Reviews

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.

Maria Lassnig: Animation Films (INDEX 033)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dariusz Kowalski: Optical Vacuum (INDEX 032)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martina Kudláček: Notes on Marie Menken (INDEX 030)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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