Press Information November 2017

Dear colleagues, in November, the ongoing film retrospective “Utopia and Correction: Soviet Cinema 1926-1940 and 1956- 1977” (October 13 to November 30), as well as the previously announced events - Filmmuseum on location: A Tribute to George A. Romero: Concert and Film (November 3, 2017, Gartenbaukino) and the symposium “No Time to Wait 2” (November 9 and 10, 2017), will be complemented by several smaller programs and film series. We hope this month’s program, focusing on independent cinema, historical “borings” into the Argentine avant-garde film production and the cultural history of Vienna, will be of interest to you.

Michael Loebenstein

Robert Frank Complete Works

In November, parallel to a large photography exhibition at the Albertina, the Film Museum will show the willful film oeuvre of legendary American photographer Robert Frank , as well as a new documentary film portrait of the artist , Don't Blink – Robert Frank (Laura Israel, 2015).

The films and videos of Robert Frank are among the best-kept secrets in film history. His debut film, the beatnik ode Pull My Daisy (1959), is considered a classic, while his three feature-length films – the fascinating experiment on schizophrenia, Me and My Brother (1968), the infamous Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues (1972) and the musical road movie Candy Mountain (1987) – have all received due attention. But even if the revival of interest in Frank has largely been due to his work as photographer, the bulk of his audiovisual opus remains mostly unknown and virtually impossible to see in the cinema.

These consist primarily of intensely personal film essays which follow a fleeting, highly contemporary aesthetic and revolve around topics which only appear to be inconsequential and trivial. A unique outsider's view of the possibilities of cinema can be discovered in these works.

Born in Zurich in 1925, Frank studied French and trained as a photographer in Switzerland before emigrating to New York in 1947, where he started working as a fashion and art photographer. His sensational photography book The Americans (1958), featuring a foreword by Jack Kerouac, delivered a dark counterpart to the image America had of itself. The Americans gradually became established as one of the most influential photography books of the 20th century , whereas Frank, on the verge of fame immediately following its publication, shifted his focus to cinema.

Having already shown all of Robert Frank’s film and video works in November 2003, now, fourteen years later, parallel to a large-scale exhibition at the Albertina, the Film Museum once more offers a full retrospective, expanded by three video works Frank produced since 2002.

Due to the complicated legal status of Cocksucker Blues , restricted to only four public screenings a year worldwide, the film will be shown in mid-January. The Film Museum will screen the film as the finale of the parallel photography exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at the Albertina (through January 21, 2018). Visitors of the Film Museum will be granted concessionary admission to the Albertina on presentation of their tickets. www.albertina.at

November 10 to 27, 2017

In Person: Claudio Caldini und Pablo Marín

With films by Claudio Caldini (b. 1952, Buenos Aires) and Pablo Marín (b. 1982, Buenos Aires), the Austrian Film Museum presents two generations of Argentinean avant-garde filmmaking that began in the mid-1960s and went almost unnoticed in Austria until now.

These works show a high degree of autonomy despite prominent references to the avant-garde traditions of the 1920s and the New American Cinema , oscillating between the poles of lyrical and structural film.

This is evident in the works of Caldini and Marín, who share a mentor-protégé relationship and whose combined work spans the time from the beginnings of independent filmmaking in Argentina up to the present day. One thing they have in common is their concentrated work with the 8-mm format, which they have both perfected while taking different stylistic directions. Both artists' films are characterized by a radical reduction of means, enabled by a rigorous technical mastery of the medium that taps its aesthetic potential without ever seeming contrived or constructed. Caldini and Marín's films have a loose, incidental and also hypnotic quality that draws on the material substance of film without constantly referencing it.

Both artists play a dual role in this show. Marín through his works and his curatorial engagement, which helped make Argentinean independent film more understandable and visible on a international level. Caldini's film work is shown in conjunction with a performance that once again underscores the "live element" resting at the heart of all these works – most were and still are screened in the presence of the filmmakers, who operated the projector themselves.

The project is a cooperation between the Austrian Film Museum, sixpackfilm and the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, where Claudio Caldini and Pablo Marín will conduct a workshop. With the friendly support of the Embassy of Argentina. November 15 and 16, 2017

Eyes Wide Shut Two concerts at the Invisible Cinema

In cooperation with Wien Modern, SUGAR, Yes Sœur! and the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop will be our guests on two successive evenings. The concert series Eyes Wide Shut , curated by the .akut Association for Aesthetics and Applied Cultural Theory, picks up where the “Vienna Version” of Morgan Fisher’s 2012 film Screening Room left off: in a frontal close-up of a glowing, filmless screen.

How do we hear in the cinema? Can we imagine a parallel history of cinema that renounces the dominance of image over sound and reflects on the film as much as the movie theatre based on its acoustic qualities? These questions will be addressed again and again by upcoming events in the following seasons at the Film Museum. The first occasion presented itself thanks to a cooperation with Wien Modern, and we have the pleasure of announcing two concerts at the Invisible Cinema.

Eyes Wide Shut was conceived and put into action by Han-Gyeol Lie / .akut Association for Aesthetics and Applied Cultural Theory. On these evenings, with the exception of the emblematic showing of Morgan Fisher’s experimental film Screening Room (1968/2012) intended for the Film Museum, film will take a break. Two musical performances, one by Ensemble SUGAR and the other by Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop , will musically reinterpret the space of the Invisible Cinema, calling our attention to our fixation on the image on the screen as a source of acoustic sensations.

Two evenings between surround sound, experimental video, musique concrète and the texts of French composer and theorist Michel Chion.

November 18 and 19, 2017 2

Visions of Vienna Book Launch and Film Series

On the occasion of the publication of her new work on the cinematic Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s , author Alexandra Seibel invited the Film Museum to cocurate a small film program of both rare and canonical Vienna-set films.

Cinematic Vienna is more than the mere sum of its locations. In 2003, the Film Museum organized a scientific event focused on the relationship between the city and its tranposition into cinema, fittingly called “Imagining the City.” Alexandra Seibel’s latest book, published in English by Amsterdam University Press, deals with an imaginary Vienna as well, a Vienna concieved by visionary directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and Max Ophüls. By analyzing films of the twenties and thirties, Visions of Vienna. Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema shows how the allegedly nostalgic, romantic Vienna is tied to crucial issues of modernity: migration, class relations, changes in working conditions, feminism and anti-Semitism.

The author, Viennese herself and film editor of Kurier newspaper, investigates cinematic Vienna in films made by American and German/Austrian directors on the basis of recurring topoi and figures: the “Viennese girl”; the Heuriger and the Prater as a place of both refuge and temptation; the operette and the waltz; and the gap between rich and poor, empire and modernity, transferred via film sets onto the map of an utterly artificial Vienna.

To start off the film series, Alexandra Seibel will present the key images and ideas of her book , whereas the conclusion of the program will come in the form of a screening of selected “ephemeral” films organized by the Film Museum and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute – unknown, fragmentary and/or anonymous finds from the joint ongoing research project “I-Media-Cities.” The series will include world-famous classics such as Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) and Max Ophüls Liebelei (1933), but also rarities such as the opening film Reunion in Vienna (1933), a Viennese fantasy concocted for MGM by Sidney Franklin, starring John Barrymore as Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg.

All silent films will be accompanied by live piano music. The film programs will be introduced by Alexandra Seibel. November 23 to 27, 2017

For more information and photos, please visit www.filmmuseum.at or contact: Alessandra Thiele, [email protected] , T +43 | 1 | 533 70 54 Ext 22

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