Index (from Vienna)

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#26 Post by antnield » Thu Jun 23, 2011 4:59 am

And another new release: Siegfried A. Fruhauf: Exposed.

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zedz
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Re:

#27 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:04 pm

zedz wrote:I'm glad to see the Gustav Deutsch films have come out on DVD. They're a series of terrific mini-compilations of ancient archival footage, organised thematically with considerable wit and intelligence. I have no idea how the "DVD Version" differs from the film version, however.
Well, it's taken me six (six!) years to get with the programme and order a bunch of Index discs, so I can now answer my own question.

The version of Film ist. on the DVD is a condensed version of the two original releases of Parts 1-6 and 7-12, running about half the total length. Haven't watched it yet to see what impact that has, but it looks like the two part / twelve part structure has been preserved and I can't see why the film won't work in this format. The disc also has a great, brief interview with Deutsch about the work and a short documentation of its gallery installation manifestation.

I have to say that Index looks to be one of the world's great DVD labels, with a level of care in presentation up there with Filmmuseum, MoC and Criterion. All the accompanying books and all the discs are fully Englished, and the label boasts probably the best 'house style' I've ever seen, with transparent cover slicks (think the first Faust album) featuring text and titles plus mysterious, barely visible numeric diagrams. The booklet with the cover image slips in behind, giving the title a ghostly drop-shadow, and each booklet, rich with information, follows the same elegantly austere format.

The only disc I've watched right through so far is their first (note that the house style had not been fully developed yet - regular slick; no transparency), of Kurt Kren's Action Films. Not for the faint-hearted, to put it mildly, these films are highly individual documents of explicitly disgusting performances by actionist artists Gunter Brus and Otto Muhl. If you felt queasy during Sweet Movie, for instance, run a mile.

Much of the films' fascination stems from Kren's agenda being radically different from that of Brus and Muhl's, and I understand this caused considerable friction with the artists. He uses intensely fast, rhythmic cutting to abstract imagery which, by its very confrontational nature, is hardily resistant to abstraction. This approach also has the effect of making the performances simultaneously more and less assaultive - in fact, it's when Kren's cutting speed slows down that the material becomes hardest to take - and it also takes some of the wind of pomposity out of the transgressors' sails. While Brus and Muhl seem to be striving to push scatology into eschatology, Kren counterpoints their aims with just plain scat, the purely formal joy of playing fast and loose with their denuded signifiers.

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antnield
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Re: Re:

#28 Post by antnield » Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:07 pm

zedz wrote:I have to say that Index looks to be one of the world's great DVD labels, with a level of care in presentation up there with Filmmuseum, MoC and Criterion. All the accompanying books and all the discs are fully Englished, and the label boasts probably the best 'house style' I've ever seen, with transparent cover slicks (think the first Faust album) featuring text and titles plus mysterious, barely visible numeric diagrams. The booklet with the cover image slips in behind, giving the title a ghostly drop-shadow, and each booklet, rich with information, follows the same elegantly austere format.
The transparent cover slicks were abandoned a while back. Every release since the Maria Lassnig disc has opted for a more conventional sleeve.

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zedz
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#29 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:14 pm

Shame. But I can't imagine they would have been cheap to produce.

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zedz
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#30 Post by zedz » Wed Jun 29, 2011 7:29 pm

More comments:

Kurt Kren: Structural Films

This is a fantastic set of films, and it gives me a much better sense of Kren as a filmmaker than the Action Films set did. The best films in this collection exhibit the great strengths of structural film: elegant conceptual simplicity that resonates with complexity and depth. Kren brings to the table a certain hyperactivity of means - extremely rapid cutting, intensive multiple exposures – that add a powerful tension to what are essentially contemplative works. 2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Test so furiously cuts between a collection of faces that no one face is recoverable: everything melds into an identikit nightmare, without ever losing its coherence as a face. 3/60 Trees in Autumn doesn’t have the same compositional coherence, but it has a textural one, as it’s a trainwreck of bare branches in single frames, vibrating with artificial life. The film gives the impression of frantic motion without containing any conventional filmic motion (i.e. movement of an object within the frame or movement of the frame itself). In the single-shot 15/67 TV, Kren condenses his hyperactivity into the mise-en-scene, by capturing a view with multiple distinct planes of action.

The most impressive film in the set for me was 31/75 Asylum, which manages to make all of the energy and activity of the foregoing films perfectly placid and pastoral. A landscape is shot from an asylum window, but although it’s something of a classical composition, and it’s quite still, it nevertheless accommodates a seething complexity, as Kren has partially masked the image, then rewound and reshot the landscape multiple times (one frame at a time) with different, ever-changing masks, so we end up with an effect as if we are watching the landscape through a rain-spattered window, with every raindrop that falls showing us a different view of the landscape. And over time, we see a fascinating, pointillistically imperceptible transition between the seasons. It’s an incredibly ingenious idea for a film, and more importantly it works beautifully in practice.

Peter Tscherkassky – Films from a Dark Room

This set is basically the Cinemascope Trilogy plus a couple of other (lesser) related works.

I’d like to think Outer Space needs no introduction, as one of the great experimental films of the last twenty years (and Barbara Hershey’s finest moment on film?). It doesn’t get stale, and I still find it incredibly intense every time I see it. Dream Work is very much Outer Space Redux, and goes straight back to the same found-footage well. It’s a brilliant film, but it inevitably suffers in comparison. The first part of the trilogy, the brief, kinetic L’Arrivee, is more impressive.

All of these films are non-anamorphic, so you have to zoom in to fill your screen. But since the film image is already degraded, and the impact of the film is so percussive and visceral, the lack of resolution doesn’t harm the films particularly.

There are four other films on the disc. One is ensconced as a “bonustrack” and is explicitly marginal and Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’usine Lumiere a Lyon is maybe the Platonic ideal of a piece of conceptual art where all of the interest lies in the concept and none in the execution.

Martin Arnold – The Cineseizure

Another disc, another trilogy, and it’s a doozy. I’ve long been a champion of Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, and it’s as hilarious and creepy as it’s ever been, but re-seeing piece touchée has hugely elevated that film in my esteem.

Piece touchée, like the other films in the trilogy, takes a brief stretch of Hollywood footage (here a husband coming through the door to his waiting wife) and distorts it mercilessly through ‘scratching’ (of the Terminator X rather than the Len Lye kind) – moving incrementally back and forth in time to turn the actors into malfunctioning dancing androids. This technique offers obvious opportunity for easy amusement, as when a simple entry through a doorway is transformed into a ridiculous dance, but Arnold goes much further, and in this film he taps into some fascinating formal and psychological territory. In addition to the expected temporal manipulations, Arnold also flops the image laterally and vertically, and in doing so creates some strikingly bizarre and comical movements. The effects he generates depend on the fact that we’re hard-wired to decode human movement – it’s a fundamental survival mechanism – so even when, rationally, we understand that an action is artificially manipulated and even spatially disjunctive (as when a movement on one side of the frame gets flipped to the other), it’s almost impossible not to read continuity of movement into the disrupted gesture, and, once we’ve perceived a particular movement (even if it’s been cobbled together from obvious disjunctions), it’s almost impossible not to impute intentionality into it – another survival mechanism: our default position is to read gesture as an expression of intent, so if it looks as if somebody is doing something we react accordingly. Which, in this case, tricks us into perceiving extraordinary sweeping gestures running across the screen and frantic flitting back and forth when in fact we’re looking at nothing of the kind. Unlike the later two films, which bring the original soundtracks along for the ride – to great effect – this film is backed by very effective industrial throbs.

The middle film of the trilogy, Passage a l’acte, transforms characters from To Kill a Mockingbird into a malfunctioning family of hip-hop robots, but it doesn’t have the formal or narrative invention of the other films. Alone shows Arnold’s control becoming very precise as well as using the technique to imply a (perverse) narrative.

The “bonustracks” are brief and comparatively minor, but they do at least give us almost all of Arnold’s extant (non-installation) filmography in one place.

Jozef Robakowski – The Energy Manifesto!

This set was a real mixed bag for me, both in terms of the quality of the films and the quality of the transfers. Dealing with the latter first, as I suspect is the case with a lot of releases of extremely marginal experimental film, it looks like Index was constrained by what transfers were already in existence, but for a couple of films here, the quality of the transfers completely ruins the film.

The main culprit is An Attempt (Test II), which – I guess – consists primarily of alternating red and black (or, given the shitty transfer, possibly dark green) screens. However, the transfer of what looked to be a rather worn print (or maybe that’s the film – who knows?) is so heavily compressed that the most dominant visual elements are the digital artifacts. In fact, they’re so dominant that in a very real sense you can no longer see the film at all. Somewhat more ambiguous in its compromised status is Video Kisses. If it was made on video, then the shimmering edges to the imagery and the pink chroma may have been intentional, but if they weren’t, they definitely skew the minimalist imagery in an unfortunate direction because they’re so prominent.

And there are a number of dud films as well, I’m afraid. Attention: Light! is supposedly a reconstruction / construction of a film originally devised by Paul Sharits, and it’s dedicated to his memory, but the finished thing (coloured screens timed to a piece of music) was incredibly underwhelming, about on the level of an overenthusiastic old-time projectionist playing the lights on the curtain before the film. The kindest thing I could say about Videomasochisms II is that it prefigures YouTube by a decade or so. It’s a kind of vanilla parody of Kren’s higher-stakes 10/65 Self-mutilation, so it falls between the twin stools of arid in-joke and dumb prank.

Beyond the middle ground of a half-dozen or so vaguely interesting films, many either under-conceptualised or under-realised, there are, however, a couple of excellent works. The biomechanical recording I Am Coming presents a kind of demotic apotheosis – and, indeed, given the wintry landscape, a demotic Apotheosis – and works straightforwardly and brilliantly. The most complex and longest film on display, From My Window, is very fine. It’s a compilation of footage Robakowski shot of the square visible from his apartment window over a number of years, complete with narration of the people and events we see. (In a sense it’s a cousin to Victor Kossakovsky’s Tishe!, though it’s quite different in its effect.) The film’s conceit neatly collapses the structuralist, architectural and biographical impulses of his other films while also being richly informed by the historical and political climate of the years inadvertently chronicled. The square quite naturally becomes a site for both performance and surveillance, with Robakowski himself completely implicated on both sides of the transaction.

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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#31 Post by ouatitw » Wed Jul 13, 2011 3:23 pm

Jozef Robakowski – The Energy Manifesto! -- I want to say that a few years ago I ordered a 3 disk set containing his films along with a book for about the same price the Index DVD sells.

I like the Kren action films more than the structure ones.

I probably have 15-20 index disks, I don't remember many of them, I remember a few were amazing, many were okay and a few were terrible.

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#32 Post by antnield » Wed Dec 28, 2011 8:13 pm


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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#33 Post by antnield » Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:15 am

A new Peter Tscherkassky volume is due in a few weeks' time...
INDEX040 PETER TSCHERKASSKY - Attractions, Instructions and Other Romances

Release date: 20.02.2013

This new DVD compiles eight short films made by Peter Tscherkassky, including multi-awarded breathtaking Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine and his most recent film Coming Attractions. Along "Films from a Dark Room" (INDEX008) featuring internationally celebrated Tscherkassky's found footage trilogy - L'arrivée, Outer Space, Dream Work - this new release on INDEX offers an exhilarating excursion in Peter Tscherkassky's radical cinema.

CONTENTS:

Parallel Space: Inter-view - 1992, 18 min
Erotique - 1982, 1 min 40 sec
Happy-End - 1996, 11 min
Shot - Countershot - 1987, 22 sec
Nachtstück (Nocturne) - 2006, 1 min
Coming Attractions - 2010, 25 min
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine - 2005, 17 min
Ballett 16 - 1984, 4 min

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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#34 Post by towda » Mon Feb 04, 2013 12:32 pm

I've seen a few of those,

Instructions is amazing, every bit as good as Outer Space and Dream Land (it uses The Good, The Bad and The Ugly footage).

Coming Attractions was good, but no where near the level as the above mentioned three.

Happy End is an okay early film but don't expect anything like this later films.

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#35 Post by antnield » Thu Nov 07, 2013 6:39 am

Coming soon: INDEX041 NORBERT PFAFFENBICHLER – NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM

Image
Norbert Pfaffenbichler (born 1967, Austria) has been involved in the emergence of the Austrian abstract cinema in the mid 1990s, when a generation of artists has begun to produce radical computer and video works, combining electronic music and abstract media art. Innovative filmmaker himself alongside other now-renowned artists like Tina Frank, Lotte Schreiber, Michaela Grill, Jürgen Moritz, SKOT, Lia, Michaela Schwentner and Billy Roisz, he also curated the major group show “Abstraction Now” at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 2003 presenting computer-generated “sound visions” works.

From 2002 onward he has started to work on his film series Notes on Film where the historical medium of film and photography is central to his analysis.

While the development of the Notes on Film – series (notes on film 01 else, CONFERENCE, INTERMEZZO, A Messenger from the Shadows, A Masque of Madness) is logical, the expansive directions it takes are baffling. Pfaffenbichler’s unique sensibility finds expression in a growing emphasis upon the comic and the uncanny, whereby his avant-garde and often structuralist approach is coupled with an ever-increasing pleasure in playful experimentation. The source material is simultaneously de- and re-constructed, with a considerable amount of Brechtian surplus value, albeit involving a specifically filmic magnetism. It is impossible to come away from a Pfaffenbichler film without an altered and enriched sense of cinema, its history and possibilities. (Christoph Huber)

01. notes on film 01 else (2002, 35mm, bw, 6 min)
02. CONFERENCE (Notes on Film 05) (2011, 35mm, bw, 8 min)
03. INTERMEZZO (Notes on Film 04) (2012, col, DV, 2 min)
04. A Messenger from the Shadows (Notes on Film 06A/Monologue 01) (2012, DV, col & bw, 60 min)

Bonus:

05. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Lotte Schreiber 36 (2001, video, col, 2 min)

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#36 Post by antnield » Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:51 pm

A postcard with the latest Index disc reveals the next two releases...

042 ERNST SCHMIDT JR. - 20 Action and Destruction Films 1965-1979
043 ALDO TAMBELLINI - Black Film Series

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#37 Post by antnield » Thu Feb 27, 2014 11:53 am

Next up...
INDEX042 ERNST SCHMIDT JR.
Stones & 20 Action and Destruction Films 1965-1979 / Steine & 20 Aktions- und Destruktionsfilme 1965-1979

If I had to name a single Austrian filmmaker who to this day has not received the international recognition deserved for the artistic level his work attained, I would unhesitatingly name him. When he died in 1988 at the early age of 50, Ernst Schmidt Jr. left behind a body of work that could hardly be more multifaceted, including experimental documentary films, material films, expanded cinema, abstract films, project films, conceptual films, Lettrist text films, compilation films, and a feature length dramatic film. The catalogue of a posthumous exhibit at the Vienna Secession in 2001 and his home page (initiated and maintained by his half brother Helmut Benedikt) encompasses close to 100 works. In 1980 Schmidt Jr. drew from this abundance to create a compilation of films entitled 20 Aktions- und Destruktionsfilme 1965–1979. This compilation is now available for the first time on DVD. (Peter Tscherkassky)
……………………………………………………………………………………….…..……………………………………………….………………...………


1. Steine / Stones 1964/65, 16mm, b&w, 30 min (with English subtitles)
2. 20 Aktions- und Destruktionsfilme 1965-1979:
2.1 Ja/Nein / Yes/No 1968, 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 min, Camera: Hans Scheugl (Expanded Cinema)
2.2 Weiß / White 1968, 16mm, b&w, silent, 1 min
2.3 Prost / Cheers 1968, 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 min (Expanded Cinema)
2.4 Rotweißrot / Red-white-red 1967, 16mm, b&w and color, sound, 1 min
2.5 Schnippschnapp / Snip, Snip (in collaboration with Peter Weibel) 1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 2 min, Camera: Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt Jr.
2.6 Filmisches Alphabet / Film Alphabet 1971, 16mm, b&w, silent, 1 sec
2.7 Burgtheater / Imperial Theatre 1970, 16mm, b&w, silent, 5 min, Camera: Walter Funda
2.8 Gesammelt von Wendy / Collected by Wendy 1978/79, 16mm, color, silent, 1 min
2.9 Eine Subgeschichte des Films / A Subhistory of Film 1974, 16mm, b&w, silent, 2 min. All photographs by Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt Jr.
2.10 Denkakt / The Act of Thinking 1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 4 min, Voice & Actor: Peter Weibel
2.11 Mein Begräbnis ein Erlebnis / My Funeral an Experience 1977, 16mm, b&w, silent, 2 min, Actress: Sara Suranyi
2.12 12 Uhr Mittags - High Noon 1977, 16mm, color, sound, 4 min, Music: Wolfgang Ernst and Susi D., Actress: Sara Suranyi
2.13 The Merry Widow 1977, 16mm, b&w, sound, 2 min, Music: Wolfgang Ernst and Susi D., Actress: Sara Suranyi
2.14 Gertrude Stein hätte Chaplin gerne in einem Film gesehen, in dem dieser nichts anderes zu tun hätte, als eine Straße entlang und dann um eine Ecke zu gehen, darauf die nächste Ecke zu umwandern und so weiter von Ecke zu Ecke / Gertrude Stein would have liked to have seen Chaplin in a film where he would have nothing other to do than walk on the street and then go around a corner, and then around the next corner, etc. from corner to corner 1979, 16mm, b&w and color, silent, 3 min, Actress: Brigitte Kowanz
2.15 N 1978, 16mm, b&w, sound, 6 min, Action and Music by Hermann Nitsch
2.16 Kunst & Revolution / Art & Revolution 1968, 16mm, b&w and color, silent, 2 min, Actions by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Peter Weibel, Oswald Wiener among others
2.17 Bodybuilding 1965/66, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min, Action by Otto Muehl
2.18 Einszweidrei / Onetwothree 1965-1968, 16mm, color, sound, 8 min, Camera: Walter Funda, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Peter Fluger, Hans Scheugl, Actions by Otto Muehl, Peter Weibel, Valie Export
2.19 Filmreste / Film Scraps 1966, 16mm, b&w, sound, 10 min, Action by Otto Muehl
2.20 Farbfilm / Color Film 1967, 16mm, color, sound, 1 min
……………………………………………………………………………………….…..………………………………………………..….…………….………

Extra: 20 pages booklet bilingual English-German / 20-seitige zweisprachige Broschüre (Deutsch-Englisch)

Zone: DVD PAL, Zone free

Language / Sprache: German with English subtitles / Deutsch mit englischen Untertiteln

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swo17
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#38 Post by swo17 » Wed May 21, 2014 11:30 am

Bad news about the Cineseizure DVD:
Index wrote:This title is sold out since more than a year now and won’t get repressed, according to Martin Arnold’s wish.
This disc appears to have completely dropped off the face of the earth--no online stores have it, no eBay or Amazon Marketplace listings, etc. And just when I finally got around to discovering the guy!

In other news, if any of you own this DVD but would prefer the feel of a large wad of cash between your fingers, please do consider PMing me in response to this desperate plea.

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tojoed
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#39 Post by tojoed » Wed May 21, 2014 2:27 pm

Swo, I assume you have tried Film Archiv, but, just in case, I thought I'd post the link.

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swo17
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#40 Post by swo17 » Wed May 21, 2014 2:30 pm

I have, but the order wouldn't go through. Note that the scrollbar at the right with all the available Index titles skips over 018. I also tried ordering from this site, but they informed me that they're out of stock as well.

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zedz
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#41 Post by zedz » Wed May 21, 2014 5:13 pm

I'd also try emailing the BFI store (since they don't list all those imports online anymore) and the bookshop at the Cinematheque Francaise.

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swo17
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#42 Post by swo17 » Fri May 30, 2014 9:54 pm

Another member here was kind enough to hook me up with a copy of the Martin Arnold DVD, but for anyone else that might still be looking for it, I thought I'd mention that the BFI store is definitely out of stock as well (though they are taking orders from their Artists' Film & Video section by phone--if anyone wants details about who to contact or what was in stock as of last week, you can PM me).

Otherwise, I never heard back from the Cinematheque Francaise.

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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#43 Post by rockysds » Mon Jul 07, 2014 5:01 pm

Not sure if this differs in any substantial way from the Index dvd of Martin Arnold films, but Re:Voir just put this Cinemnesis / DVD à la demande up.

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ola t
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#44 Post by ola t » Sat Jul 12, 2014 4:07 am

Thanks for posting that, I bought the Re:Voir edition. It contains two DVD-R discs, one PAL and one NTSC, and includes this note:
Why 2 versions?

In the PAL version, you will find Arnold's films with the correct number of fps. Normally, your DVD player should be able to read PAL, but if this is not the case, we have provided a NTSC version with a significantly higher number of fps.
The running times of the two discs are in fact identical, so I don't quite understand what's going on.

Picture quality's not great (I immediately noticed compression artifacts), and the Re:Voir has none of the bonus films that were on the Index disc.

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antnield
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#45 Post by antnield » Fri Oct 31, 2014 6:54 am

New release:
INDEX043 PETER WEIBEL
KÖRPERAKTIONEN BODYWORKS 1967 - 2003

Peter Weibels performances differentiate themselves from other actions performed in the 1960s, for instance in Vienna and California, firstly, through their relation to media and secondly, through their relation to politics. His body politics is body critique that is simultaneously a critique of traditional forms of representation as well as identity politics. Unlike classical body artists Weibel did not only search fort he emancipation of the body, for instance through the sexual revolution but liberation from the body in the age of its constructability via media and gene technology.
(Peter Weibel)

01. FINGERPRINT (1968, 2:04 min)
02. NÜSTERN / NOSTRILS (1969, 33 sec)
03. LÜSTERN / LASCIVIOUS (1969, 33 sec)
04. AUGENTEXTE / EYE TEXTS (1974, 1:10 min)
05. MUNDTEXT / MOUTH TEXT (1974, 42 sec)
06. STIRNTEXT / FOREHEAD TEXT (1974, 20 sec)
07. DAS RECHT MIT FÜßEN TRETEN / TRAMPLING ON RIGHTS (1967/68, 1:14 min)
08. LÖSUNG DER PHANTASIE / SOLUTION OF FANTASY (1972, 2:20 min)
09. WIE HAT SICH AUS DEN FISCHEN DIE MATHEMATIK ENTWICKELT? /
HOW DID MATHEMATICS EVOLVE FROM THE FISH? (1971, 54 sec)
10. KUNST UND REVOLUTION: BRANDREDE / ART AND REVOLUTION: INCENDIARY SPEECH (1968, 33 sec)
11. FLUIDUM UND EIGENTUM: KÖRPERVERHÄLTNISSE ALS EIGENTUMSMAßE /
FLUIDUM AND PROPERTY: BODY RELATIONS AS MEASURE OF PROPERTY (1971/72, 3:36 min)
12. GRÜß GOTT / GREET GOD (1967/72, 1:06 min)
13. KOKAIN(E) / COCAIN(E) (1972, 2:05 min)
14. REKONSTRUKTION DER STOPPAGESÉTALON (1913/14) VON MARCEL DUCHAMP /
RECONSTRUCTION OF STOPPAGES-ÉTALON (1913/14) BY MARCEL DUCHAMP (1970/71, 49 sec)
15. DENKAKT / THINKACT (1967, 3:54 min)
16. VULKANOLOGIE DER EMOTIONEN / VULCANOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS (1971/73, 7:18 min)
17. AKTBESPRECHUNG ODER INVERSES SELBSTPORTRÄT /
REVIEW OF THE NUDE OR INVERSE SELF-PORTRAIT (1975/76, 19:01 min)
18. SWITCHER SEX (1972, 5:35 min)
19. VENUS IM PELZ / VENUS IN FURS (2003, 4:31 min)
20. VERS UND VERNUNFT / RHYME AND REASON (1978, 19:16 min)
21. AUS DER MAPPE DER HUNDIGKEIT / FROM THE PORTFOLIO OF DOGGEDNESS (1968/69, 1:39 min)
22. ZEITBLUT - BLUTGLOCKE / TIMEBLOOD - BLOODBELL (1972/79/83, 16:49 min)

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zedz
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#46 Post by zedz » Sun Nov 16, 2014 8:00 pm

I recently picked up a bunch of Index discs and am making my way through them at the moment, so here are some thoughts.

Valie Export - 3 Experimental Short Films
Pioneering, confrontational feminist works. Mann & Frau & Animal is a tripartite Vagina Follies, on the respective themes of masturbation, childbirth and menstruation. Rough, pointed, somewhat dated. . . . Remote . . . Remote . . . is pure body horror, as Export hacks away at the base of her nails in a ghastly metaphor for feminine beautification. Achieved the remarkable feat of making the corners of the room absolutely fascinating for ten minutes. Syntagma is the major work here and it's brilliant. Split screens and imaginative projections (e.g. a woman's feet climbing stairs projected onto a flight of stairs as a woman climbs them) evoke a psychological split in the subject.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta - Obsession: Structuring Time and Space
Superb programme of work by an important Croatian filmmaker. The title is appropriate, as all of these films do wild and wonderful things with time and space. Two Times in One Space replays a formative experimental film from the 60s (and it was great to be introduced to Nikola Stojanovic's impressive one-shot drama In the Kitchen) superimposed on itself with a 219 frame delay. It's a static shot with often static characters (a family eating breakfast), so the smearing of superimposed motion is constrained and quite lovely. Pyramidas is a structural train film, with a train's eye view of an accelerating journey that rotates as it progresses (each brief segment of the journey is rotated 90 degrees). Water Polo is a film I saw decades ago and have been wanting to resee ever since. It's a record of a water polo match in which, through the magic of optical printing, the ball is the centre of every single shot, making it the stationary singularity in a chaotic universe of splashing water and flailing limbs. It's also a love letter to film grain, because the original image (presumably a static shot taking in the entire pool) has to be blown way up in order to convey the structuring conceit. Sfaira explores a similar, but more kinetic and kaleidoscopic, concept: this time the central circle (a monolithic sculpture) is monumentally static and the crazy kineticism surrounding it is purely cinematic.

Siegfrid A. Fruhauf: Exposed
Another superb programme, with some familiar delights. The common denominator here is an exploration of the limits of the material, so over- and under-exposure and various kinds of generational and definitional loss are explored expressively. La Sortie evokes Lumiere and, specifically, bad dupes of Lumiere films. A brief snippet of industrial documentary is duped and duped and duped until it's reduced to stark black and white blobs of meaning, all while losing stray frames and getting more and more frantically paced. Mountain Trip is a glorious cavalcade of tacky Alpine postcards, all arranged end to end (with carefully matched horizon lines) to make the kitchiest, most nonsensical panorama ever conceived, mirrored by another one hanging in the sky. Exposed is breathtaking and hypnotic. A clip (of an instance of voyeurism) is looped and viewed through a miasma of floating windows (created by exposing the image through the sprocket holes of another piece of film and superimposing multiple such passes). The effect is sort of like watching a film projected onto a slow-motion deluge of confetti. Palmes d'Or is a full-on sensory assault, as photos of Cannes are processed beyond recognition and blasted at us in non-linear single frames for six exhausting minutes. I imagine this is a little like what being blasted through the Large Hadron Collider would feel like. I should also mention that almost all of these films have really remarkable soundtracks.

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swo17
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Location: SLC, UT

Re: Index (from Vienna)

#47 Post by swo17 » Tue Feb 03, 2015 11:43 am

The Gustav Deutsch Film Ist DVD is sold out on Index's website. But fear not?
Index wrote:My answer might not be very helpful: we are thinking of repressing this DVD but without any precise date!

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antnield
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2005 1:59 pm
Location: Cheltenham, England

Re: Index (from Vienna)

#48 Post by antnield » Thu Oct 22, 2015 9:53 am

New release:

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INDEX DVD Edition presents

INDEX044 – ERNST SCHMIDT JR.
Wienfilm 1896-1976 / ViennaFilm 1896-1976

“You can be Viennese all over the world – just not in Vienna.” (Joe Berger in ViennaFilm 1896–1976)

“ViennaFilm 1896–1976 constitutes the first feature length film completed by Schmidt Jr. It premieres on January 28, 1977 at the Austrian Film Museum; it is screened at Vienna’s Inter-national Film Festival, the Seventh International Forum of New Cinema in Berlin and the Festival dei Popoli in Florence. In a statement accompanying the film, the filmmaker himself describes the work as a collage.2 This term evokes the use of diverse footage, tape splices, and an uneven surface – instead of a tidy unity it conveys a patchwork that remains visible as such.” (Isabella Reicher)

“This film is a kind of anthology about Vienna, from the invention of film to the present day. The aim is to break down the usual clichéd ‘image of Vienna’ such as that found in the traditional ‘ViennaFilm’ by juxtaposing documentary footage, newly shot material and subjective sequences created by various artists. Individual, self-contained sections of the film gain new meaning within the context of historical material. Familiar sites appear estranged when edited together with historical scenes. Other scenes appear like a persiflage or satirical.

The film does not incorporate any commentary whatsoever. It is a collage of diverse materials aimed at conveying a distanced image of Vienna to the viewer.”(Ernst Schmidt Jr.)

Up until the early 1970s, Schmidt Jr. realized expanded cinema Actions, created conceptual films, shot several lettrist text films, and began work on his wonderful Wienfilm 1896-1976, a two hour documentary Schmidt Jr. called “a kind of anthology about Vienna, from the discovery of film up until the present time”. The list of participants reads like a who´s who of the avant-garde and underground scene in Austria of its day. (Peter Tscherkassky)

DVD Extra: 20 pages booklet bilingual English-German, including:

- „Image of the City as a Construction Site“, by Isabella Reicher
- Exhaustive shot sequence, compiled by Ernst Schmidt Jr.
- Ernst Schmidt Jr.’s biography and filmography


Zone: DVD PAL, Zone free
Language: German with English subtitles
Category: Experimental
Running time: 117 min
Catalogue number: INDEX044
Price: € 28,80

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antnield
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Location: Cheltenham, England

Re: Index (from Vienna)

#49 Post by antnield » Fri Jun 10, 2016 10:45 am

New Release:

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INDEX045 GUSTAV DEUTSCH
NOT HOME. Picturing the Foreign
Films 1990-2015


01 ADRIA - HOLIDAY FILMS 1954-68 (SCHOOL OF SEEING I), 1990, 16mm (S- 8 Blow-up), col & b/w, 37 min
02 EYEWITNESSES IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES Gustav Deutsch, Mostafa Tabbou, 1993, 16mm, col, 33 min
03 NOTES AND SKETCHES I 31 poket films, 2005-2015, digital, col, 60 min

BONUS: SAT., 29TH OF JUNE/ARCTIC CIRCLE, 1990, 16mm (S- 8, Blow-up), col, 3 min

Summer, sun, beach games and other attractions: holidays and excursions have always motivated amateur and professional filmmakers to switch their camera on – also later at home to be able to dream away. Out of such anonymous Super-8 shots the renowned experimental filmmaker Gustav Deutsch composed in 1990 a very entertaining master home movie that leads us to the Adria. (Adria - Holiday Films 1954-68. School of Seeing I).

For Eyewitnesses in Foreign Countries (1993) the Austrian Gustav Deutsch and the Moroccan Mostafa Tabbou have gazed into each other’s native place: an enlightening “authentic film-experiment in 600 takes” that shows how everyday life is special in the eyes of the beholder from afar.

Travelogues can also contain “mini-dramas”: this is what the “pocket films” of Notes and Sketches I (2005-15) reveal. Surprising behavioral studies of man and animal, the hidden humor of nature’s phenomena as well as of automatized routines make good entertainment for your home cinema and for all ages.

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swo17
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Re: Index (from Vienna)

#50 Post by swo17 » Fri Jun 23, 2017 10:35 am

A new Tscherkassky DVD!

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048 Peter Tscherkassky - Exquisite Ecstasies

"Approaching the Exquisite Corpus" was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of "exquisite ecstasies". No matter how various the imagery of Blood-Letting, Film of Love, Holiday Film, tabula rasa or The Exquisite Corpus, each of these films crystalizes an essential impulse at the heart of my entire artistic work: to expose the utterly distinct nature of analog film in all its unique beauty, a potential and vision neither available nor transferrable to any other medium. (Peter Tscherkassky)

A dream narrative of a sleeping beauty--a nudist found unconscious on a beach--intertwining different films, different bodies, caresses, screams of shock and cries of ardour, The Exquisite Corpus works to collapse the line between the filmed body, Tscherkassky's nudes in search of each other and of satisfaction, and the film body, the celluloid that has captured these bodies, the celluloid Tscherkassky meticulously manipulates in his darkroom. Such darkroom magic teases and exposes the film itself, frames layered on one another, images masked and unmasked, perforations and flung celluloid strips playing their own game of seduction and consummation somehow at once on top of and within the choice (s)excerpts. This is where Tscherkassky's love for celluloid is wedded to his source films' love for flesh, where the pathways to climax--narrative and sexual--are built from the same component parts of mystery, attraction, rhythm, repetition, variation, new sensations, and ecstasy. (Daniel Kasman)

Blood-Letting, 1981, 11:00 min
Film of Love, 1982, 8:00 min
Holiday Film, 1983, 9:00 min
Tabula Rasa, 1989, 17:00 min
The Exquisite Corpus, 2015, 19:00 min

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