PETER KUBELKA: Metric films

The screening of metric films of Peter Kubelka, a pioneer of experimental cinema, legendary Austrian director and theorist, one of the founders of the Austrian Film Museum and Anthology Film Archive. «with my films ADEBAR (1957) SCHWECHATER (1958) ARNULF RAINER (1960) and ANTIPHON (2012) I created a new form of cinema, which I called METRIC CINEMA. these films have an overall rhythmic structure like music, like poems, like proportioned architecture», the author said about them. Peter Kubelka will visit Moscow for the first time since the 70s and will personally introduce his works at the festival. Films are screened from 35mm film.

ADEBAR

Austria | 1957 | 1 min | 35mm
In Adebar, only certain shot lenghts are used and the image material in the film is combined according to certain rules. For instance, there is a consistent alternation between positive and negative. The film´s images are extremely high contrast black-and-white shots of dancing figures; the images are stripped down to their black-and-white essentials so that they can be used in an almost terrifyingly precise construct of image, motion, and repeated sound. Fred Camper

SCHWECHATER

Austria | 1958 | 1 min | 35mm
Kubelka´s achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as the basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema. the fact that a projected film consists of 24 still images per second serves as the basis of his art. Fred Camper

ARNULF RAINER

Austria | 1960 | 6 min | 35mm
Arnulf Rainer, an architecture built in time by cinema uses only the four essential elements of the medium: light, darkness, sound and silence. Peter Kubelka

With Arnulf Rainer, his third metrical film, Kubelka arrived at the most elemental components of cinematography – namely light, absence of light, sound, silence. These are the four poles from which all of cinema, all of film is suspended. Stretched to their utmost limits, all illusionism is driven out. The last trace of a spatial reproduction is extinguished. And the illusion of movement based on visual similarities of sequential frames (whose minor differences disappear upon projection and thanks to the sluggishness of perception are transformed into an illusion of continuity) is also obliterated. Peter Tscherkassky

ANTIPHON

Austria | 1960 | 6 min | 35mm
Antiphon is constituted by the same 4 basic elements of cinema, light and darkness, sound and silence, as is my film Arnulf Rainer but it has the opposite form. Negative becomes positive, positive becomes negative, silence becomes sound, sound becomes silence. Six minutes 24 seconds, black and white, optical sound, 35 millimeter film. Peter Kubelka
Some films will be repeated: ADEBAR, SCHWECHATER.

ON THE PERSONAL REQUEST OF THE ARTIST, THE LECTURE WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WITHOUT TRANSLATION

Peter Kubelka


Peter Kubelka, director and art historian, was born in Vienna in 1934. Since the 1950's Peter Kubelka has been an influential figure of the international avant-garde of cinema. He is one of the founders of the Austrian Museum of Cinema, which he directed until 2001. And in 1970, together with Jonas Mekas, he founded one of the largest American archives of experimental cinema Anthology Film Archives. Peter Kubelka was a professor at the Städel Schule in Frankfurt. Kubelka is also known as a non-writing theorist, using non-verbal elements, such as mimic, music, food, objects, tools in his lectures.
The screening is supported by Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow
September 28
19:30
Stanislavsky electrotheatre, 16+
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PROGRAMME 2018