Reviews

Kurt Kren: Which way to CA? (INDEX 020)

| Tyran Grillo

When Michael Palm asks, “What does it mean to recognize a documentary gesture in Kren’s films?” he touches the central paradox of Kurt Kren’s twilight period. Long associated with the Vienna Actionists and known for some of the most uncompromising structural films ever made, Kren did not turn to the documentary mode as a fallback. It emerged as a quiet intensification of his lifelong fascination with fragments, the energies of the everyday, and the body’s unstable position within political and aesthetic systems. During his years in America, he jokingly called these late works “bad home movies.” Palm insists they do not refer to a distant elsewhere but to the vivid here and now. They relinquish the mythic aura of the avant-garde in favor of lived contingencies, grounding Kren in a world that rarely notices him.

Whereas home movies locate the filmmaker in a selective, recognizable way, Kren is an émigré in constant dislocation. The power of this art lies in this refusal to monumentalize either the American landscape or his own presence within it. Up close but rarely personal, these films are flashes of collisions between the remembered intensity of radical youth and the inevitable disjunction of aging.

Happy-end

This shift in practice begins with the prophetic ruin of 18/68 Venecia kaputt, where a battleship looms in the haze as blue spots burst across the frame. It is as if Venice and the film stock corrode together. The camera attempts to bear witness even as its own material disappears. That sense of vanishing matter, of form dissolving as soon as it appears, sets the tone for what follows. In 22/69 Happy-end, the viewer sits in a theater, watching Kren watch films, only to have the experience interrupted by stray bursts of pornography. Kren is no longer detailing the images on the screen but exposing the structures of looking that keep them arbitrarily intact.

Western

This concern with spectatorship continues with 23/69 Underground Explosion, where a touring underground festival is captured with a camera held at the hip. The tremor is not an aesthetic choice but the imprint of presence. The image vibrates not to signify energy but to enact it. In 24/70 Western, a poster of My Lai trembles under Kren’s insistence. The film ends in Vienna, collapsing distance, reminding the viewer that atrocity is never elsewhere but leaks into every geography.

Auf der Pfaueninsel

Even the more eccentric detours of the early seventies enter this widening arc of regard. 26/71 Zeichenfilm – Balzac und das Auge Gottes, Kren’s laconic allegory involving an “eye of God,” a near-hanging, and a sacrilegious eruption, folds Actionist grotesquerie into the logic of animation, as if to test the boundaries of what constitutes a record. 27/71 Auf der Pfaueninsel shifts the playing field again, turning a simple walk with the Brus family into a meditation on proportion. The credits, twice as long as the film itself, suggest that certainty can reside in the absence of emphasis. And in 29/73 Ready-made, Kren reads Groucho Marx’s exasperated letters to Warner Bros., turning authorship into a relay of citations.

Keine Donau

These works culminate in the existential drift of his American films. In 30/73 Coop Cinema Amsterdam, filmed just prior to his emigration, he observes an art cinema’s daily rhythms, paying attention not to the people who inhabit it but to the micro-gestures of the space itself: doors breathing open, light carving the dark. When he returns to Vienna for 33/77 Keine Donau, his camera broken and his routine disrupted, the window becomes a fractured prism. The Danube is absent, displacement all that remains.

Getting warm

The collection’s 1981 title film transforms a road trip from Vermont to California into a consideration of anonymity. Black and white reduces the vast landscapes to a kind of near-nowhere, stripping specificity from cars, mountains, and the ocean. The camcorder aesthetic confers a strange doubleness: Kren is both present and passing, lost in a journey that offers no arrival. 40/81 Breakfast im Grauen watches workers dismantle old houses in New Hampshire, noting the fragility of rest amid destruction, while in 42/83 Getting warm, a move to Texas becomes a chain of waking moments, tire changes, night-day shifts, and survival rituals.

Snapshots

Kren condenses the autobiographical reaction to its barest possible form in 42/83 No Film, which records a few seconds of motionless writing. Other works lean toward spectral reproduction, as in 43/84 1984, where the Reagan–Mondale debate appears ghostly and doubled. 44/85 Foot’ -age shoot’ -out blends Houston’s skyline with Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, the camera’s obsessive returns to a hotel door evoking the ache of interior escape, before collapsing into a vision of suburban grass that feels meticulously maintained yet devoid of meaning. Even his Viennese advertisement, 46/90 Falter 2, finds brilliance in the velocity of subway commuters. Finally, 50/96 Snapspots (for Bruce), filmed at Vienna’s Strauss monument, exposes tourism as a ritual of self-making, photographs flickering into motion as if caught between stillness and performance.

Hans Scheugl’s 55-minute portrait, Keine Donau: Kurt Kren und seine Filme (No Danube: Kurt Kren and His Films), gathers these fragments, offering Kren’s voice as connective tissue while preserving his elusiveness. Kren speaks while driving, offering glimpses of his past, his wry humor, his fluctuating sense of belonging. The interviews provide anecdotal grounding without resolving the disjunctions at the heart of the films.

Taken together, Kren’s late works make no claims to authority, revelation, or coherent story. Neither naïve nor nostalgic, they mark a sea change from happening to being. They do not gesture toward a lost European past or a promised American future. They remain suspended in the moment, each a tiny conceptual flare. In their trembling, he discovers a new kind of cinema, one that documents nothing but the fact of living and, in doing so, documents everything.

Jan Peters: …but I still haven’t figured out the meaning of life (INDEX 019)

| Tyran Grillo

Becoming without End: Jan Peters and the Cinema of Ongoingness
Jan Peters’s long-term diaristic project, Ich bin… (I am…), unfolds as an accidental autobiography, a chronicle of becoming that resists anything so stable as identity. Living and working between Hamburg and Paris, Peters crafts these films not as testimony but as experiments in cinematic presence. What begins as a private exercise in front of a Super-8 camera gradually turns into a ritual: once a year, from age 24 to 40, Peters records himself speaking to the lens about his life, his doubts, his failures, his aspirations, and the embarrassments that lace through every attempt to speak honestly about oneself.

Claus Löser, in his booklet essay, makes clear that these are not windows into a life but catalysts for unexpected insight. They are awkward, provisional nodes of retrospection, moments in which Peters grasps at mortal straws while simultaneously acknowledging that their purpose may be perpetually deferred. The films trace a philosophy of the perpetually revised. Self-perception is not an essence but a moving target, an emergent shape in an archive of gestures, hesitations, slips, and confessions.

Peters never intended these films to become a series. The first installments embarrassed him; they were rough, juvenile, too revealing. Yet when, after screening one at a university seminar, a professor asked him when Ich bin 25 would be made, what he once considered a private try-on suddenly took on the form of an open document. And so he continued, year after year, even as the technology changed, from Super-8 to home video to the immediacy of cellphone lenses. As his tools evolved, so did the textures of self-examination.

J’ai 20 ans

Prologue: J’ai 20 ans (1984)
The collection opens with this short directed by partner Hélèna Villovitch in 1984. It is a silent work that sets the tone for everything that follows: a dark room, a mirror scrawled with words, hands used as luminous backdrops; makeup applied not for beauty but metamorphosis; lipstick obliterating the mirror until identity becomes pure gesture. Her cigarette hangs in front of a poster for Breathless. Even here, the diary form already strains against stable meaning.

Ich bin 27

Ich bin 25–29: Fractures in the Emerging Self
The early films occupy the raw zone of self-representation, where uneven lighting and awkward sound reveal the mechanics of a young man still learning how to speak himself into existence. At 25, Peters jokes that the only honest thing would be to sit naked before the camera, and he does so, a gesture that collapses irony into exposure. A year later, vulnerability shifts inward as an MRI scan of his spinal column becomes a quiet emblem for the entire project.

Number 27, filmed in grainy black and white, treats unemployment as both a material condition and an aesthetic limitation. Cheap film stock mirrors a stripped-down life, prompting reflections on childhood and the arithmetic of time, as if counting hours could compensate for an absence of meaning. Then, at 28, emotional gravity enters the frame: an unplanned pregnancy, the woman’s decision to have an abortion without involving him, and his uneasy attempt to contribute financially. He confesses that “men appear to be incapable of grasping anything at all,” a remark that exposes both his helplessness and his wish to understand what he cannot access.

In his 29th year, he looks not backward but ahead, pondering memory’s unreliability and the shifting nature of personal narrative. A parallel entry, made by a Paris filmmaker on April 29 as a birthday gift, refracts him from the outside, drifting through associations that place Peters within someone else’s imaginative field.

Ich bin 33

Ich bin 30–34: Time, Excess, and Technological Revolt
As Peters enters his thirties, the tone oscillates between levity and introspection. At 30, filming inside a car, he sings a playful song, an almost self-canceling gesture that acknowledges the ordinariness of many days and the impossibility of always mustering insight. The following year, sharing a Paris flat with Hélèna, he muses on the subjectivity of time while the camera sputters into repeated pauses, as if exasperated by his philosophizing. These mechanical refusals become a meta-commentary on the diary itself, which resists being turned into a philosophical vessel.

By 32, filming in the bathtub, he admits he cannot bear to look at his own reflection, and once again, the camera quits mid-thought. At 33, a solar eclipse darkens a field around him. When light returns, he speaks of being perpetually broke but relieved that the world did not end. His anxieties are momentarily absorbed into a larger, cosmic cycle. Then, at 34, video technology becomes its own antagonist: the medium’s “unbearable length” feels suffocating, and Peters screens the footage only in fast-forward, a gesture of compression that mirrors the temporal fallout of the entire series.

Wie ich ein Höhlenmaler wurde

Breaking the brief cadence of the annual updates, a 20-minute work from 2001 titled Wie ich ein Höhlenmaler wurde (How I became a cave-painter) parodizes reportage, full of errors that become structural signatures. He tries on wigs in a theater prop room, drives aimlessly, and wanders through nightclubs in altered states. He and his girlfriend project homemade pornography onto a window, visible to the outside world yet unnoticed. A tear in the paper the next morning creates a pinhole camera effect, a metaphor for the accidental apertures through which life enters art. It ends with selfies taped to theater seats, populating an imaginary audience with (re)iterations of himself.

Ich bin 40

Ich bin 36–40: Return, Rupture, Release
With 36, a digital point-and-shoot replaces earlier formats. Grain gives way to sharpness, and immediacy replaces texture. Peters comments on his technological “up-to-dateness,” already obsolete at the moment of articulation. The following year, he returns to his childhood home, attempting to re-inhabit a place that no longer fits him. At 38, the camera collapses into darkness; the diary becomes blind, reduced to pixel ghosts drifting across the frame. At 39, he declares his desire for limitless possibility, only to describe himself in the same breath as a bulldozer driver shoving around debris—an apt metaphor for adulthood’s strange blend of freedom and obligation. At 40, he abandons language altogether, dancing and pantomiming through an art gallery.

Bonus Films
Ich bin in Chicago (1991) captures Peters struggling to speak above the roar of highway traffic, a reminder of how easily communication can be drowned out by circumstance. Ich habe einen Lincoln (1994), filmed at San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, transforms technological disappointment into deadpan humor as he praises his car’s innovations while admitting that it barely works.

Ich bin Chicago

In Praise of the Unfinished
Taken as a whole, Ich bin… reveals itself to be anything but. It refuses resolution, coherence, and continuity. Each installment is, at best, a provisional answer to the question of who he is, only to be contradicted by the next. Meaning accumulates through the ritual of returning rather than in singular revelations. And so, the project is not about finding the meaning of life but about honoring the impossibility of doing so.

In the end, he does not find himself, nor does he wish to. Instead, he constructs something more fragile and more revealing: a cinematic record of a self continually in transit, unfinished, unresolved, and therefore unmistakably alive.

Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (INDEX 018)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Schatzl: Farrago (INDEX 017)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dietmar Brehm: Black Garden (INDEX 016)

| Tyran Grillo

Trauma, Erotics, and the Phantasmatic Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: On the Edge of the Unbearable

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sonic Fiction: Synaesthetic Videos from Austria (INDEX 014)

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

The 12 Sections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus Tracks

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

When Light Remembers Itself

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

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

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