuality into pattern.

The burial of Dolly within the debris of demolished buildings introduces a subdued violence. The soundtrack invokes anxious rhythms, shaker and organ weaving a sonic texture that offsets things further. Then the color palette shifts abruptly, erupting into garish, almost radioactive tones. The editing accelerates, its resulting friction vibrating with a special agitation. When the man kisses Dolly, the gesture lands with a hollow resonance, an attempt at connection that collapses into artifice. Vienna remains suspended between beauty and decay, its identity perpetually rewritten by forces that cannot fully erase what came before.

4. o.k. (1987, 16mm/digital, 5 min)

In o.k., perception is folded back onto its own conditions of existence, drawing attention to the fragile interface between projection and surface. The title’s reference to Oberflächen-Kontakt (Surface Contact) anchors the work in a palpable reality, even as it destabilizes any simple notion of contact. Footage originally captured on Super-8 is re-projected onto Blackout’s hand, then re-filmed in 16mm, creating a layered structure in which each iteration transforms what came before. The hand becomes both support and participant, its contours shaping the image even as the image redefines the hand.

This recursive process generates a sense of temporal slippage, as though remembering itself in real time while simultaneously forgetting its origin. Water moving over stones, a man eating, the sudden appearance of a bee: these fragments circulate without coalescing into narrative, their repetition producing a kind of haunted continuity. Bruckner’s symphonism erupts subcutaneously, lending the sequence a gravity that feels disproportionate to its ephemerality.

As the hand closes and opens again, revealing physical fragments of film, the illusion of permanence proves itself to be dependent on surfaces that can never fully stabilize it. What remains is an awareness of cinema as an act of holding and releasing, a temporary convergence of light, matter, and perception that resists any claim to lasting solidity.

5. Der Galaktische Nordpol liegt im Haar der Berenice / The Galactic North Pole Lies in the Hair of Berenice (1992, 16mm/digital, 14 min)

This work unfolds like a myth refracted through unstable time, where narrative threads intertwine without resolving into a single trajectory. The story of Berenice II of Egypt, who sacrifices her hair to ensure her husband’s safe return, drifts alongside the fate of Actaeon, whose desire leads to his transformation into prey. These figures move as volatile chemicals, their actions filtered through layers of dissolves and double exposures.

Acts of survival—eating, drinking, sex, and violence—accumulate into a sequence that oscillates between preservation and destruction. The body emerges as both agent and site of vulnerability, caught within cycles that cannot be easily disentangled. A star map flickers intermittently, suggesting a cosmic dimension that reframes the narrative as something both intimate and vast. The transformation of Berenice’s hair into a constellation lingers as a gesture suspended between offering and relic, a trace that resists disappearance even as it becomes abstract.

Images of decay, a rotting meal, blood, and moments of penetration interrupt the flow, grounding the myth in a fiercely material reality that refuses transcendence. A red beast appears, then recedes, its presence marking a threshold between recognizable form and something more elusive. Everyday fragments surface unexpectedly, seeking to exceed the frame’s containments in disorientation, where the underworld awaits its fleshly meal.

6. Loss (1998, 16mm/digital, 12 min)

Loss gathers its materials from disparate geographies, weaving together home movies from the Canadian wilderness with documents from Australia and Europe into a meditation on mourning that unfolds without overt declaration. Landscapes stretch outward, even as they are shaped by the weight of memory that presses inward from all sides.

The suggestion of a mother losing her child emerges not as a singular event but as a continuous undercurrent. The footage acquires a strange inflection of agency, as if it were the viewer who had been summoned rather than the other way around. Recurrent motifs, including a stone wall and fragments of play, return with subtle variations, their circularity nevertheless buckling against closure.

Peter Mudie’s voice introduces language into the visual field, describing it as “silence interrupted by language.” The montage begins to move in reverse, time folding back upon itself in an attempt to retrace what has been lost. This reversal does not restore what is gone. Instead, it reveals the persistence of absence.

7. Neue Wege bricht neue Welt aus / New Paths Breaks New World Out (1996, 16mm/digital, 11 min)

This collaboration with Karin Schöffauer unfolds as a dialogue that never fully aligns, each element maintaining a degree of autonomy. Its opening situates the viewer within a space of exhaustion and self-doubt, a final push into an undefined void undertaken with a sense of misalignment, as though the timing itself were already off.

Flashes of physical exertion, of bodies engaged in sport, refinement, and displays of vitality, circulate alongside a textual voice that distances itself from corporeal pleasure, describing a terrain that feels hopeless and illuminating. The body becomes a site of contradiction, celebrated and estranged simultaneously.

“With fade-ins, darling, I am at the cinema, wallpapering the breaks,” the text declares, introducing a notion of cinema as both construction and concealment. The appearance of an empty sanatorium intensifies this atmosphere, its vacancy suggesting a waiting that may never be fulfilled.

Afterimage, Residue, Name

To watch these films in one go is to encounter the living questions they continue to nurse. What does it mean to look without mastery? How does repetition alter power? Where does pleasure reside in the act of making? Such questions are afterimages in and of themselves.

And then there is the name.

Moucle.

Blackout.

Letters recur.

The “l” overlaps.

The “c” overlaps.

Small intersections suggest identity folding into itself, as though the name were a loop akin to her cinematic imagination. Not one name, in fact, but two. Not one form, but an overlap. A self intersecting with itself in the space between light and its disappearance.

A blackout that reveals rather than obscures, exposing the fragile architecture through which vision becomes inescapable.

Ramsau am Dachstein: A Film by Claus Homschak & Elfriede Jelinek (INDEX 052)

| Tyran Grillo

Elfriede Jelinek’s name is synonymous with language. As Austria’s first Nobel laureate, she was so crowned “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” And in Ramsau am Dachstein, which made its television debut on May 21, 1976, via the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), she does not abandon this density. Instead, she reveals how landscapes articulate what the mouth alone cannot hold.

Though often overlooked in discussions of her work, Jelinek’s sole cinematic statement carries the same restless energy that animates her novels and plays. In a rich essay for this timely INDEX edition, film and TV historian Sylvia Szely frames it as a document entangled with the conditions of its own making. Commissioned for the Vielgeliebtes Österreich series between 1975 and 1977, it became part of a larger project seeking to produce a “critical land survey” of Austria through the eyes of those bound to its regions by memory or affiliation. Jelinek’s own connection to Ramsau am Dachstein was as intimate as it was peripheral, braided through childhood visits to her grandmother in the Styrian Mürztal. Yet intimacy here does not produce nostalgia. It sharpens perception and unsettles inheritance.

The broader context of Austrian broadcasting reform in 1974 unfurls a crucial backdrop. ORF, newly tasked with promoting national culture and values, found itself in a paradox. It invited artists who could interrogate identity while also expecting a reaffirmation of cultural coherence. Among them were Franz Novotny, Karin Brandauer, and Michael Guttenbrunner, who were already shaping or would go on to shape the world of Austrian cinema in various ways. Jelinek’s participation appears inevitable and improbable at once, as she faced great hardship as a result of it, not least of all because of the involvement of Claus Homschak.

Homschak’s editorial intervention, at the behest of ORF, alters the trajectory of the film in decisive ways. His insistence on incorporating picturesque footage introduces a layer of visual appeasement, an attempt to soften the film’s more abrasive elements. The result does not erase Jelinek’s vision so much as distort it. The piece becomes a site of struggle between competing aesthetics. One seeks legibility, comfort, a surface that can be consumed without resistance. The other insists on rupture, on a refusal of coherence, on a mode of expression that unsettles rather than reassures. What emerges is tension preserved within the structure of the film itself.

This tension finds its thematic core in the question of tourism and its socioeconomic reverberations. Ramsau appears prosperous, its snowy expanses and pastoral scenes inviting admiration. Yet beneath this surface lies a stratification that the film exposes with quiet persistence. Farmhands and laborers, those who sustain the land without owning it, recede from visibility within the dominant narrative of progress. Jelinek reintroduces them through a method that resists conventional documentary logic. As contradictions accumulate, she renders a visual essay in which meaning emerges through dissonance rather than synthesis.

The opening sequence establishes this approach with disarming clarity. A folk song drifts across a snowy mountainscape with a strange duality. It enchants, yet something within it feels unsettled, as though the landscape existed outside both time and frame. The voiceover announces its intent to demythologize the notion of “simple, original and genuine farm life.” The phrase “to give things back their history” resonates as both promise and provocation.

Central to this excavation is Josefa, whose presence anchors the film’s emotional and conceptual gravity. She smiles and laughs while recounting a childhood marked by deprivation, by relentless labor, by abuse inflicted within the very structures that claim to sustain rural life. Her recollections unfold in fragments, each piece carrying a weight that the tranquil surroundings cannot absorb. As she places kindling into her stove, the gesture gathers symbolic force. Memory becomes fuel, consumed for warmth, yet never fully extinguished. The act suggests both survival and loss, a quiet economy of endurance.

Her trajectory continues through a series of displacements. After leaving school at 14, she works as a dairymaid in the mountains, a period she recalls with a certain tenderness. The mountain pastures offer a temporary reprieve, a space where the weight of her earlier years recedes, though never entirely: “I forgot my childhood, so to speak. But I couldn’t forget entirely.” The statement holds its own contradiction, a reminder that forgetting remains partial, always haunted by what persists within.

The film places her story alongside flashes of tourists who traverse the same landscape with ease and delight. Horse-drawn sleighs glide through the snow, their occupants smiling, insulated from the histories embedded in the terrain they admire. For them, the farms become postcards in motion, fragments of an aesthetic experience detached from its conditions of production. The voiceover traces the economic structures that underpin this transformation. Landlords accrue profit through taxes, tithes, and the consolidation of property. Tourism emerges as both a continuation and an intensification of these dynamics. The history of Ramsau reveals itself as a layering of exploitation and accumulation.

The refrain “This is a beautiful landscape” reverberates throughout the film, each repetition hollowing out its initial meaning. What begins as affirmation becomes incantation, then critique, then something approaching accusation. Beauty itself becomes suspect, implicated in systems that convert aesthetic pleasure into economic value. A beautiful place yields greater profit. The phrase lingers, stripped of innocence.

Religious history enters the film with similar complexity. Ramsau, a rare stronghold of Protestantism in Austria, carries within it a legacy of resistance and suppression. During the Counter-Reformation, Evangelical faith was outlawed, forcing believers into secrecy under threat of torture. The presence of a worn Lutheran Bible from 1557, preserved across generations, embodies this history. It appears fragile, yet endures. Its taped pages carry the imprint of survival, a material trace of belief maintained against erasure.

The economic realities of the region further complicate its pastoral veneer. Farms produce only enough to sustain themselves, leaving little room for surplus. The arrival of tourism introduces new forms of capital, yet these gains remain unevenly distributed. The labor that once sustained subsistence becomes subsumed within a broader economy oriented toward external consumption. Authenticity recedes, replaced by a curated version of rural life designed to meet the expectations of visitors.

A striking anecdote from a local woodworker, who also serves as church choir director, encapsulates this transformation. Farmhouses once featured small towers with bells that summoned workers to their daily tasks. These bells marked time through labor, structuring the rhythms of communal life. Now they remain as decorative elements, silenced to accommodate transient visitors who prefer uninterrupted rest. Function gives way to ornament. History becomes aesthetic.

The film’s visual language reinforces these themes through moments of quiet disjunction. Skiers glide across the snow with effortless grace, their movements suggesting an unburdened relation to the landscape. Pan to Josefa, standing within the same expanse, her presence grounded, immobile, bearing the weight of histories that the skiers traverse without awareness. The juxtaposition resists overt commentary. It allows the tension to persist, unresolved, demanding recognition.

A shot of an empty gondola lingers with particular force. Suspended in motion, it carries no passengers, no visible purpose. It moves through space as if propelled by an absent logic, a system continuing its operation despite the absence of those it ostensibly serves. The voiceover deepens this critique through its articulation of tourism’s theatrical dimension, saying, “One visits the old farms like theater plays.” The landscape becomes a stage, its inhabitants cast into roles that must conform to external expectations. The tourist, positioned as the audience, demands a performance of authenticity that conceals the conditions under which it is produced. The voice continues, suggesting that the tourist must perceive the landscape and its customs as existing solely for their benefit, perfected for their gaze. The world becomes an open-air performance, sustained through repetition, maintained through illusion.

The reception of the film reveals the volatility of this exposure. Editor and documentary filmmaker Silvia Heimader details the hundreds of phone calls that flooded ORF following the broadcast, expressions of anger from viewers and stakeholders who felt misrepresented, even betrayed. The film disrupted the image Ramsau sought to project. It challenged the alignment between self-perception and external representation. The resulting backlash extended beyond critique into hostility.

Jelinek’s return to Ramsau for a public discussion only worsened these sentiments. Surrounded by local officials, members of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), and community members, she encountered an atmosphere charged with resentment. The gathering carried an undercurrent of threat, a collective anger directed not only at the film but at the artist herself. Within this charged space, Josefa’s presence becomes particularly poignant. She attends, only to leave in tears as the hostility directed at the film redirects itself toward her. Her life, her suffering, has become an unwanted mirror held up to the community.

This moment crystallizes the ethical stakes of representation. To give voice to marginalized experiences carries the risk of exposing those individuals to further harm. Jelinek’s attempt to draw attention to the plight of women such as Josefa encounters resistance that reveals the limits of empathy. The film does not resolve this tension. It leaves it exposed, unresolved, an open wound within its own reception. Despite these challenges, the film’s engagement with language remains its most enduring contribution. Jelinek approaches cinema with a vocative sensibility that reshapes the medium from within. Speech and text become structural elements, organizing the flow of images while simultaneously destabilizing their apparent coherence.

The result of Jelinek’s first foray into television was that it was also to be her last, and she still bears the emotional scars of the mob mentality that sought to have its way with her like a political ragdoll for various factions’ own amusement. What’s so painfully ironic about the whole ordeal is that ORF was likely seeking this kind of counter-cultural narrative in the first place, given that Jelinek was a member of the Communist Party of Austria and already well known for her radical approach to narrative. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to ask her to participate in this project. But it was Homschak who overtook the editing, during which Jelinek was not present, thus sanitizing (if not altogether cutting out) much of her experimental leanings toward alienation.

Jelinek’s later reflection on the film, articulated in her 2022 essay “Shipwreck on the Mountain,” frames the work through the lens of failure: “What I captured was not supposed to be captured.” And so, the act of capturing becomes both transgression and necessity. The film records what resists representation, what eludes the frameworks designed to contain it. In doing so, it exposes the frayed edges of those frameworks. Her characterization of the project as a shipwreck suggests collapse, yet also preservation. A shipwreck disperses fragments across a landscape, each piece retaining traces of the whole while existing independently. The film functions likewise. It resists closure and remains open to reinterpretation, continuing to generate meaning through its unresolved tensions.

In recent years, reception of the film has shifted. Contemporary viewers, including residents of Ramsau, have approached it with a renewed openness, recognizing its insights into the transformations that have reshaped the region. Time alters perspective. What once provoked anger now invites reflection. Yet the film’s history remains inseparable from its meaning. Its scars persist, informing its continued resonance.

This dynamic extends beyond the film itself, gesturing toward broader questions about representation, perception, and the construction of reality. If landscapes can be rewritten, if histories can be obscured or revealed through shifts in perspective, then the stability of meaning becomes uncertain. What appears solid dissolves under scrutiny. What seems transparent reveals layers of mediation.

At the edge of such uncertainty lies a more elusive inquiry. Perhaps reality itself exists as a surface continually inscribed by competing narratives, each seeking to assert its version of truth. Beneath this surface, no fixed essence awaits discovery. Instead, there is an ongoing process of articulation, erasure, and rearticulation. The film gestures toward this process without attempting to resolve it.

In this sense, Ramsau am Dachstein extends beyond its immediate context, offering a meditation on the conditions of seeing and speaking. It invites a reconsideration of how eyes and ears shape our understanding of the world, how they collaborate and conflict, and how they produce meaning through their interplay. And perhaps this is where its deepest significance resides. Not in what it reveals about a particular place or moment, but in how it unsettles the mechanisms through which revelation occurs. Yet behind this continuity, something shifts. A recognition that meaning does not reside within the image or the word alone, but within the unstable space that connects them, a space that resists closure, that invites perpetual reconsideration, that holds within it the quiet possibility of seeing otherwise.

Dietmar Brehm: PRAXIS SELECTION (INDEX 047)

| Tyran Grillo

PRAXIS SELECTION feels less like a compilation than an ongoing physiological test, an attempt to discover what images can endure before collapsing into pure sensation. Drawn from the sprawling PRAXIS cycle (2007-2015), these forty pieces, of which the below only touches upon highlights, operate as a catalogue of intensities that never buy into logic. As Stefan Grissemann astutely observes, Dietmar Brehm’s “secular icons irritate precisely because they never reveal their aim, often not even disclosing what is happening in and to them.” They do not point toward meaning so much as enact its very possibility, stripping “praxis” of any political or ideological inheritance in favor of naked dissociation.

Brehm moves from erotic to clinical, from diaristic to abstract, yet each mode is a membrane that can be pierced, stretched, or contaminated. The digital clarity of the later entries is abraded by bumped microphones and the sounds of equipment being dragged, as if the assembler were refusing the illusion of being “hands off.” Even the concluding glyphs that begin to appear are cryptic enough to obscure what precedes them. As our vision is heightened, impaired, and rerouted, we are left caught in the performative residue of it all.

1000 Blitze

A few distortions of reality serve as anchors for the larger constellation. 1000 Blitze (1000 Bolts) turns lightning into a vascular network, an illuminated anatomy of perception that overwhelms the sensorium. Vision feels compromised yet somehow more acute, as if the eye were seeing its own interior. Himmel (Sky) distills the world into a single fly drifting in an impossible blue expanse while rain murmurs in the soundtrack. The insect is reduced to an atmospheric event, a coherence of sentience within a monolithic field. Here, Brehm demonstrates how minimal stimuli can trigger an almost cosmic alertness.

Übung

This shift from the microscopic to the elemental reappears in Übung (Exercise), where a figure is thrust toward the camera, lit as if by an emergency sign from within. Strobes slide across sweat and skin until the figure becomes particulate, edging toward ash. Schwarzensee repeats the experience through landscape: bands of colored water glide past while the creak of a rowboat grounds the abstraction in human effort.

Basis pH

The domestic sphere proves no safer. Vollmund (Full Moon) frames eggs frying, cigarettes burning, Coke bottles bending, and a child’s cheerful “Let’s go,” all glimpsed through a circular aperture that turns the mundane into a pupil of surveillance. In Basis pH, the application of makeup is a study in exposure rather than beautification, as if each gesture were removing a layer of self-protection rather than adding one. It’s the private act as uncertain confession.

Berlin

Brehm’s engagement with pornography punctuates at regular intervals but refuses eroticism. Peng Peng links desire to violation by intercutting voyeuristic gazes with surgical imagery, whereas Berlin and Paris tint fleshly negatives green or red-blue until their physics appear industrial.

Röntgen

Self-portraiture assumes the identity of a malfunction. Chesterfield shows Brehm flickering beside a car while a metronome hammers machinically. In Charles, a drained, remorse-free face is doubled by a twin that never quite aligns, enacting a moral vacancy. Röntgen (X-Ray) meshes screaming vocals with inverted faces and vehicles in a radiographic exorcism. Such pieces insist that identity is not a stable referent but an affectation that appears only when stressed, inverted, or pulled apart.

Sonne Halt

As chronology grows, so does the gentility of Brehm’s touch. Licht (Light) is a standout in this regard: a hand caresses a lampshade again and again in a manner so tender that it borders on obsession. Sonne Halt (Sun Stop) freezes the sun between two towers as a red circle that pins luminosity to the board of life without extinguishing it. Cocktail shifts into a reflective register as Brehm diverts focus to his layered image, jazz sketching itself in the background.

Oxford

The selection concludes with uncanny simplicity. Oxford holds a pair of dress shoes against the firmament. Walking on air? Hello Mabuse converts a simple handshake into a bureaucratic nightmare, framed by ominous clocks. And Rolle returns to repetition as ritual, walking toward and away from the camera near a bale of hay until the act becomes a mantra.

Throughout PRAXIS, Brehm interrogates the image’s ability to signify anything beyond material agitation. The cumulative effect is fiercely corporeal, working directly into the viewer’s nervous system. Along the way, we learn how recognition and estrangement can collapse into each other, how ordinary objects can become alien through intensity, and how a soul caught in the act of looking cannot help but feel implicated in what it sees. What remains is a kind of hyper-alive exhaustion. Brehm exposes the vitality of the photographic trace even as he acknowledges the slow death embedded in every act of viewing. These fragments do not cohere, yet their incoherence is the point. Are we really so different?

Dóra Maurer: Thinking in Proportions (INDEX 046)

| Tyran Grillo

Thinking in Proportions hums with the integrity of a mind that treats perception itself as material. The mind in question is that of Dóra Maurer. Born in Budapest and trained as a printmaker, she did not enter moving pictures through story or representation but through process—the lifeblood of spatial relations. She describes her works as “displacements,” and each indeed alters the coordinates of seeing by measured degrees, thought revealing itself as something with weight and texture. Her structural rigor never hardens into rigidity. Instead, she builds systems in which freedom accumulates quietly, like breath made visible in winter. The viewer begins to sense that Maurer is a grammarian of matter whose proportions anchor themselves to the world with both scientific precision and metaphysical resonance.

Learned Spontaneous Movements (1973) introduces this tension between rule and release through four takes of small gestures performed as Maurer reads: hair twirled, lips bitten, fingers moved toward the mouth in tiny cycles of self-soothing. Variations accumulate with the logic of an étude. The voiceover in an untranslated language becomes a ghost-signal whose meaning is withheld but whose cadence settles into the room. As takes multiply, comprehension erodes until only rhythm remains in unconscious behavioral patterning.

Relative Swingings (1973/75) is a mesmerizing exploration of a conical lamp swinging in space and recorded through a split-screen setup that reveals both the object and the mechanism filming it. Maurer exposes the infrastructure of perception, letting the camera that films the camera act as a kind of auxiliary consciousness. Mechanical grinding aligns with the lamp’s pendular arc. And then, a quiet miracle occurs as the object takes on a cosmic significance. The pleasure of watching it feels as if a thought had been suspended in the air and allowed to make its own skeleton visible.

Timing (1973-80) brings us closer to the body. A plain linen sheet becomes a screen, an object, and a problem. It is folded and unfolded while mirrored projections track its shifting geometry. The absence of sound lays bare the concentration at work, turning domestic labor into a contemplative action. The sheet’s creases are diagrams of invisible forces that echo contractions of memory, landscape, and skin.

Proportions (1979), Maurer’s first piece made with video, is intimate in its austerity. She uses a long roll of paper to measure her arms, legs, head, and torso, thus charting the room and the world around her. She walks with her hands, rolls her head across the paper, and marks every change of course through profound self-calibration. The message is undeniable: without us to insist on their significance, metrics would fall apart like so many atoms.

With Triolets (1980), she achieves a crystalline balance between three focal lengths, three subjects, and three sung tones that assume ceremonial force. Bodies and objects split and converge in a ritual of repetition that liberates rather than confines. The voices, sung in quiet invocation, lend the work an air of secular liturgy. It is among the cycle’s most resonant pieces, a sustained articulation of harmony born from constraint.

Kalah (1980) transforms an ancient Arabic board game into a synesthetic machine. Colored squares pulse with tones, evoking early video graphics or elemental sound scores. It appears playful on the surface, yet behind the game’s syncopation lies the proportional logic that threads through Maurer’s practice writ large. Strategy is now an acoustic and chromatic event.

The Inter-Images trilogy (1989/90) stretches into mediation. Part 1, “Retardation,” shows a face glimpsed through rectangles that flicker like shuttered windows, each opening accompanied by electronic tones. Part 2, “Streams of Balance,” follows a nearly nude male dancer in a dark, overhead-lit space, mapping equilibrium with anatomical poise. Part 3, “Anti-Zoetrope,” places two men boxing within a cylindrical enclosure viewed through vertical slits, slowing violent motion into sculptural intervals.

The bonus piece, Space Painting, Project Buchberg (1982/83), anchors her cinematic and painterly intelligence. She moves through an outdoor environment as if drawing from it, painting with air and light while allowing landscape, stone, and shadow to render the action in a whispered manifesto. Art is not imposed upon space but coaxed from it, uncovered through engagement rather than declaration.

Throughout this artfully curated program, Maurer returns again and again to the idea that seeing is a disciplined act, a negotiation between structure and sensation. She seeks not to depict the world but to reorganize it proportion by proportion so that the viewer can relearn how to treat the eyes not as windows but as crucibles for the everyday.

Gustav Deutsch: NOT HOME. Picturing the Foreign Films 1990-2015 (INDEX 045)

| Tyran Grillo

Behind the films collected on NOT HOME lies an inquiry into the act of seeing, shaped by the unsettling realization that vision is never objective or neutral. To witness the world through images one did not make is to inherit the desires, omissions, and vulnerabilities of subjective strangers. Having long worked as a cartographer of found memory, Gustav Deutsch finds himself in the more elusive position of a traveler who never arrives, someone perpetually foreign even in the intimacy of his own gaze. What does it mean to be the custodian of other people’s looking, and what is revealed when the world is glimpsed through perspectives that cannot be fully assimilated?

Adria – Holiday Films 1954-68 (School of Seeing I) lays track by presenting postwar tourist films as if they were relics of some vanished civilization. Its structure moves from still shots to views from vehicles to montages in motion, a transition from the fixed monumentality of place to the restlessness of those attempting to inhabit it. Signs, oceans, bridges, cars, beaches, and faces gather into a quiet taxonomy of yearning. These fragments carry an ache, as if time had already begun erasing them during the very moment of their recording. The Venice passage becomes a kind of primal scene: a man serenades us on the rising waters, yet we hear nothing. Expression survives only as the ghost of a gesture. Those cradled in frame are almost certainly gone, their vitality preserved in an archive that cares nothing for mortality. Deutsch teases out this paradox—that these films were meant to enshrine happiness yet now mirror the fragility of all that once felt permanent—with painful clarity.

Eyewitnesses in Foreign Countries (1993), made with Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Tabbou, turns Deutsch into a documented outsider. Six hundred shots, each lasting three seconds, alternate between Figuig and Vienna in a steady, metronomic rhythm. Deutsch’s astonishment at the desert’s elemental force contrasts with Tabbou’s measured attention to the textures of European daily life. The exchange is not symmetrical, the time limit suggesting a fragile equality at best. Deutsch cannot entirely escape the exoticizing pull of unfamiliar territory, while Tabbou renders Vienna without spectacle, letting human detail eclipse architectural bravado.

Notes and Sketches I (2005-15) extends this sensitivity across a decade of small observations. Thirty-one pocket films made with digital cameras and mobile phones emerge as devotional gestures spared from the erosion of ordinary time. The lazy Susan sequence in a restaurant becomes a center of gravity around which an entire perceptual world turns. Plates glide, voices hum, the table rotates, and from this dance an unexpected sanity arises. Sound plays an equal role in these pieces. Spaces speak their own grammar, and Deutsch listens carefully, letting ambient noise shape the contours of each entry. Geography dissolves; what remains is an atlas of attentiveness. These sketches reveal how the unguarded instant often contains more truth than the composed event. They show how perception, when freed from the demand to explain, allows the world to declare its own quiet coherences.

The bonus film, Sat., 29th of June / Arctic Circle (1990), operates as an early crystallization of the larger project. Four travelers pause at the titular location, pose with numbers, and mark their presence as if the boundary they have crossed holds metaphysical weight. Their actions, unconsciously choreographed, are as sincere as they are awkward, unaware that decades later they will be observed as part of an experiment in temporal distance. What they enact is the desire to extract meaning from place, to position one’s own frailty against the indifference of all terrain.

Across these works, Deutsch drifts between ethnographer and wanderer, historian and poet. He gathers glimpses rather than conclusions, tracing the shape of experience without feigning to contain it. And so, the foreign is never simply elsewhere. It appears whenever an image survives the life that produced it. It appears whenever we see ourselves reflected in the gaze of someone we have never met. And it appears whenever the world, in its fleeting instants, reveals that regard is always cyclical.

Ernst Schmidt Jr.: Wienfilm 1896-1976 (ViennaFilm 1896-1976) (INDEX 044)

| Tyran Grillo

Ernst Schmidt Jr.’s Wienfilm 1896-1976 opens its subject the way a cadaver is splayed on a coroner’s table. It does not search for a beating heart but for the conditions that make Vienna both itself and something estranged from itself. Montage is now a diagnostic tool, less a method of assembling meaning than of measuring how it buckles under the weight of mortality. The filmmaker himself calls it “a collage of diverse materials aimed at conveying a distanced image of Vienna,” and this distance is the guiding principle: no seduction, no civic hagiography, only a long, unsettling look at a city that contradicts its own self-image at every turn. The result is almost two hours of historical consciousness unfurling at the pace of a slow-motion sea change.

The project begins innocently enough. Two little girls draw and talk about photography, as if the film were briefly pausing to consider the act of looking before descending into its century-long excavation. Soon, Schmidt Jr. sends his camera wandering into the streets to locate the letters of his name. Thus, identity is something to be scavenged rather than inherited, pulled from signage, storefronts, and neglected typography. The artist reconstructs himself through urban residue, establishing an implicit kinship between detritus and personal (re)formation. Lumière footage from 1896 reminds us that Vienna’s filmed life began in the same mood of wonder that swept Europe. Yet here the vintage images register as a faint alarm, the first entries in an archive that will come to record both innocence and catastrophe, albeit in disproportionate amounts.

A montage of women walking follows, accompanied by a syrupy song about femininity. The sequence drifts uneasily between admiration and objectification, as if the soundtrack were trying to smooth over the very wounds it denies. And that’s when a Nazi parade cuts into frame, 1938 charging forth without commentary or warning. The simple adjacency of images does the work of showing how the bootmarks of the past can never be lifted from the present’s pavement. Peter Weibel appears interviewing passersby about who “owns” Vienna, a question that exposes civic pride as well as civic vacancy. Abandoned buildings and shuttered shops stand as ruins. Joe Berger’s remark, “You can be Viennese all over the world…just not in Vienna,” functions as a darkly comic proposition about belonging, exile, and the contradictory nature of borders.

When Chaplin arrives, mass adoration floods the screen. The crowds reveal a collective fervor that cinema alone seems able to provoke. Ecstatic public unity collides with the kitschy cheer of Wienerlieder, whose supposed affection grows sinister when paired with footage of marching columns, rubble, or muted political assemblies. Such sentimentality takes on a narcotic charge, a way of drowning out the psychic noise of its unresolved history. Freud drifts through as a spectral reference, less a person than a reminder that Vienna’s self-knowledge has always been bound to its neuroses. Dogmatic speeches rise and fall, promising clarity yet delivering only the musical rest of rhetoric. Actionists erupt briefly, warping from within. Ordinary people cross streets, ride trams, and enter buildings, each carrying a share of a saga that exceeds them.

As Wienfilm 1896-1976 nears its end, it no longer behaves like a documentary. It becomes a séance of stone. Schmidt Jr. summons imperial afterimages, post-war silences, and self-mythologizing refrains, letting their intercourse give way to an apparition built from incompatible truths. What remains is a portrait assembled from fragments that resist composition, vibrating with the discomfort of witnessing too much yet understanding too little. A city is not something to be summarized but confronted, piece by tactile piece, in all of its charm and violence, until a composite sketch is revealed that no one can fully bear to recognize as their own.