Ernst Schmidt Jr.: Stones & 20 Action and Destruction Films (INDEX 042)

| Tyran Grillo

Ernst Schmidt Jr. belongs to the incendiary second wave of the Austrian avant-garde that Peter Tscherkassky, in his liner notes, associates with transgression. By the same token, the force of Schmidt Jr.’s creations does not stem from crossing limits so much as eroding that very stubborn notion. His images resist symbolism at every turn. Rocks, scraps of emulsion, a curtain’s twitch, faces caught between expressions, even the jitter of spliced frames: all insist on their own existence before they signify anything at all. They become the raw elements of a practice that stitches itself together and tears itself apart in the same motion, revealing a paradox that has been the lifeblood of cinema since its inception. We try to liken filmmaking to cutting or pasting, to analogize its ruptures and assemblages to familiar actions, yet nothing quite matches the peculiar self-becoming of the strip itself. Celluloid behaves as if it possesses impulses of its own, and Schmidt Jr. is one of the few who ever allowed it to behave accordingly.

Steine

This sensibility is clear in Steine (Stones, 1964/65), ostensibly a documentary on sculptors in St. Margarethen but more accurately a study of the negotiation between labor and matter. The jazz score by Dieter Glawischnig and Ewald Oberleitner syncs with the staccato rhythms of chisels, while texts by Gunter Falk and Harald Seuter counterbalance the bemused commentary of passersby. A visitor admits that anyone capable of making something from stone “can’t be normal,” seemingly unaware that shaping stone is not domination over but a surrender to a material whose history predates the sculptor. Schmidt Jr.’s camera lunges, drifts, and waits until the quarry becomes a primordial studio where sculpture resembles an act of listening. Superimpositions remind us that stone contains layers and sediments, ghosts of earlier states in a syncopated duet between imagination and the ancestral depth of matter.

Schnippschnapp

This principle expands in the 20 Aktions- und Destruktionsfilme 1965-1979 (20 Action and Destruction Films, 1965–1979), which treat attention, dismantling, and impulse as structural devices. Ja/Nein (Yes/No, 1968) positions a theater curtain as protagonist, converting a transitional object into an enigmatic presence that behaves independently of spectatorship. Weiß (White, 1968) reduces cinema to flickering circles that hang in midair as portals leading nowhere. Prost (Cheers, 1968) invites participation by challenging viewers to shout “Cheers!” when a line touches the frame, only to reveal how futile synchronized response becomes when the apparatus refuses cooperation. In Rotweißrot (Red-white-red, 1967), the Austrian flag is rendered as pure abstraction, perhaps the most honest way to depict an emblem too often leveraged for false unity. Schnippschnapp (Snip, 1968), made with Peter Weibel, uses scissors to slice the reel until the strip begins consuming itself, culminating in the absurd reduction of paper to its smallest fragment.

Eine Subgeschichte des Films

Reduction continues in Filmisches Alphabet (Film Alphabet, 1971), which compresses the entire medium into twenty-six frames, each a letter that becomes a cipher of visual genesis. Burgtheater (Imperial Theatre, 1970) drains sketches from a commemorative book of their theatrical grandeur, leaving them to hover between documentation and exorcism. Gesammelt von Wendy (Collected by Wendy, 1978/79) quietly records the debris of a party—photographs, stray video fragments, traces of interaction—until social life appears as an archaeology of residual presence. Yet Eine Subgeschichte des Films (A Subhistory of Film, 1974) may be Schmidt Jr.’s most spectral construction. Drawing images from the 1300-page encyclopedia of the same name by Schmidt Jr. and Hans Scheugl, it arranges them as an apparition. Moving through its catalogue feels like wandering a museum where history refuses to settle.

Gertrude Stein…

His portrait works sustain this sense of volatility. Denkakt (The Act of Thinking, 1968) captures Peter Weibel thinking aloud, treating thought itself as an unstable field. Mein Bergräbnis ein Erlebnis (My Funeral an Experience, 1977) and 12 Uhr Mittags (High Noon, 1977) modulate tempo and expression until faces mutate into shifting topographies. The Merry Widow (1977) converts expression into something uncanny and grotesque. Sara Suranyi’s features flutter into new registers, showing how emotion never coalesces into a fixed state. Gertrude Stein hätte Chaplin gerne in einem Film gesehn, in dem dieser nichts anderes zu tun hätte, als eine Straße entlang und dann um eine Ecke zu gehen, darauf die nächste Ecke zu umwandern und so weiter von Ecke zu Ecke (Gertrude Stein would have liked to have seen Chaplin in a film where he would have nothing other to do than walk on the street and then go around a corner, and then around the next corner, etc. from corner to corner, 1979) literalizes Stein’s fascination with repetitive motion as a woman walks corner to corner until a staircase interrupts her circuit.

Einszweidrei

Schmidt Jr.’s more extreme explorations, including N (1978), which documents Hermann Nitsch’s actions, and Kunst & Revolution (Art & Revolution, 1968), plunge into spaces where ritual, violence, and provocation collide. The latter film features a group Action by Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, Peter Weibel, and Oswald Wiener, plus a disguised stranger for good measure. Their taboo interactions, performed on an Austrian national flag on June 7, 1968, at the University of Vienna, would lead to three arrests and the ousting of the Viennese Actions from the city. Bodybuilding (1965/66) and Einszweidrei (Onetwothree, 1965-68) inhabit the Actionist milieu with both fascination and critique, letting the body become instrument and message while Dixieland music and dissonant voices form a carnival of collapse. (VALIE EXPORT walking Weibel like a dog is an especially memorable highlight.) These are not documents but exposures, the camera registering cultural nerve endings without mediation.

Filmreste

In Filmreste (Film Scraps, 1966), his philosophy condenses into a single gesture: scraps arranged into a mosaic where smears, gospel phrases, bumper cars, lovers, city fragments, and bursts of color create a vitality that feels mischievous and irreducible. With this film, says Tscherkassky, “Schmidt Jr. reduces the base and emulsion of film to its status as material, film as a physical object.” Farbfilm (Color Film, 1967) names colors over blinking fields of hue yet never finds “blue,” as if the spectrum itself were resisting resolution.

Across these works, Schmidt Jr. remains focused on matter, vibration, interruption, and impulse. Representation defers to sheer presence. Accidents, ruptures, and material insistence generate the energy that drives the images. In treating the medium at its most elemental, he confirms a deep avant-garde intuition: that cinema is not a window onto the world but a substance within it and that its vitality is inseparable from the matter of which it is composed.

Norbert Pfaffenbichler: Notes on Notes on Film (INDEX 041)

| Tyran Grillo

Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s Notes on Film approaches moving images as a palimpsest, a surface carrying its past as half-erased inscriptions waiting to be pressed into new shapes. His practice is less a restoration than an exposure of fault lines. By reorganizing and reprocessing inherited material, he forces it into states where certainty dissolves, each fragment a visual equation caught and interrupted in the act of solving itself. The archive becomes a reservoir of dormant energies, coaxed out with a mixture of severity and play, always attentive to how a single gesture or sonic abrasion can convert the familiar into a cognitive riddle. Under his hand, the storytelling apparatus mutates into a thinking machine.

notes on film 01 else (2002), the first entry in the cycle, recalibrates a scene from Paul Czinner’s Fräulein Else (1929) as a drifting hypothesis sustained by new additions. The woman in question, repeatedly summoned into a perpetual screen test, becomes less a character than a set of possible identities seeking traction on surfaces that cannot stabilize her. The word IF migrates along the frame’s lower edge, assembling and dispersing itself with a logic too unstable to resolve, yet too insistent to ignore. Wolfgang Frisch’s score stretches the material into a hypnotic trance where syntax becomes sensation. Lines rising and falling resemble a nervous system diagram or the first hesitant scratches of a manifesto that refuses to speak through fleshly instruments. One feels caught inside a conditional mood: If this happens, what follows? If she exists, then who am I? The result is a thought experiment that dramatizes the contingency of meaning itself.

The most chilling configuration appears in Conference (Notes on Film 05) (2011), which assembles 65 portrayals of Adolf Hitler. Pfaffenbichler arranges them as if they were a group of singers rehearsing a single monstrous chorale, each voice tuned to a different frequency of delusion, rage, or parody. The moustache becomes a floating glyph emptied of significance through repetition, a marker of historical exhaustion and cultural overexposure. Udo Kier’s fevered performance in Schlingensief’s 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler shares oxygen with Mel Brooks’s mockery and Chaplin’s trembling poise. Pfaffenbichler maps their common repertoire: the violent doorway entrance, the serpentine regard of subordinates, the thunder from the balcony. Sound forms a coarse landscape of distorted peaks. At one point, “Hitler” sits in a theater watching himself, an abyss that curls back into paranoia until the image-world appears implicated in the very fantasies it attempts to critique. What remains is static, as though representation itself had been scorched.

INTERMEZZO (Notes on Film 04) (2012) lights the fuse of early slapstick and detonates it from within. Pfaffenbichler extracts Chaplin’s escalator tumble from The Floorwalker (1916) and reshapes it into a high-voltage rock montage. Frisch’s guitar tears through the field while the fall is mirrored and refracted into a cascading collapse of gravitational logic. The stumble becomes an endlessly recomposed event in spacetime, a pattern slipping into abstraction, recombining itself, and falling again. The gag dissolves into pure kinesis.

A Messenger from the Shadows (Notes on Film 06A / Monologue 01) (2012) expands this logic into a full-scale resurrection of Lon Chaney. Drawing from all 46 extant features, Pfaffenbichler constructs a temporal chimera in which The Man of a Thousand Faces confronts his own proliferating identities. The result moves with the feverish drift of a nightmare: Chaney gazing at a building’s façade as shadows creep across it; hands emerging from nowhere to deliver warnings; characters dialing telephones that connect to alternate versions of the same man. Orientalist disguises, phantom wounds, and grotesque prosthetics recur as though lost inside a self-made labyrinth. Rain and smoke invade the frame until the building burns, the figures collapse, and only a lone spotlight remains, illuminating emptiness where onlookers should be.

The bonus piece, 36 (2001), made with Lotte Schreiber, pares moving images down to patterns and sequences derived from the titular number. Its structural rigor anticipates the methods that follow: repetition as revelation, mathematics as atmosphere, the image as a system generating its own permutations.

Across the cycle, Pfaffenbichler demonstrates that the moving image is never simply hereditary. In being reactivated, it takes on shades of the era in which it now awakens from its coma. His pieces interrogate the archive until it confesses what it never intended to reveal. In the end, what forms is less a conclusion than a faint pressure in thought, a configuration that hovers without settling into shape. No image quite arrives; no pattern fully claims itself. Instead, an unnamed interval opens where perception senses its own scaffolding and begins to loosen it. Within this interval, meaning is neither lost nor found but suspended, waiting for a consciousness willing to meet it without expectation, to inhabit a space where recognition has not yet begun.

Peter Tscherkassky: Attractions, Instructions and Other Romances (INDEX 040)

| Tyran Grillo

To engage with Tscherkassky’s practice is to confront the strange afterlife of representation itself, a realm where film no longer records the world so much as remembers its own ruin. What burns across his strips is neither nostalgia nor innovation but a deeper pulse, the kind that surfaces when a form recognizes finitude and begins to think through decay. Vision becomes autogenic, a mechanism studying itself from within, peeling back its surfaces to reveal the primal violence of exposure. Watching, one senses that matter is dreaming of being seen, as though consciousness had migrated into celluloid at the very moment it began to die. In this suspended state, we are compelled to interrogate conditions of possibility.

Christoph Huber observes that Tscherkassky “fathoms cinema’s potential as an intellectual machinery of associations and as a palpable experiential space.” This remains true, yet something more disquieting appears with sustained attention. He is among the rare artists who show that moving pictures have already crossed into a posthumous phase—or rather, that their death is a necessary precondition. He revives the corpse only long enough to out its allegiance to disappearance. What unfolds behaves as a series of postmortem documents that yields a final burst of sensual and intellectual life. He does not capture reality; he sifts through its remains. Handling emulsion, sprockets, perforations, and mechanical abrasion directly, he shows that the only place this apparatus still lives is in the final breath.

This recognition becomes deeply personal in Parallel Space: Inter-View (1992). A love scene between Montgomery Cliff and Lee Remick from Elia Kazan’s 1960 Wild River is isolated and reprinted on 35mm still stock, so the projection splits the embrace in two. Tscherkassky writes “The Physics of Seeing” and “The Physics of Memory” onto the surface, turning recollection into a mechanical act. The strobing becomes cognition: a self trying to remember itself even as the material erases the attempt. Domestic fragments and reflections intrude. The original eros dissipates, replaced by a strange eroticism of apparatus, the soundtrack mutating lovemaking into a newborn’s first cry. Desire abandons the bodies and migrates into the violent closeness of stock and exposure. Consequences, which lovers and spectators rarely consider, become etched accordingly.

Erotique (1982) presents similar tensions in miniature. Lisl Ponger’s face appears in fragments, a visual homage to the musique concrète of Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henry, sending its voltage far and wide.

Happy-End (1996) expands the idea of resurrection. Austrian home movies from 1965 to 1980 gain a dignity that history rarely grants private lives. The first half plays gently, nearly untouched, before overlays accumulate, bruising the memories they were meant to preserve. What once appeared stable now vibrates with the uncanny.

Recursion becomes literal in Shot – Countershot (1987), where a man fires a weapon and is struck by his own bullet. Thus, Tscherkassky converts the basic grammar of visual storytelling into a fatal loop. Cause and effect devour each other until nothing remains but the absurdity of a structure turning on itself.

The self-attack resurfaces in Nachtstück (Nocturne, 2006), created for VIENNA MOZART YEAR 2006. A trembling pulse is fashioned from Eine kleine Nachtmusik, romance strained through temporal distortion until bodies dissolve into afterimages. An owl’s wink acknowledges the futility of preserving classical culture under its own conditions. Music becomes something the strip tries and fails ever so beautifully to hold.

Tscherkassky’s ability to mine entire histories from discarded material reaches its peak in Coming Attractions (2010). In its tangle of vintage advertising footage, spokespeople push soap, stockings, soda; household labor becomes erotic display; voices break into stuttering prayer-wheel rhythms. The piece twists promotional language into a fever dream where faith, fetish, and commodity dissolve into one horrific whole. A woman initially framed as nun-like is revealed to be a performer wearing an inflatable hood. Yet even in such degradation, unexpected solace erupts, as if intentions were defrocked in favor of empathic vulnerability.

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) turns to the canonical corpse of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the showdown of which is reworked so that the characters catch themselves in combat with the medium itself. Weapons fire autonomously. The strip becomes an adversary. Hanging, shooting, stuttering, the frames panic and tear. Rescue comes too late. The apparatus turns against its creatures with the same operations that once generated them. Only by collapsing into teeth and static does it reveal its own architecture.

Even the early bonus short Ballett 16 (1984) demonstrates the body as an optical instrument, the frame as both prison and escape route. The seeds of collapse are already present.

Across this constellation, Tscherkassky shows that, unlike photography (which remains a living organism, capable of being cut, wounded, caressed, and jolted back into awareness), moving pictures are spirits still learning of their own passing. He stages this haunting so we may witness it in (un)real time. His appropriations feel more alive than their sources because he performs their autopsies and releases whatever vitality has been lodged therein. What lingers is neither medium nor method but a trembling field where perception hesitates before naming itself. Something passes through—unclaimed, unmeasured—like a pulse brushing against the threshold of form before dissolving again into the dark. It is there, in that brief stasis, that another kind of seeing stirs: a quiet flare that refuses inheritance, belonging only to the moment it ignites. Whatever follows is a mere residue of attention, a faint pressure on the mind reminding us that all acts of looking are born from the same vanishing point, and that creation begins precisely where comprehension falters.

Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller: Photography & Film (INDEX 039)

| Tyran Grillo

To approach Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller’s work is to enter a visual conversation in which portraiture reverses its usual direction. Instead of externalizing the internal in her subjects, she internalizes the external. The images behave less as windows than as mirrors, each a sobering reflection of our desire to read emotion, history, and truth into faces that refuse to perform. As Andréa Picard notes, Gröller is a practitioner of “intimate encounters” in which individuals are neither exposed nor captured but held in suspension at the threshold of recognition.

This suspension permeates the early pages of INDEX’s first book edition. The photographs therein, printed with honest lucidity by Christoph Keller Editions, show faces emerging mid-breath. Simultaneously present and withdrawn, they tremble between suffering and serenity. Her grid structures, most famously the Lebensportrait Louise Anna Kubelka series that documents her daughter weekly from birth through adolescence, unfold like a filmstrip. The blank squares where images are missing take on equal significance: temporal fractures, absences in maternal memory, interruptions in the fragile ritual of steady observation. These sequences echo the formal logic of cinema, built from illusions of continuity shaped by the cutting room.

The Jahresportraits, taken every five years from 1972 onward, chart not only the forward march of aging but also the atmosphere of an entire life-world. Melanie Ohnemus situates them within a feminist reclaiming of bodily autonomy. Within this context, the 1970s self-portraits, especially the Pin-Ups series, create a counter-archive. Saturated in color, refracted through ceiling mirrors or segmented by architectural lines, they mimic the vocabulary of glamour photography while disrupting it from within. Seductive yet confrontational, carefully staged yet emotionally exposed, they insist on a form of visibility that resists conventional consumption.

Even her fashion photography, an early professional pursuit, elicits shades of disobedience. Although commercially viable, the images perform what Ohnemus calls a “false copy” of the genre, “acting almost defiantly in the face of normative style conventions and countering obstinate references with consistent assertion of individual aesthetic autonomy.” They exhibit awkwardness, vulnerability, and small slippages where faces or bodies stutter against the camera’s demands. In her interview with Dietmar Schwärzler, Gröller explains this approach with disarming clarity: “For me, the psychological aspect was always important and also the creation of intimacy, even when I don’t know the person in front of the camera.” Said intimacy is never sentimental. It develops through exposure.

Her films, collected on the accompanying DVD, You. Me too., behave as “moving photographs,” as if time itself has begun to oxygenate the still image. Silence dominates, carrying a weight that spoken language cannot.

Erwin, Toni, Ilse (1968/69), her first film, contains the seeds of her entire creative approach. Among the three subjects, her friend Ilse is the most poignant arbiter of truth. Having been filmed after a suicide attempt, she oscillates between resilience and brokenness. The film neither diagnoses nor consoles; it waits, aware that the environment belongs to a person’s portrait as much as their features do.

In Graf Zokan (Franz West) (1969), the celebrated artist squirms beneath the camera’s regard while banal elements such as a water spigot or an outdoor café table drift into view. The result is an exercise in worldly interruption.

Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas (1994) incorporates Gröller’s own presence. The aftermath of an argument with Kubelka becomes embedded in the air, shaping tensions and micro-expressions. Reconciliation unfolds wordlessly in a choreography of glances and hesitations.

Eltern: Mutter, Vater (Parents: Mother, Father, 1997/99) confronts the difficulty of filming one’s parents. Her mother’s full-color restlessness and father’s monochrome indifference forge a valley between memory and attachment. Such are the asymmetries of familial bonds.

Lisa (2001) alternates between sternness and a sudden smile. Care and tension hover in unresolved harmony.

Polterabend (Hen Night, 2009), filmed the night before Gröller’s wedding, transforms a social ritual into a photographic event. The group portrait becomes a swarm of miniatures as guests step forward into the camera’s silent gaze.

Der Phototermin (Photo session, 2009) offers a moment of joy: a man and woman laughing while still and motion cameras capture them. Their silent laughter overflows with unmistakable warmth. The final reveal of the photographs grounds their exuberance in physical trace.

Gutes Ende (Bliss, 2011) devastates. Her mother, dying in a nursing home, can still sense her daughter’s presence. Gröller wipes the lens, an act of care that becomes part of the portrait, as if clearing the fog from the world’s surface so her mother can be seen. Another woman in the room is pregnant. Birth and death share the space without commentary.

Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Me too, too, me too, 2012) turns inward. The jaundiced color, trembling voice, and wandering monologue form a self-portrait of illness, a body on the verge of dissolving into its own fragility.

Delphine de Oliveira (2009) layers past and present in what Harry Tomicek calls a “[p]aradox of portraits that insist upon their right to stay a mystery.” Ilse’s early image appears projected on a wall before the frame shifts to Delphine, who smokes and moves with the same withheld despair. She accepts an apple and returns it, an anorexic refusal that resonates with Ilse’s remembered presence.

La Baromètre / Laurent / Herachian (2004/05/07) observes three men who enter Gröller’s Paris apartment to watch her perform a striptease. Their reactions, ranging from arousal to awkwardness, become the real subjects. Vulnerability and power trade places.

Psychoanalyse ohne Ethik (Psychoanalysis without Ethics, 2005) stages an analytic encounter devoid of sound. The viewer must listen with their eyes as Gröller quietly peels away a cast from her leg. Therapy becomes a double removal: of protection and of façade.

Passage Briare (2009) shows a tentative romantic encounter. Two older people negotiate the camera’s presence and their own hesitant intimacy.

Spucken (Spitting, 2000) turns domestic mischief into portraiture. Gröller spits cherry pits at the camera. Childish, unruly, and undeniably endearing.

Boston Steamer (2009) moves into abjection. In a nod to Kurt Kren, defecation is filmed in extreme proximity through a cardboard aperture framing each anonymous anus. With each repetition, the grotesque takes on an unexpected tenderness.

Heidi Kim at the W Hong Kong Hotel (2010) studies architectural vulnerability. A woman perched on a windowsill dwarfs herself before the city’s scale.

La Cigarette (2011) brings five people, including two actors from Godard’s Nouvelle Vague, into a small room. A cigarette circulates like a fragile talisman. The woman who smokes collapses onto the table, and an old man attempts to revive her by offering the cigarette again. The gesture feels both horrific and healing.

Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 2006/11) is unusually fluid for Gröller. A morning-after scene, with pizza slices and soft sunlight, becomes a quiet celebration of friendship in its least performative state. She captures the residue of the night with affectionate precision.

Wherever she is in space and time, Gröller resists any urge to pry open her subjects. Instead, she constructs situations in which the revelation speaks in the dialect of the individual. Having built something like a counter-history of human appearance in which faces shift, seasons change, and bodies falter or revive, her gaze nevertheless retains a peculiar steadiness in recognition of the fact that the self revealed at any given moment is only a temporary tenant. The psychological thread linking her work is an awareness that identity is never entirely ours but something that contradicts itself at every turn. Her portraits do not crystallize a person so much as follow the fault lines along which each becomes someone else. What they ultimately disclose is not hidden emotion or buried truth but the simple fact that we are all in continuous negotiation with time. In this sense, her oeuvre gestures toward a philosophy of the unclaimed self that lives not in fixed expressions but in the fragile spaces between them. Such art invites us to meet that self, not with certainty but with care.

Mara Mattuschka / Chris Haring: Burning Down the Palace (INDEX 038)

| Tyran Grillo

The collaborations between Mara Mattuschka and choreographer Chris Haring unfold in what Mattuschka calls an “inner time,” a realm in which duration is elastic, language unreliable, and form caught between its own imperatives and the pressures of cultural inscription. These darkly comic and disturbingly intimate films speak a vocabulary of incomplete sentences, glitched vocalizations, uncanny gestures, and bodies imitating their own existence. The effect is that of an audiovisual terrain in which identity becomes a form of atmospheric drift rather than a stable category, and every movement, no matter how spastic or hesitant, registers as both confession and critique.

Part Time Heroes (2007), shot in an empty Viennese department store, places performers Stephanie Cumming, Ulrika Kinn Swensson, Johnny Schoofs, and Giovanni Scarcella inside a maze of dressing rooms, the kind of liminal cubicles where self-presentations are supposedly perfected, standardized, and groomed for consumption. In place of that promise, speech collapses into stutters and half-thoughts, the microphone an extension of the nervous system rather than a transmitter of clarity. Stephanie Cumming’s voice warps in pitch as she declares, “You could never, ever imagine how it is to be me,” a sentence that shudders under its own burden. The store’s PA system broadcasts a man’s disembodied fantasies about personal space and access while the performers’ movements defy normative choreography.

A woman undresses in a gold-leafed room, but the action refuses voyeuristic logic. Jagged and interrupted, she radiates both resistance and vulnerability. Another flexes in a mirror, adopting a male voice to brag about Cameron Diaz, rubbing the microphone against her clothing to amplify the friction of fabric against skin. So begins a chameleon’s game, with each performer trying on and discarding selves like yesterday’s discount rack. Even interaction becomes a form of dissociation. A man calls a woman on the phone but can speak only through technological mediation, misgendering her in the process, until he catches himself mid-sentence and briefly confronts his own absurdity. “Real stars shine only at night,” someone says, as if to reassure these drifting figures that obscurity is its own form of luminosity.

The emotional pivot arrives when Ulrika guides Stephanie and Johnny toward mutual recognition. She commands them to look into each other’s eyes and to listen to each other’s bodies. For one moment, care feels possible before its coherence dissolves. Voices break again, and images fracture in reflective surfaces. Giovanni emerges from his elevator only to be met with Ulrika’s shriek. Stephanie impersonates Johnny over the radio while he mouths her words perfectly, a duet of dislocation performed against a backdrop of store windows meant for display but now showcasing only fragmentation.

Running Sushi (2008) flings its protagonists into a pop-inflected, manga-tinged Eden that reimagines domestic life as a conveyor belt of images and half-digested memories. Stephanie Cumming and Johnny Schoofs inhabit a cartoonish household powered by manic whimsy. Eve eats an orange peel whole, every scrape and chew amplified with grotesque clarity. Adam recoils from behaviors he cannot explain and hyperventilates himself into animality. Their conversations veer from banal domestic choices, such as what color to paint the kitchen, to sudden eruptions about sexual assault and the enslavement of domestic expectations. Yet the film refuses tragedy. It vacillates between slapstick and trauma, between whispered tenderness and squeals at their own nakedness. The appearance of Eve’s chopstick-wielding alter ego, puncturing the veneer of calm, is an eruption from a psyche with a backstage pass. The two end on the floor, singing to a ukulele, a moment of fragile equilibrium in a world where even sincerity feels like performance.

Burning Palace (2009), the darkest and most erotically charged of the trilogy, moves into the lush corridors of Vienna’s Hotel Altstadt. Red curtains invite comparisons to David Lynch, even though the film’s deeper kinship lies with Philippe Grandrieux. Bodies press against surfaces until they warp, voices distort into pleas, moans, and chants. Stephanie’s slowed-down narration lingers on the intricacies of a woman’s pleasure while naked men skitter through hotel rooms and hide behind magazines. Screams in the hallway are trapped between floors of desire and despair. Mock-operatic performances unravel as voices warp until the boundaries between song and wail thaw. Scenes of women feeling their own pleasure, either alone or together, alternate with men muttering non sequiturs and avoiding narrative continuity or emotional labor. A pop song melts into slowed oblivion, liquefying in response to the bodies onscreen. Laughter, ambiguous and uncanny, leaves us unable to tell whether release or derangement has been offered.

The accompanying documentary, Burning Down the Palace: The Making of Burning Palace (2011), shows how such controlled chaos arises from trust, improvisation, and risk. It confirms what the trilogy already demonstrates: the body, pushed to its limits, can overturn every lie we tell ourselves about the shape of things when its aura is sucked in through the mouth and expelled in a single twitch of authenticity.

Siegfried A. Fruhauf: Exposed (INDEX 037)

| Tyran Grillo

Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s found-footage films are chemical burns on the skin of cinema. What Stefan Grissemann calls the artist’s love of the “raw, handmade, seemingly unfinished” isn’t a retro affectation but an ontological position: the image must not be allowed to settle into complacency. 

Film is always in the process of dying, degrading, collapsing, and fraying, yet from this entropy, Fruhauf cultivates an extraordinarily steadfast precision. His sources are organs of a larger body mutating under pressure. Each short feels like an autopsy born of its own fragility. His work reminds us that film is a minor miracle rendered mundane by familiarity, even though its ability to inscribe time should overwhelm us.

This attention to mortality begins immediately in La Sortie (1998), where a primal scene of workers leaving a factory is stretched and compressed until their exit becomes a mechanical tremor. Bodies speed up, slow down, and drone against industrial hums until they dissolve into motion without origin. The message is clear: even the most iconic images cannot hold still. Celluloid labors against its own impermanence.

The postcard innocence of Höhenrausch (Mountain Trip, 1999) offers no reprieve. A sequence of Austrian mountain postcards glides past with an artificially cheerful guitar accompaniment. Their pace accelerates until the idyll becomes grotesque, a surplus of images exposing the violence of sentimentality. These snapshots, usually invitations to belonging, reveal themselves as curated illusions once velocity tears away their charm. Fruhauf shows how repetition can uncover the brutality hidden within the familiar.

Erotic unease enters the frame in Blow-Up (2000), where an educational film on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation proves uncanny on its own terms. We observe the filmstrip from a distance, listening to distorted breathing as the camera approaches. The woman’s inhalations shift from instructional to suggestive, revealing how fragile intention becomes when context is strained. Fruhauf listens to the footage as a pathologist to the body, waiting for signs of distress that were never meant to be audible.

This diagnostic instinct reaches its clearest form in Exposed (2001), one of the collection’s strongest works. A man peers at a woman through a keyhole, a simple voyeuristic setup unraveled by repetition and sound. The woman’s body trembles into abstraction as the distorted breath returns. Desire becomes surveillance, and surveillance becomes a wound. When the woman is finally revealed openly, smoking and unguarded, the image lands as a quiet indictment of the gaze that preceded it.

A shift toward landscape occurs in REALTIME (2002), where a sunrise, tinted green, rises to a pop track stretched into an otherworldly drone. The effect is familiar yet estranged, as if the sun were trying to recall how to rise after forgetting the sequence.

From there, the films plunge into material debris. Structural Filmwaste. Dissolution 1 (2003) arranges discarded darkroom artifacts in dual frames punctuated by digital wipes and unstable white voids. Jürgen Gruber’s electronic score pulses like a remnant of lost memory. The fragments seem determined to form meaning and equally determined to dissolve before doing so. The result is a visual analogue to the temporal disintegrations of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, where beauty becomes the residue of decay.

The recursive logic deepens in Mirror Mechanics (2005). A woman wipes a mirror again and again, her reflection fracturing into drifting geometries. The repetition recalls Martin Arnold’s compulsive loops and Peter Tscherkassky’s optical detonations, yet Fruhauf’s tone drifts toward melancholy rather than rupture. Images of the woman floating in water or running along a beach fold into themselves like psychic diagrams. She remains surrounded by a closed circuit of glances, trapped within the mirror’s ongoing self-examination.

This struggle between image and intruder becomes literal in Ground Control (2008), where ants crawl across the frame in patterns that threaten to consume the image entirely. The digital plane pushes back. The surface wrinkles, repels, and kills. The act feels miniature but chilling, a reminder that the image can fight for its life.

The calm of Night Sweat (2008) is equally deceptive. A treeline at night, slow cinematographic encroachment, then a rare convulsion of lightning accompanied by distorted screams. The moon rises pixelated, then dissolves. The serenity holds only as long as the sky refrains from tearing itself open.

Instability reaches fever pitch in Palmes d’Or (2009), where more than eight hundred Cannes photographs become a rapid negative collage. Architecture flickers into shards, palm trees dematerialize, and the sequence ends in virtual fire. Fruhauf cauterizes the glamour until only a scorched symbol remains. By comparison, Tranquility (2010) feels almost misnamed. Beach and ocean imagery ripple with hints of war, machinery, and parachutes, as if memories of violence haunt the shoreline. The waves embody an undertow of buried histories, their calm a thin surface stretched over turbulence.

The bonus works extend this reflection on instability. Frontale (2002) stages the impossibility of desire as a man and woman attempt to kiss, only for their identities to double and collide, with car crashes interrupting their union until a shattered windshield marks the moment eros finally arrives. Phantom Ride (2004) transforms an empty train car into a ghost vehicle sliding through night streets before receding into its own absence. Mozart Dissolution (2006) reduces the composer’s silhouette to vibrating graphic traces of Eine kleine Nachtmusik without letting us hear the music itself. A warped LP scratches out the ghost of a melody the likeness can no longer produce.

Cumulatively, this body of work feels like cinema trying to expose its own skeleton, revealing the nerves, scars, and residues that usually remain hidden beneath appearances. Fruhauf scrapes at the emulsion until the surface gives way and the image confesses its condition. What is ultimately found, then, isn’t footage but consciousness in raw, unrefined form.

Just Say No to Family Values (INDEX 036)

| Tyran Grillo

This INDEX anthology of queer, transgressive, and body-centered performance is a study of resistance in motion, shaped by Dietmar Schwärzler’s observation that, despite their aversion to gender fluidity, post-socialist societies are increasingly unable to suppress it. The selections curated here orbit one another like unstable particles, abrasive and intimate, each refusing the comforts of binary thinking. What forms is a constellation pushing against regulation and decorum, insisting that desire, embarrassment, violence, humor, and play be allowed to exist without being pressed back into polite accounts. It yields a portrait of a Europe whose margins speak more urgently than its institutions, where artists carve through rigid traditions with the unsharpened saw of selfhood.

This insistence on subjectivity announces itself from the beginning in John Giorno and Antonello Faretta’s Just say no to family values (2006), which stages an ecstatic performance in a tiny southern Italian village built to repel the unfamiliar. An elderly woman quietly observes Giorno as he recites his poem of the same name, a text that celebrates drugs as sacred substances and mocks Christian fundamentalism as a cultural virus, his voice ringing against the village’s stone surfaces. Giorno’s sentiments land gently in the air and harshly in the psyche.

Keren Cytter’s Der Spiegel (2007) elicits an even deeper tension. A 42-year-old woman sees herself as 16 because that is the age she imagines as desirable to the man she wants, a man who hardly deserves the labor of self-distortion. Mirrors open into recursive realities. Bodies multiply. Voices contradict themselves as if consciousness were rewriting its script in real time. A Greek chorus of women comments from outside the frame while the man who enters seems split between presence and condescension. Cytter reveals the violence that occurs when desire is shaped by misogyny: the self becomes a repertoire of poses rehearsed for someone else’s gaze until the poses crumble.

The body continues its revolt through the tangle of breath, fabric, and friction that is Maria Petschnig’s KIP MASKER (2007). Clothing is now a prosthesis, a means of making the body unrecognizable to those who would read it through convention. The soundtrack is raw: scraping threads, stretched seams, the sound of breath negotiating constraint. What emerges is an exploration of femininity stripped of its expected ornamentation, a choreography in which awkwardness becomes a form of liberation and confidence grows through estrangement.

Patrycja German’s Schenkeldrücken (Leg Wrestling, 2005) translates such interior struggles into a public contest. When the filmmaker challenges a group of men in Kraków to a leg wrestling match, they laugh at first, using humor to conceal their discomfort as they lose again and again. Her force remains steady, revealing the fragility of masculine assurance and the potency of female strength when staged without theatrics.

The anthology shifts into darker territory with Jaan Toomik, Jaan Paavle, and Risto Laius’s Invisible Pearls (2004), a descent into prison masculinities where desire, violence, and survival become inseparable. Men speak in fragments about coercion, self-enhancement, and mutilation in a disturbing film that reveals how sexuality mutates under duress, the body now the only site where agency can be claimed or lost.

Karol Radziszewski’s Fag Fighters: Prologue (2007) imagines milder forms of insurgency through craft turned militancy. An elderly woman knits pink yarn, which feeds into a machine that produces a vivid scarf, which in turn serves as the material for a ski mask. The mask is a tool for queer resistance, equal parts protection and provocation. Thus, domestic labor is reclaimed as an armament for a fantasy army that refuses invisibility.

If resistance often requires reinvention, it can also require drift, as in Deborah Schamoni’s Dead devils death bar (2008). In what Ken Pratt calls a Fassbinder-influenced satire of Berlin’s Bohemian nightlife, the single tracking shot features actors rotating through personas, conversations that collapse into absurdity, and an atmosphere thick with posturing. Nothing anchors these characters except their own shapeshifting roles. Even so, the emptiness of their talk becomes revealing. Behind the curated surfaces lies the weariness of souls trying to invent themselves with too little material.

The bonuses extend the anthology’s tonal range. Paolo Mezzacapo de Cenzo’s Under Water (1971) moves through a dreamlike forest of erotic projections set to Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht. A man’s fantasies spill across scenes populated by multiple women, a baby, and a vague sense of guilt. Less a story than a psychic event, it is a veritable murder mystery conducted inside the self. John Giorno’s poem is also included as a PDF, revealing the sculptural precision behind his spoken word and reminding us that incitement can be both spiritual and surgical.

Across the entire collection, what emerges is not a stable argument but a terrain of embodied freedom. These films resist the false security that binary identities pretend to offer. They express different tactics of survival through erotic distortion, militant softness, and the refusal to quiet the thinking of the flesh. Together they form an archive of renegotiations, insisting that individuality is a continual act of becoming. And so, the most radical gesture remains the simplest: to let love explode on its own terms.

Ferry Radax: Thomas Bernhard – Three Days (INDEX 035)

| Tyran Grillo

“In darkness, everything becomes clear.”

Thomas Bernhard – Three Days is one of those rare portraits in which the filmmaker’s presence shapes every moment without ever imposing itself, guiding the flow of thought while allowing the subject to remain fully himself. Harun Farocki once described documentary as the art of arranging time; what Ferry Radax arranges here is solitude. Georg Vogt is right to call him a literary filmmaker, since he does not film people so much as he films the movement of their thinking. In Bernhard, he found a subject whose thinking is already cinematic: rhythmic, repetitive, self-correcting, darkly comic, and as angular as the cuts that shape this three-day conversation. The film becomes a study in how consciousness performs itself when given nothing but open space and a listening camera.

Bernhard sits on a bench in a Hamburg park, reluctant at first to “play himself,” eventually consenting to respond to a series of keywords Radax has prepared. This simple compromise yields a portrait in which artifice and confession blend into something more elemental. The park becomes a resonating chamber, an outdoor confessional where even the air seems to carry the weight of recalled experience. He speaks of playing a role in Lessing’s The Great Scholar and being unable for 20 years to move beyond the first line of an experiment he compulsively reenacts, as if treading a Möbius strip that mirrors his own philosophical dilemmas. He remembers the butcher shops of his childhood, the density of smell and sound that remains lodged in him with splinterlike insistence. He recounts the funeral of his brother’s friend, where he and his brother were beaten, their bicycle destroyed. These flashes enter abruptly and with startling clarity, then vanish again, as if delivered by a fragile projector that stutters between realms.

Radax punctuates the monologue with irregular fades to black. They do not function as dramatic gestures but as a kind of blinking, a punctuation suited to the syntax of thought. Bernhard often halts mid-sentence, not to create effect but because futility interrupts him, and the film chooses to honor these hesitations rather than conceal them. In the pauses, the park’s ambient life swells and the image inhales. One senses the weight of what remains unspoken, as though silence were an additional speaker at the bench.

When Bernhard reflects on isolation, he does so with the fluency of someone who has made loneliness his intellectual province. School was isolation, writing is a deeper isolation, and the self becomes a terrain that expands the longer one inhabits it. “If you are alone for a long time,” he says, “if you have become trained in loneliness, you discover more and more where for the normal person there is nothing.” He describes the page as a dark surface on which words suddenly appear like lightning strikes, as if language arrived from the same darkness it attempts to illuminate. Radax mimics this sensibility by allowing images to materialize from blackness with the same tentative grace.

Bernhard then recalls the sanatorium of his late teens, where illness and boredom pressed him into writing: “You either go mad or you begin to write.” For him, writing is less a craft than a disturbance, “the root of all evil I have to cope with now.” Yet when he turns to Vienna, his tone softens. The city’s melancholy, its overheard conversations, its minor tragedies unfurled on trams, all contribute to what he calls a “wonderful prerequisite for melancholy.” Vienna becomes a collaborator in his worldview, a place whose atmosphere trains one to hear the undertones of everyday communication.

Darkness is not a rhetorical flourish but a form of being. It is the origin from which truth emerges and the terminus to which everything returns: “The darkness is ultimate. It is farewell. It is everything.” Radax allows this final movement to settle without commentary, ending the film not with resolution but with an intake of breath, as if we are meant to accompany Bernhard toward that darkness rather than retreat from it.

A bonus interview from 2010 offers context without diminishing the resonance of the original film. Radax recalls reading Bernhard’s Frost and disliking it, yet becoming increasingly fascinated by the mind behind the work. He describes the challenges of filming, the elegant estate chosen as a location, Bernhard’s resistance to being directed, and the way the structure emerged as a matter of contingency rather than design. Above all, he insists on attention to detail. That attention is palpable in every frame of Three Days, which stands as one of the most intimate and spacious portraits ever made of a writer. It approaches documentary not as exposition but as shared solitude, a space constructed with meticulous care so that loneliness itself might speak.

VISIONary: Contemporary Short Documentaries and Experimental Films from Austria (INDEX 034)

| Tyran Grillo

VISIONary, the first two-disc anthology to make an appearance on the INDEX imprint, unfolds as a cartography of attention, an attempt to map the outer zones where Austrian documentary and experimental cinema probe the limits of seeing in the early 21st century. Curated by Michael Loebenstein and Norbert Pfaffenbichler, the set demonstrates how short-form filmmaking can bear witness to urgencies and absences, to architectures of power and of memory, to the world as lived and as imagined. How might images carry experience without embalming it, and how might sound reveal structures that narrative alone refuses to name?

Marine und Sascha, Kohleschiffer

Disc 1 begins by grounding these inquiries in the raw textures of endurance, displacement, and historical rupture. Ivette Löcker’s Marine und Sascha, Kohleschiffer (Marina and Sasha, Coal Shippers, 2008) introduces Lake Baikal’s frozen expanse as a site where labor and longing intermingle. Marina and Sasha wait for the ice to break so they can resume the work that both sustains and confines them. Their conversations drift between dreams and aphorisms, between faith in work and the sense that waiting for God and waiting for employment follow the same spiritual logic. Löcker’s camera listens as their voices echo across a landscape that offers neither comfort nor judgment. When Marina later writes that she and Sasha have left their profession, it resonates with the quiet force of two lives liberated from the time loop that once defined them.

Frauentag

Johannes Holzhausen’s Frauentag (Woman’s Day, 2008) turns from Siberia to the borderlands between Bavaria and the Czech Republic, revealing another kind of stasis. The border becomes a scar that is visible on maps yet continually reopens within remembrance. Through stories of displaced Germans, of lovers separated by territorial chess, and of families caught in the churn of postwar geopolitics, identity becomes a negotiation between inherited pasts and future uncertainties. August 15, Assumption Day, emerges as a memorial in which the land sponges the trauma that language often avoids. What might appear to be a minor observance serves as a reminder of our selective daily amnesia.

Eines Tages, nachts…

Moral clarity rings forth in Maria Arlamovsky’s Eines Tages, nachts… (A White Substance, 2008). A decade after the First Congo War, survivors speak on rape as a tactic of coercion, even as perpetrators offer evasions, officials shift responsibility, and UN peacekeepers are exposed as yet another predatory force. Lush landscapes collide with testimony that reveals the gulf between surface beauty and lived horror. As doctors describe children violated beyond comprehension, and how those treating them become collateral victims of their trauma, the film refuses to resolve such disorder, holding the viewer in a space where no disclosure can redeem the damage and no political rhetoric can soften its weight.

The disc closes with Klub Zwei’s Phaidon – Verlage im Exil (Phaidon – Publishers in Exile, 2007), which widens the frame to consider diaspora, cultural loss, and the ungraspable residue of ostracism. The story of Phaidon Press, founded in Vienna and driven into exile under National Socialism, becomes a parable of what happens when a country expels its intellectuals and artists. As Karin Gludovatz observes, “Phaidon is an example of the loss of people and of cultural resources that cannot be replaced through ‘reparations’—the voids Austria and Germany caused by National Socialism that must be made apparent.” Thus, the ruins of political upheaval are delineated as broken altars of restoration.

NightStill

Disc 2 offers some escape through abstraction. Michaela Schwentner’s la petite illusion (2006) opens with a cubist shattering of intimacy, portraying a couple through splintered interactions. In contrast, Elke Groen’s NightStill (2007) slows perception to a near-halt within the Dachstein mountains, where light and fog breathe through the landscape, and an electronic hum signals the presence of time itself. Unlike the work of Dariusz Kowalski, to which it might be compared, it has no feeling of menace but of a comforting progression that moves without intervention.

Minot, North Dakota

These shifts in tempo lay the groundwork for Angelika Brudniak and Cynthia Madansky’s Minot, North Dakota (2008), a study of a town sitting above 150 nuclear missiles once built to attack the Russians but which now lay slumbering beneath it. Children’s voices, testimonies from Air Force personnel, and the blank gaze of surveillance cameras mesh in quiet negotiation with catastrophe. The wonderful soundtrack from Zeena Parkins adds an unsettling undercurrent.

In the Mix

Jan Machacek’s In the Mix (2008) offers kinetic release, attaching a camera to a blender so the room becomes a spinning environment through which a dancer moves in playful resistance. The experiment pivots sharply into Siegfried Fruhauf’s Night Sweat (2007), a concentration on dread through lunar silhouettes and throbbing tones, evoking cosmic terror. Dietmar Offenhuber’s paths of g (2006) transforms Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory into pure geometry, maintaining the original sound while turning the tracking shot into a bare-motion trace. War is reduced to a choreography of pixels stripped (but not robbed) of their humanity.

Borgate

Lotte Schreiber’s Borgate (2008) turns its attention to modernist Italian housing projects now stranded in their own saga. Fascist architecture, appropriated dialogue from Fellini and Pasolini, and crumbling structures combine into a palimpsest of utopian failure. billy roisz’s not still (2008) cuts across the grain with audiovisual glitch in a battle between screens and faces before Josef Dabernig and Isabella Hollauf’s Aquarena (2007) shifts the mode of inquiry toward infrastructure, revealing water systems as choreographies of law, design, and hidden logic. Michaela Grill and Martin Siewert’s cityscapes (2007) refashion archival photographs of Vienna into trembling proto-memories, suggesting that cities sustain themselves in glimpses, not foundations.

visibility of interim~

dextro’s 43 (2008) continues this interrogation of form by generating algorithmic white shapes that feel both biological and digital. Martin Bruch and Reinhilde Condin’s home.movie (2008) contrasts with deep intimacy as a camera travels along a track system designed by Bruch for his own mobility. Manuel Knapp’s visibility of interim~ (2007) conjures wireframe architectures that arise and collapse in the same breath, and Barbara Doser’s evolverevolve 01 (2008) concludes the anthology with pulsing neon synaesthesia where light and color find consonance in a kind of primordial signal.

Taken together, the works in VISIONary reveal cinema as a way of diving into the waves of experience. The documentary films remind us that truth is always situated within structures that sustain or wound. The experimental films remind us that vision itself is an invention, a means of producing what reality alone cannot yield. Through both modalities, portraits come to matter not because they are accurate but because they allow the visible to resonate with what we cannot see. In this sense, the anthology lives up to its name, offering not merely a record of the world but a proposition for how it might be perceived anew.