Rude & Playful Shadows: Collective Performances of Cinema in Cold
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Rude & Playful Shadows: Collective Performances of Cinema in Cold War Europe by Megan E Hoetger A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Shannon Jackson, Chair Julia Bryan-Wilson Abigail De Kosnik Anton Kaes Spring 2019 Abstract Rude & Playful Shadows: Collective Performances of Cinema in Cold War Europe by Megan E Hoetger Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair “Rude & Playful Shadows: Collective Performances of Cinema in Cold War Europe” is a historical examination, which engages rigorous discursive and performance-based analysis of underground film screening events that crossed the West/East divide and brought together an international group of artists and filmmakers during some of the “hottest” years of the Cold War period. At its center, the study investigates the practices of two pioneering filmmakers, Austrian Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna, 1998) and German Birgit Hein (b. Berlin, 1942). Tracking their aesthetic, ideological, and spatial reconfigurations of the cinematic apparatus—their “performances of cinema”—in Austria and former West Germany, the dissertation demonstrates how Kren and Hein were progenitors of influential new viewing practices that operated in the tacit geopolitical interstices between nation- states and underground cultures. Contemporary art, film, and media scholarship tends to move in one of two directions: either toward aesthetic inquiries into the appearance of moving images and other time-based arts in the visual art museum since the 1990s, or toward the politics of global media distribution in the digital age. “Rude & Playful Shadows,” alternatively, takes two steps back, seeing these strands of inquiry as interlocked sets of historical conditions. Practices such as those of Kren and Hein, this study contends, were vital to the formation of contemporary arts curatorial models. Importantly, if not paradoxically, they also remain crucial models for conceptualizing noncommercial and anti-institutional underground circulation and the kinds of convenings such movement fosters. Each chapter of the study looks at different screening event forms in which Kren and Hein partook, considering how these forms developed under different sets of materials circumstances and in response to different sets of political aspirations. Through its analysis of these event forms and practices of “eventing,” “Rude & Playful Shadows” sheds new light on pre-histories of today’s transnational time-based media networks, offering critical revision of the conventions for reading allied histories of art and film, film and performance, performance and art. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Preface iii Introduction Expanding and Eventing Performances of Cinema in Cold War Europe 1 Blurring / Expanded / Expanding 4 Eventing / Kurt Kren and Birgit Hein / Cold War Europe 8 Performances of Cinema: Transdisciplinary Encounters 14 Towards a Distribution Studies Methodology 22 Chapter Overview and Something Else 26 Chapter One Collectivizing Distribution in Vienna Meetings, Markets, and Bildung at the Edges of the Institution 31 Visibility, Legibility, and Bildung: Artist Meeting Formations and New Approaches to Distribution. 39 Pedagogical Meetings and the Educational Marketplace: The Institute for Direct Art 48 Grounds for Critique: The Austria Filmmakers’ Cooperative 67 Conclusion: Return to the Amsterdam Coop 90 Chapter Two Convening Curated Programs in Cologne Underground Cinema between State and Markets 93 Curated Programs: A Cinema of Attraction for the Nuclear Age 100 Setting up the Studio: Underground Attitudes and Infrastructures 106 “The Underground Pushes Up”: The XSCREEN Program at Art Cologne, 1968 118 “It Was the Way We Lived”: Daily Life and the Underground 136 Conclusion: After Underground Explosion, Convening as Critique 145 Chapter Three Displaying Experimental Film in Kassel Above Ground Formations of the Time-Based Exhibition 153 Time-Based Exhibitions: New Consumer Patterns for the New Cinema of Attraction 158 Das 100-Tage Ereignis: Eventing the Exhibition, Expanding Pedagogical Purview 167 Events that Make it Above Ground: d6 and Experimental Film 179 Conclusion: “Film Als Film” and Cinema’s Performances 197 Epilogue Something Else Still 202 Bibliography 208 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A historical study of this nature requires support from a multitude of institutions and people; it simply would not have been possible without archive access and insights from the following (in no particular order): Antonella Bonafante and Canyon Cinema, San Francisco; MM Serra and the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative; the Getty Research Institute; the Pacific Film Archive; Steve Polta and the San Francisco Cinematheque; Ilona Lütken at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Susanne Rübsam at the documenta Archiv; Dirk Burghardt and Rudolf Fischer at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Egidio Marzona; Marie-Therese Hochwartner and the Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig Stiftung Wien; Marian Wallace and No Nothing Cinema, San Francisco; Jean-Paul Dorchain and the Royal Film Archive, Belgium; Stanford University; University of California, Santa Cruz; Diana Nenadić and the Croatia Film Association; Tanja Vrvilo; Ivan Paic and everyone at the Zagreb Student Cultural Center; Bojana Piškur at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana; the Tate Britain; David Curtis and Stephen Ball at Central St. Martins; and Regina Schlagnitweit at the Austrian Film Museum. Special thanks to those who took the time for formal interviews, sometimes more than once, including: Steve Anker; Martin Arnold; Sabine Breitwieser; Brigitta Burger-Utzer; David Curtis; Xavier Garcia Bardon; Nicky Hamlyn; Birgit Hein; Wilhelm Hein; Michael Johnsen and Greg Peirce; Ralf Kaethner; Malcom LeGrice; Marian Luntz; Matthias Michalka; Bruce Posner; Hans Scheugl; and Peter Weibel. And, of course, nothing on this long and winding research trail would have happened if I had not had the incredible patience and support of my committee members at the University of California, Berkeley, including Shannon Jackson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Abigail De Kosnik, and Anton Kaes. There were numerous moments, I am sure, when they listened to me talk through the mountain of original source materials I was uncovering and had to go on pure trust that I would not get lost in the thickness of histories that I was unearthing. At numerous moments along the way, in fact, I felt myself moving without a compass, and I relied on the attentiveness, enthusiasm, and navigational input of countless interlocutors across UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division and beyond, especially my academic family in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; my adopted cohort in the Department of the History of Art; my long-term readers, Sara Blaylock and Megan Metcalf, both of whom I met in the Julia Bryan-Wilson’s writing group early on in my ABD work; and participants in the Townsend Center working groups on Contemporary Art, Sound Studies, and New Media 2014-2016, as well as participants and co-facilitators of the 2017–2018 Critical Theory working group “Collaboration, Cooperative, Coalition-Building.” Across these diverse contexts, innumerable brilliant minds helped me to work through my ideas by introducing me to other ways of thinking and other directions of approach. Even before arriving at UC Berkeley, the seeds of this project were planted many years ago while completing a master’s thesis; to my committee at CSU Long Beach, Nizan Shaked, Karen Kleinfelder, and Matthew Simms, I owe a great deal. This manuscript is that much stronger for all that they taught me; for all that each of these interlocutors have taught me. Most of all I owe the deepest thanks to those that have sustained me in ways closer to the heart, ways upon which my practical and psychic survival has depended. All the femme love to my chosen family: Jahan Khajavi, Alex Hurt, Albino Penna, Adrien Fischer, Giorgio Celen, Emma Silverman and Sara Smith-Silverman, Jess Dorrance, Julia Havard, Ellen Feiss, Sasha Rossman, Kirila Cvetkovska, Catherine Foulkrod, and Amber Osiadacz. Together we traverse worlds and imagine new ones. Alles gut kommt von unten. ii PREFACE Sitting in the office of film scholar Anton Kaes at UC Berkeley on an overcast day in the early spring of 2013, I could not help but to smile as he recounted for me his first encounter with the work of the 1960s Austrian art movement known Viennese Actionism, specifically artist Otto Mühl’s performance, O Tannenbaum, from 1964. Structural filmmaker Kurt Kren’s highly edited celluloid translation of Mühl’s performance 8/64—a flicker film harkening back to the days of the stag film—was being screened as part of a Monday night underground film series at the Türkendolch restaurant/bar/college hangout behind the University of Munich. The year was 1969. Kaes went silent for a moment and, staring off into the distance, described the darkened space: haphazard with some chairs and tables around, and a thick cloud of hash smoke hovering just below the ceiling as The Doors’ “The End” played. He and other film students showed up with no idea of what was to be screened; it was a habit of faith, “like a religious thing,” he said, where you just went. You went to see something transgressive and “weird” (Andy Warhol’s films also came up as did the early theatre experiments of Fassbinder and his troupe when students there); you went because this was the alternative cinema context—what we sitting here today might think of as “art” film was not yet in the museums and nowhere near possible in the popular movie houses. Kaes could still vividly remember seeing Mühl and Kren’s work. He paused again—this time I could almost see him seeing the film—and after a few moments he continued: “it was beyond obscenity, beyond nudity.” Our conversation turned in another direction, returning to Kren’s film only when the word “excess” came up in discussion of the 1960s context.