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.

Peter Weibel: Körperaktionen Bodyworks 1967-2003 (INDEX 043)

| Tyran Grillo

Peter Weibel’s Körperaktionen (Bodyworks) reveal him as the Actionist who refused the Actionists’ mythology. While others pushed inward toward abjection and self-wounding, Weibel turned outward toward media, politics, semiotics, and the body as a site where power writes its own grammar. His gestures are never self-contained eruptions. They are conceptual irritants that question whether an “action” is an event, an inscription, a perceptual trap, or an estrangement from social order. The body becomes the primary medium not because it grants access to primal truth but because it is the site where systems fray at the seams.

Lüstern

This appetite for estrangement is already present in Fingerprint (1968), which uses the film strip to produce sound, image, and a forensic poetics of identity. A print is an index of presence, a bureaucratic marker, a residue of control, and, finally, a reminder that the flesh leaves traces, whether we like it or not. Nüstern (Nostrils) and Lüstern (Lascivious) (both from 1969) push the close-up toward distortion until isolated members appear as media property rather than human attributes. A magnified nose, an eroticized massage revealed as nothing more than an orange, both dismantle the consumer industry’s habit of slicing us into marketable zones of sensation.

Das Recht mit Füßen treten

The Text films from 1974—Augentexte, Mundtext, Stirntext—literalize the notion that the body speaks. Yet the speech is stuttering, mechanical, self-consuming. The eye blinks words, the mouth utters “SCHEISSE” before swallowing it, the forehead writes until it throbs. Language contaminates skin and vice versa. In Das Recht mit Füßen treten (Trampling on Rights, 1967/68), museum visitors step on the word “recht” scattered across the floor in an unwitting political gait. Here, the act belongs to the public, hinting at what is perhaps Weibel’s most radical proposition: spectators are never neutral. Lösung der Phantasie (Solution of Fantasy, 1972) examines hair as a philosophical emblem, elegant when attached to the head and repulsive when shed, offering a small but potent meditation on beauty and decay sharing the same root.

Fluidum und Eigentum: Körperverhältnisse als Eigentumsmaße

Weibel often condenses his motifs of interest into crystalline forms. Wie hat sich aus den Fischen die Mathematik entwickelt? (How Did Mathematics Evolve From the Fish?, 1971) is a self-styled visual haiku centered on a typewritten iteration of “hand,” zooming until the word mutates into a pure visual pattern. Fluidum und Eigentum: Körperverhältnisse als Eigentumsmaße (Fluidum and Property: Body Relations as Measure of Property, 1971/72) examines the idea of property by asking at what scale ownership collapses: bread, chair, room, shadow. Each item passes through the body’s orbit of affordance and discards the illusion that possession is stable.

Kokain(e)

Such explorations of symbolic order continue in Grüß Gott (1967/72), where Weibel and Susanne Widl casually eat pretzel letters forming the titular greeting, turning Austrian piety into edible farce. Kokain(e) (1972) reveals a pornographic image hidden beneath a can of fish printed with St. Stephen’s Cathedral, suggesting that sacred and obscene imagery differ only by their packaging. His reconstruction of Duchamp’s Stoppages-étalon (1970/71) reenacts the dropping of a thread to show that randomness, not symmetry, is the geometry of modernity. Vulkanologie der Emotionen (Vulcanology of the Emotions, 1971/73) arranges bodily poses as geological layers of feeling, while whale-like moans push the human voice toward prelinguistic depths.

Venus im Pelz

Weibel’s inquiry into the politics of looking continues in Aktbesprechung oder Inverses Selbstporträt (Discussion of the Nude or Inverse Self-Portrait, 1975/76), which reverses the male gaze by showing male nudes through women’s descriptions. The men become mirrors without agency, their vulnerability revealed through shifting reactions. Switcher Sex (1972) overlays body parts into unstable configurations, turning gender into an assemblage that resists coherence. Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs, 2003) uses morphing technology to blend centuries of painted Venuses into a single monstrous continuum, exposing the canon as an endlessly repeated, idealized submission. Vers und Vernunft (Rhyme and Reason, 1978) stages Weibel and Widl in a cage of television screens, grunting and breathing themselves into exhaustion until reason gives way to an animal rhythm. Zeitblut – Blutglocke (Timeblood – Bloodbell, 1972/79/83) completes this arc by spilling his own blood on national television. Through this action, every Austrian home was simultaneously filled with his life essence, as if the media had become a circulatory system carrying his interiority into the public domain.

Kunst und Revolution: Brandrede

Three films by Ernst Schmidt Jr., previously seen on INDEX 042, are also included among the selections curated on this DVD. Kunst und Revolution: Brandrede (Art and Revolution: Incendiary Speech, 1968) documents Weibel’s speech from his infamous June 7, 1968, performance at the University of Vienna. With one hand aflame, he quotes Lenin and Chernyshevsky in a powerful deconstruction of rhetoric. “The goal of the speech action,” he recalls, “was to inflame consciousness, to pass the flame of revolution and freedom to its listeners, and it was realized in the form of a body action.” Denkakt (1967) captures Weibel thinking aloud until the medium truncates his thought, proving that technological limits mediate cognition itself: “[F]ilmmaking meaning nothing other than the production, derivation of figures, events according to the possibilities of the formation film, for example with celluloid or the movie auditorium, screen, spectators.” The notorious Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit (From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968/69), in which VALIE EXPORT walks Weibel as one would a dog, literalizes power inversion and makes the male body the site of disciplinary display. The title is a play on Aus der Mappe der Menschlichkeit (From the Portfolio of Humanity), a leaflet once distributed weekly by the Red Cross.

Across these projects, Weibel does not use the self to enact mysticism or sacrifice. He treats it as a contested field where authority, machinery, desire, and perception collide, and where every decision reveals the infrastructures attempting to constrict it. His Actions expose that the body, even in the absence of a camera, is already mediated by the lens of the human eye and that the screen is not a recording device but a palimpsest for sociopolitical fictions. Over decades, Weibel has pursued nothing less than a decolonization of the sensorium. He invites us to notice what we have been trained to ignore, to feel what we anesthetize, and to recognize how deeply the rules of visibility are written into these bags of bones we imagine as our own.

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.