Machfeld

Videoart from Austria
curated by
MACHFELD
(Sabine Maier | Michael Mastrototaro)
www.machfeld.netbiography

presented on 2 April 2011 at Arad Art Museum (Romania)

CologneOFF 2011 Arad – 31 March – 2 April 2011

The short film is a popular medium used to provide opportunities for debates on a specific subject.
It may provide concise, provocative, contradictory challenging information or even a compassionate image.
Our aim with this selection is an artistic reflection in the development of individual and aesthetic form of the short film. From this perspective, the most recent is not always the most contemporary. Therefore the uniqueness and consistency of the formal language is more important than the production date.
The ambitious experimental films were artistically selected and represent the diversity in avant-garde and Austrian short – filmmaking.
The sequence of the show is not in chronological order. Films of the seventies are shown next to recent experimental videos transforming the experience into a journey through time.
The diversity of the material (Beta SP / Super 8 / Digital) is an important component for understanding where the film / video is coming from; moreover it exemplifies the emotional layers of these different medias.

.
Artists:

1.
Eva Ursprung
biography

Title of work: “was werbung” (what commercial)
year: 1979, duration: 2 min.

credits:
director: Eva Ursprung
camera, script: Andreas Wildbein
actors: Eva Ursprung, Herbert Ripan

short synopsis
A young woman trying to tape her future identities between a stack of super8 film cartridges, everyday objects and a boy from the rural neighborhood. In the fast esthetics of a commercial, she is switching between the options offered by commercials, commercial items and their refusal. Should it be the playboy bunny, the vamp or the shorn rebel? The naive country girl or Diotima in her salon? It is the first film from a yet undefined range of empty reels.

premiere: 1994 LFMC London, “Austrian Super8”

2.
Florian Kmet
biography

Title of work/:TRAFFIK

TRAFFIK was created while travelling the globe with bands like lokai, trio exclusive, superlooper, fatima spar & the freedom fries and kmet.
Between soundcheck and concert or later at night I explored intersections of cities like mexiko, tokyo, bukarest, ljubljana and others.
TRAFFIK was done without any postproduction. Hundreds of Pictures strung together and sometimes looped.

3
Birgit Graschopf
biography

Title of work/
‚FOOD’, 2006, 4 min 23 sec, © Birgit Graschopf

The film shows six consuming, mainly eating people.
Slackness, listlessness and monotony as well as the trust and reliance in food one’s think to know come to mind by facing the uniformity in appearances, smells and tastes of ‚global food’. This great boredom shall get differentiated meanings.
Customer’s behavior nowadays, their values, patterns and cultural and economic ideals shall be constantly deliberated and aestheticized. Paradox and absurd aspects occur by watching the increasing meaning and the attention paid to consumerism.

4
Christoph Freidhöfer
biography

Title of work:
daily anxiety at about five past five , 2010, 1 min 20

short synopsis
From the receivers it sounds ever the same, but always different: Now again something has happened.

5
Karin Fisslthaler
biography

Title of work/

Imaging Machine, 2008, 5`22 Min., colour & b/w, Stereo

concept & realisation: Karin Fisslthaler
“Imaging Machine” is an analysis of the human gesture, the represenation of bodies and nonverbal communication in cinema.The starting material comes from scenes from American entertainment films, in which people touch tenderly, violently or incidentally. The touched bodies and the backgrounds are removed image by image, only the hands are left and positioned on a black background. The black, invisible cinematic area is a place of uncertainty, a place of interpretation, which is freely imagineable for own concepts of perception and desire.

6
Thomas Fürhapter
biography

Title of work
Planes, 06, 00 min

credits:
Director: Thomas Fürhapter
Sound: Stefan Németh
Concept & Realization: Thomas Fuerhapter
Image Editing: Branko Bily, Manuel Zauner

short synopsis:
Die Funktionalität einer U-Bahn-Station wird durch die Zerlegung in ihre räumlichen Einzelelemente dekonstruiert. Planes greift dabei Themen der klassischen filmischen Avantgarde auf und bettet sie, durchaus humorvoll, in eine »andere« Geschichte des städtischen Raumes ein. (Claudia Slanar)

7
Philipp Hauss
biography

Title of work/
La fosse aux lions/2010/5:45/Philipp Hauß.
Home movies never depict catastrophes, and that although most families’ narrations consist of nothing but catastrophes. The camera is turned off, when the argument begins. The faces start grinning, once the camera records them. Only children seem to have the privilege of crying on camera, but in most cases surrounded by adults smiling mildly and quieting.
The non-depiction of the catastrophe is also the significant characteristic of Werner Herzog’s film „La soufrière“, a report on a volcanic eruption that does not take place.
The synchronization of Super8-home-movies and Herzog’s narration does maybe create an artifact, which renders the truth behind the home-movie and the fictionality in Herzog’s documentary visible.
And if one starts on family-home-movie, why not begin the investigation with one’s own family?

8
interdisziplinäre aufzeichnensysteme effriede
biography

title of work: elffriede.soundrawing
year: 2008
duration: 2 min.
credits: drawing + animation: elffriede.interdisciplinary.drawingsystems
sound:
synopsis:
one of a series of 34 films of the interdisciplinary dialogue + poetic mail-art-project interrelating graphic art, sound, film. idea + project initiated 2006 by elffriede.interdisciplinary.drawingsystem sending 33 minimalistic characters = one-picture-ink-drawings to 48 soundartists asking for a (max.) 2-min.-sound-interpretation in order to animate each drawing interpreting vice-versa the sound given to it.


9
Johann Lurf
biography

Title of work
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, Johann Lurf, 2009, 3 min.

The green opening credits race across the screen so fast that the only way to read everything is by pausing the film. The scenes that follow are cut even shorter: Each consists of solely a single frame taken from other films, reproduced carefully, including the sprocket holes, and mounted in sequence. When projected in the normal way they are 1/24 seconds in length, and they are all differentiated so clearly that the succession creates a kind of flickering, which is rhythmically synchronized with the stuttering of the somewhat fragmentary optical soundtrack. This makes it difficult to tell who is a boxer, who Viktor is, and where the dike of Sylt is located.
At the same time Johann Lurf’s super-short cuts appropriate the structure of a classic feature film. In the twitchy editing the individual frames deconstruct the normal sequence: The passage with various black frames⎯which serves as a kind of leader⎯is followed by another with fragments of a number of opening credits, then snippets of locations, possibly from establishing shots. Then come individuals or groups of two or more people, posing inside or outside, walking, driving cars, making music or having sex. Here and there subtitles appear suddenly, here and there a star can be recognized. But whether Charlotte Rampling, Klaus Kinski, wet asphalt, Kubrik’s The Shining, a box terrier or the sky: Everything possesses the same contingency. There is no dialogue, no shot/countershot, no chase ensues after these brief appearances. On the contrary, Lurf’s thesis film has a great deal in common with the found-footage experiments made by artists of the American neo-avant-garde, such as Morgan Fisher or Bruce Connor, though the way Lurf accelerates his visual salvoes is undoubtedly intended to produce ambiguity between media-specific reflection and overwhelming the audience.
(Rainer Bellenbaum)

10
Eva Brunner – Szabo
biography

Title of work/
Bandages X, 2008, 4:25/no sound

In “Bandages”, the artist uses her own bare body to explore the mental space of painful memories. This method of self-exploitation has always played an important role in Austrian art; think of the Viennese Actionists, especially Günther Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. In presenting herself as a medium for as well as an object of the untouchable, Brunner-Szabo takes this tradition a step further. It is a proof that a body is still important even in the age of the so-called virtual reality.
Martin Breindl – curator of FLUSS – Society for the Promotion of Photo- and Media Art Wolkersdorf, Austria

11
Hans Nevídal
biography

Title of work
Gentle Giants, 3 min. 26 sec.
a film by Hans Nevídal with Ernst Herbeck (†1991), Edmund Mach (†1996) and Karin Marinho da Silva (camera)

The film was shot when visiting the two late poets at the art brut centre Gugging in the early eighties.

12
JOEL CURTZ
biography

Title of work/
« Mise en boîte », une psychosatire / 2010 / 4’40min
Video and acting: Joël Curtz
Musical composition: Fabrizio Tentoni
With the support of the Universität der Künste Berlin and Hochschule für Musik Berlin

In the video “Mise en boîte”, the artist is trapped in a TV box while his alter egos are focused at watching him. After realising that he is being watched, his alter egos start mocking him and the TV suddenly stops.
Between megalomania, paranoia and absurdity, this video by Joël Curtz reflects a time in which artists are raising questions about their approach to new media and its interaction with the audience.

13
Martin Krenn
biography

Title of work

ONE SHOT
by Martin Krenn, 2:10 min., Tirana 2007

Synopsis:
In a single take, a street scene is documented in which an elderly man, in an unexpected act, becomes the protagonist of the short film. ONE SHOT can be read as a metaphor for the fight (for survival) of the individual within post-communist society.

14

Gerald Zahn
biography

Title of work/
Just 5 more minutes / Nur noch 5 Minuten © 2010


a film by Gerald Zahn with Mario Rott

Screening Formats: HD 1080p, DVD PAL 16:9
Duration: 5 min.

Synopsis:
This is a film you have to take time for.
As a study of time in cinematic perception, Viennese media artist Gerald Zahn visualizes 5 minutes by filming a person holding his breath for the duration of the film. 
In contrast with the casual disregard for mere 5 minutes in the film title, the film fills this period with significance. The emotional turmoils on the actor’s face as he fights through every second on the stop-watch, make 5 minutes a cinematic era of tension, impatience, doubt and expectation.