Press Information
November 2014
As announced in our previous press release, the annual joint retrospective of the Austrian Film
Museum and the Viennale is dedicated to the work of John Ford (October 16 – November 30).
Below you will find information about three other November programs at the Filmmuseum –
retrospectives of Thomas Heise’s and Gregory J. Markopoulos’ works, as well as a high-profile
series of lectures and conversations: "The Invisible Cinema."
We would also like to draw your attention to the Film Museum’s upcoming presence in New York
and two of our new publications. From November 12 to 16, Anthology Film Archives will showcase
a special tribute program: "The Climate of Vienna – The Austrian Film Museum at Fifty". Further
details can be found here: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/43498
Edited by Paul Cronin, the new Filmmuseum/Synema book Be Sand, Not Oil – The Life and Work
of Amos Vogel will be launched on October 26 in the framework of the Viennale, and on November
9 at New York’s Film Forum, followed by a screening of Cronin’s documentary about Amos Vogel.
A new 2-Disc Edition Filmmuseum DVD is dedicated to the transatlantic connections in James
Benning’s career: Ruhr (2009) and natural history (2014), the latter of which just world-premiered
at Vienna’s Museum of Natural History, are his only films shot outside of the U.S. The box is
complemented by Circling the Image, Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary about Benning.
Thomas Heise. The Complete Works
Thomas Heise, born in 1955 in East Berlin, is one of the most important documentary filmmakers of
our time. Since the early 1990s, he has realized a singular oeuvre which still awaits discovery
outside of German-speaking Europe. Dedicated in great measure to the social upheaval in
"reunified" Germany, Heise's thrilling body of work provides a much more rigorous and complex
perspective on this era than the cultural mainstream has ever been able to muster.
Heise studied at the Potsdam-Babelsberg Film Academy in the GDR, where his far-sighted early
documentaries were promptly banned. For a while, he turned to making "films without images”,
continuing his social exploration in the form of radio features. Many aspects of these collages of
everyday life would become key for Heise’s later films: the evocative montage, an interest in life
on the margins, youth culture, and the relationship between political and personal histories.
After the GDR collapsed, Heise was among the few in his generation who succeeded in cinema. His
first feature films, Eisenzeit (1991) and STAU – Jetzt geht's los (1992), a portrait of right-wing youth
in Halle, created controversy in a culture that liked to see itself as “reconciled”, superseding all
previous German States. Heise’s unprejudiced observation and skill at fostering open
communication, even with skinheads and their families, also helped kindle a debate about what
constitutes "permissible" forms of representation. Heise answered this question by expanding
STAU into a long-term cinematic project: returning eight years later, in Neustadt, he again sought
out the protagonists of the earlier film; and again seven years later in Kinder. Wie die Zeit vergeht.
Through the decades it has become clear that right-wing thinking has moved to the center of society.
"I am loyal to all people whose words and images I put on film." – Thomas Heise upholds this
work ethic even when, as a "child of socialism," he deals explicitly with the GDR and its legacy; his
conversation films, Barluschke (1997) and Mein Bruder (2005), and the enigmatic biographical
sketch Vaterland (2002) can be equally read as individual portraits and as political allegories. But
Heise is not only a cinematic analyst of the first rank, he is also a man of the theater, mostly adapting
and directing works by Brecht and Heiner Müller. This experience has left meaningful traces across
his films: collage-like soundtracks are as characteristic of Heise's cinema as the continuous themes
of language and loss of language.
Basically, says Heise, "my works are storehouses of experience and history." In his powerful
essay film Material (2009), this idea manifests itself most succinctly – as if Heise had compressed
his complete oeuvre into one film. Like an archaeologist, he excavates a rich network of traces:
fragments of great historical panoramas as well as testimony of complex streams of consciousness.
The retrospective is organized in collaboration with Navigator Film, the Vienna Film Academy
and Vienna Art Week. Thomas Heise will be present at numerous screenings. To kick off the
retrospective, he will present his latest film, "Städtebewohner."
November 10 to December 3, 2014
Gregory J. Markopoulos
Gregory J. Markopoulos was twenty (and still a student at the University of Southern California) when
he completed his first masterpiece, the one-hour Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort (1947-48).
Influenced by surrealism and literary modernism, and along with Mara Deren and Kenneth Anger, he
was one of the founders of the New American Cinema, the most significant movement in
independent cinema after 1945. At the same time, that film marks the beginning of an individual
course, as Markopoulos became one of the greatest formal inventors and innovators in the history of
film: "A work formed in serious, radical creativity, employing what the Greeks called thrasos – fire,
self-confidence, enthusiasm." (Harry Tomicek)
Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1928, and raised with the Greek language and traditions (he didn't speak
English until he was seven years old), Markopoulos would follow his artistic goals with
unprecedented rigor until his death in November 1992. Against any pigeonholing by generic terms
such as “narrative,” "underground”, "avant-garde" or "art” film, he always vehemently upheld one
motto: Film as Film.
Markopoulos was no stranger to cinematic storytelling – he attended lectures by Josef von Sternberg,
observed Hitchcock and Lang at work and had contact with Cocteau and Godard during the fifties.
But his own practice taught him that the deepest experiences available in cinema were to be found
elsewhere: "Who can dare to imagine what a single frame might contain?" More and more, he
realized the shape of his films directly during the filming process: composition, sequencing, montage,
dissolves, multiple exposures – all of these processes (which the film industry usually delegates to an
entire team), he accomplished himself, during the moments of filming.
The result is a cinema of true poetry, containing trance-like narratives such as Swain (1950) and
Twice a Man (1963), as well as iridescent portraits of people (Galaxie) and spaces or structures
(Ming Green, Gammelion, Sorrows), all made and released in the late 1960s when Markopoulos
separated himself from the New York underground scene. His oeuvre of that period is characterized
by an almost eerie sense of color and rhythm, and by ecstatic "chords" and clusters made of the
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shortest visual elements. At the same time, he searched for a utopian unity – a non-alienated
relationship between life, filmmaking and film viewing.
Starting in 1967 and together with his partner, Robert Beavers (now the keeper of his estate),
Gregory Markopoulos led a nomadic life marked by poverty, traveling between Italy, Belgium, Greece
and Switzerland. He continued filming ceaselessly, but released no work after 1971. Instead he
concentrated fully on that approximately 80-hour work which would sum up his artistic existence:
Eniaios ("unity," "uniqueness"), created for a special performance in nature, at the "Temenos" near
the village of Lyssaraia in Greece.
22 years after Gregory Markopoulos' death, the opportunities to see his films are still rare; the
restoration and preservation of Eniaios is in progress, but far from complete. The Austrian Film
Museum, with whom the artist had a long (and complicated) relationship, has collected his works for
almost 50 years – and is proud to offer its international audience this retrospective of 26 works, the
most comprehensive examination of Markopoulos' cinema to date.
The retrospective takes place in conjunction with the Vienna Art Week and was organized
with the help of Robert Beavers who will attend all screenings. At the opening, curator Mark
Webber will present his new book, "Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J.
Markopoulos." On November 21, Beavers will present four restored acts from "Eniaios IV"
and will speak about the ongoing Temenos project.
November 19 to 24, 2014
The Invisible Cinema Film, Art, History, and the Museum
Lectures by (and conversations with) Nicole Brenez, Chris Dercon, Noam M. Elcott, Daniel
Fitzpatrick, Lars Henrik Gass, Siegfried Mattl, Winfried Pauleit, and Jacques Rancière.
Can we say that with the demise of film a central allegory of the long 20th century is also in the
process of disappearing? And can the medium's specific modes of production and perception, its
alternative concepts of art and history be preserved in a museum?
"The exhibition space of a film museum is the screen." This is Peter Kubelka in 1964, a few weeks
before he and Peter Konlechner founded the Austrian Film Museum. 50 years later, this somewhat
avant-gardist (and, at the same time, very simple) conception still serves as a mark of distinction visa-vis many other institutions – within the realm of film and beyond. It distinguishes itself by
inextricably tying the cinema and the museum together. Cinema becomes two things at once: a
specific site or location (the darkenend movie auditorium) and shorthand for a historical technology or
cultural technique (cinematography).
In Kubelka's terms, the Invisible Cinema is the exhibition space that makes itself disappear: a Black
Box instead of a White Cube. It is also that part of technology which usually remains hidden during
the show in order for the film to be experienced as an event: projection technology, the mechanical
arrangement of man, projector and filmstrip. The latter two have always been collected in the Film
Museum, but they don’t turn into museum artefacts; not even if film – as is the case today – has
already become a historical medium.
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As a new art which often tried to avoid becoming precisely that, film shared – in the words of
Siegfried Kracauer – an anteroom with history: In its indexical relationship to reality it became a new
form of historical document and at the same time wrote history in a new manner. Furthermore it was
a medium of spectacle and entertainment, a tool of political militancy and repression, and a means of
producing experience and knowledge in many other domains where High and Low, the
„sophisticated“ and the „profane“, the „pure“ and „impure“ intermingle incessantly.
Ironically, film persists as a synonym for any form of moving images which replaced it – as an
invisible cinema from which film itself has disappeared. How can it still be made visible, and what can
it still make visible in the process?
"The Invisible Cinema" is a joint project of the Film Museum and the IFK – Internationales
Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, which will also be hosting Siegfried Mattl’s
keynote lecture (Nov 25). All other lectures and conversations will take place at the Film
Museum.
November 25 to 29, 2014
For more information and photos visit www.filmmuseum.at or contact us directly:
Sabine Maierhofer, [email protected], phone 43/1/533 70 54 ext. 19
Alessandra Thiele, [email protected], phone 43/1/533 70 54 ext. 22
Eszter Kondor, [email protected], phone 43/1/533 70 54 ext. 12
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