Search results for ""Synema Gesellschaft Fur Film u. Medien""

Viennese filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, who has been making films since the 1970s, has created an exciting and widely recognized body of essay and documentary films. Her work is both deeply personal and political. She discusses the complex relationship between history and the present and reflects on her identity as a Jewish woman in postwar Austria and Europe. Tropes of travel and migration feature heavily in her work as means of experiencing the world and of staying alive, literally as well as artistically.Beckermann’s films speak about identity conflicts and class struggle (Suddenly, a Strike), her family history in the Habsburg monarchy (Paper Bridge), and the war generation as it confronts the crimes of the Wehrmacht (East of War). In 2016, she turned the love affair between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann in postwar Vienna into an unconventional feature film (The Dreamed Ones). In her latest project, The Waldheim Waltz (2018), Beckermann uses 1980s archival footage of the “Waldheim Affair” to reflect on the mechanisms of populism and the media.This is the first English-language publication on Ruth Beckermann’s filmic oeuvre, including an original essay by Nick Pinkerton, an in-depth conversation with the artist conducted by Alexander Horwath and Michael Omasta, and a detailed filmography by Michael Omasta and Brigitte Mayr.

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Dominik Graf, an exception in the film/television business, is a man of many parts. This is precisely what makes him so fascinating. He is a genre filmmaker, who guilefully attained freedom from within the rigid confines of television, and wrote (German) TV history with his episodes of Der Fahnder and Tatort. His sole commercial hit in theatres, Die Katze, has developed into a veritable "generational text". He is an auteur filmmaker in the spirit of the nouvelle vague or New Hollywood, who made waves with such masterpieces as Spieler, Der Felsen, Die Freunde der Freunde, or Das Gelübde. He is also a wonderful writer on film – and a polemical commentator of recent German history. However, these parts cannot be separated so clearly, something which this book explains through an essay by Christoph Huber, an richly annotated filmography by Olaf Müller and an in-depth interview with Dominik Graf by both authors.

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Peter Kubelka's program cycle What is Film is a key element in the work of the Austrian Film Museum. It was inaugurated in 1996 on the occasion of the centenary of cinema and now consists of 63 programmes of outstanding works. Kubelka's selection of essential cinema defines film as an independent art form, as a tool which cultivates new ways of thinking. The book Was ist Film makes the cycle accessible via essays and film stills for the first time.

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During the past decade, the international study of non-theatrical cinematic forms has seen a strong expansion – with amateur film as a central area of research. Changing collection policies in film archives and museums and new forms of digital access are not the only reasons for this interest. However, the major impulse to current debates comes from contributions based on an analysis of archival holdings. Abenteuer Alltag. Zur Archäologie des Amateurfilms is the first German-language publication to give an overview of amateur film research in Europe, presenting essays on topics such as the politics and history, the technology and aesthetics, as well as the bodies and spaces of amateur film. In addition, several European and American film archives provide information about their collection strategies.

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Amos Vogel was one of America's most innovative film historians and curators. An émigré from Austria who arrived in New York just before the Second World War, in 1947 he created Cinema 16, a pioneering film club aimed at audiences thirsty for work "that cannot be seen elsewhere," and in 1963 was instrumental in establishing the New York Film Festival. He later embarked on an ambitious teaching career, synthesizing decades of experience and directing his ideas towards students and, eventually, the wider public. In 1974 he published the culmination of his thoughts – along with an extraordinary collection of stills – in Film as a Subversive Art. On his death, the New York Times wrote that Vogel "exerted an influence on the history of film that few other non-filmmakers can claim." Be Sand, Not Oil is the first book about Vogel, and includes uncollected writings, an unpublished interview, and new essays documenting his never-ending quest for what Werner Herzog, his friend of many decades, has described as "adequate imagery."

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From moving images on the Internet to giant IMAX displays: The number of screens in the public and private sphere has increased significantly during the last two decades. While this is often taken to indicate the "death of cinema," this volume attempts to reconsider the limits and specifics of film and the traditional movie theater. It analyzes notions of spectatorship, the relationship between cinema and the "uncinematic," the contested place of installation art in the history of experimental cinema, and the characteristics of the high definition image. Further contributions discuss the ways in which cinema interacts with other arts and media such as theater and television. Contributors include Raymond Bellour, Victor Burgin, Vinzenz Hediger, Tom Gunning, Ute Holl, Ekkehard Knörer, Thomas Morsch, Jonathan Rosenbaum and the editors.

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Jean Epstein, the great unknown amongst the pioneers of independent filmmaking, was also an essential figure in the invention of modern cinema-both as a theorist and as an artist. For the first time, a selection of Epstein's writings on film are published in German in this volume. Nicole Brenez' essay on Epstein contextualizes his achievements.

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From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet distinguished themselves as two of Europe's most inventive, generous, and uncompromising filmmakers. From Machorka-Muff (1963) through These Encounters of Theirs (2006), and in the subsequent solo work of Jean-Marie Straub, they developed groundbreaking and unique approaches to film adaptation, performance, sound recording, cinematography, and translation in films made across Germany, Italy, and France – including such modern classics as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), Moses and Aaron (1974), Class Relations (1983), and Sicilia! (1999). On the occasion of the first complete North American retrospective of their films in more than two decades, this volume traces the history of Straub's and Huillet's work, placing their films in the specific cultural, linguistic, and critical contexts in which they were produced and providing an account of their distribution and reception in the English-speaking world.

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Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her “body awareness” visible found additional expression in film in the early 1970s. During her time in New York, Lassnig studied animation at the School of Visual Arts and began to film in 8mm and 16mm. While several of these New York films have long since been part of her canonical works (e.g. Selfportrait, Iris, Couples, Shapes), many remained unfinished. These "films in progress" can be regarded as autobiographical notes as well as an artistic experiment featuring many of Lassnig’s recognizable sujets and methods. In 2018, this filmic legacy was restored and in many cases completed according to Lassnig’s original concept and instructions by two close collaborators, artists Hans Werner Poschauko and Mara Mattuschka, and presented to great international acclaim.This German-language publication provides the first comprehensive index of Lassnig’s film works, offering insight into the filmmaker’s world of ideas through a wide selection of Lassnig’s own previously unpublished notes. It also includes a selection of Lassnig's "films in progress" on DVD. Two essays by James Boaden and Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni place Lassnig’s work in the context of the US-American film avant-garde of the 1970s, while conversations with Mara Mattuschka, Hans Werner Poschauko and the restoration team shed a light on the rediscovery of Lassnig’s fascinating films.

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A transformative decade that witnessed the U.S. film industry's restructuring under the pressures of neoliberal globalization, the 1980s swept away the last remnants of Old and New Hollywood alike while preparing the ground for today's High Concept wasteland – thus goes an all too familiar tale of decline. The texts assembled in this volume tell a different, altogether more fitful and complex story about Reagan-era Hollywood, attuned to the struggles that went on behind and in front of the camera: interrupted careers, defiant last stands, paths not taken.The book places particular emphasis on modes of realism from within the mainstream of U.S. popular cinema that resisted the tide of the times. The lexicon format, allowing for many perspectives and constellations while imposing none, encourages the reader to make their own connections, drawing out parallel histories that restore a sense of possibility to the canonical course of film history. From forgotten masters to minor works of the greats, from the defining actors of the decade to its definitive genres, from resistant independents to the resistible rise of the multinational corporation: the Real Eighties await rediscovery.

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This is the first English translation of Alain Bergala's seminal text on the potentials, possibilities, and problems of bringing film to schools and other educational contexts. Based on the author's own experiences of writing about and teaching film as well as serving as an adviser to then-Minister of Education Jack Lang, Bergala promotes an understanding of film as an autonomous art form – rather than viewing it as a supplement to other established school subjects. Film, for Bergala, is not something that has to smoothly blend into the school but something that can serve as a productive rupture, for both institution and pupil. Published in collaboration with the British Film Institute, this edition will be complemented by a new introduction on the occasion of its first appearance in English and a conversation with Bergala about the current state of film education on an international scale.

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With her documentaries and essay films since the late 1970s, Viennese filmmaker Ruth Beckermann has created an exciting and widely recognized body of personal/political cinema. Her work reflects on the relations between history and contemporaneity, on her life as a Jewish woman in postwar Austria and Europe, and on travelling and migration as modes of staying alive - literally as well as artistically. Beckermann's films speak about identity conflicts and the class struggle, about her family history in the Habsburg monarchy (The Paper Bridge) and the war generation as it confronts the crimes of the Werhrmacht (East of War). Most recently, she has turned her sights towards the deep love affair between two poets, Paul Celan und Ingeborg Bachmann, in 1950s Vienna (The Dreamed Ones). This is the first book about Ruth Beckermann's multifaceted oeuvre, with original essays by critics and literary writers, rare illustrations and documents, and an in-depth conversation with the artist. Also included are Beckermann's reflections on her current project, The Case of Kurt Waldheim.

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The collections of the Austrian Film Museum feature a wide range of artworks, objects, apparatus and historical documents. Picturing and describing 50 artifacts from these collections, the book suggests a non-dogmatic reading of film history. The 50 selected items represent a rough timeline, from the pre-cinematic moving image arts to pixelized film grain, tracing a material culture deeply entangled with the history of the 20th century – and far from the reductive idea of cinematic "glamour" that is so often associated with movie memorabilia. The images and texts describe a territory where private lives and politics, art and terror, famous and marginalized films, and desired and despised objects, all engage in conversation with each other. This picture book in 50 chapters begins with a cinema and ends with a cactus (or vice versa).

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The founding of the Austrian Film Museum in February 1964 was part of the radical innovations in early 1960s German-language film culture. This work of historical research describes the establishment, development and early critical success of the institution – from post-war Viennese film culture and its protagonists to the tenth anniversary of the Film Museum in 1974. The book evokes Austria's cultural climate and its changes between the late 1950s and 1970s, highlighting the struggles of the two museum founders, Peter Konlechner and Peter Kubelka, who were not yet 30 when they began their endeavor ("juvenile students" in the civil service lingo of that era). The book also touches on international film politics (in relation to FIAF) and on the clashes between Vienna's "actionist" underground scene and the Austrian Film Museum in 1969.

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What are the major issues and challenges that film archives, cinémathèques, and film museums are bound to face in the digital age and at a time when there is an expectation of access on demand? What is curatorship, and what does it imply in the context of film preservation and presentation? Is there a concept of “cinema event" that transcends the idea of film as “content” or “art” in the era of information?Film Curatorship is an experiment: a collective text, a montage of dialogues, conversations, and exchanges among four professionals representing three generations of film archivists and curators. It calls for an open philosophical and ethical debate on fundamental questions the profession must come to terms with in the twenty-first century.The first edition of this book was jointly published with Le Giornate del Cinema muto, Pordenone, Italy.The second edition features a new preface by the authors.

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In his films Guy Debord (1931–1994) worked according to the following principle: do nothing you should, do everything you should not. Created between 1952 and 1978, all the films reflect this rule and confirm what he referred to as his “detestable ambition.”Gathered in a single volume for the first time in German, this publication unites the texts of all of Guy Debord’s films in a new translation: from his first film made in affiliation with the Lettrist group led by Isidore Isou, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), an alteration of black and white sequences devoid of images; to works that originated in the course of his participation in the Situationist International, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959) and Critique de la séparation (1961); to the adaptation of his best known theoretical work, La Société du spectacle (1973), followed by the response to his critics entitled Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film "La Société du spectacle" (1975) and his résumé, intended as an act of closure: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978).Texts and images are true to the French original edition and complemented by a list of sources for the quotes, Debord’s notes on his films, drafts of unrealized film projects, as well as the text of the TV documentary he coauthored, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (1994).

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A richly illustrated anthology of memories, documents and essays on the 50-year history of the Austrian Film Museum, founded in 1964. The book highlights the major retrospectives staged over the past five decades and celebrates many of the visiting artists as well as the writers who contributed to the Museum's international recognition – or to its curatorial positions. The newly commissioned pieces range from literary texts and brief flashes of remembrance to extended discussions of certain aspects of film culture. A decade-by-decade, year-by year, month-by-month chronicle of all programs also runs through the book.

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In the often dreary landscape of Hollywood's blockbuster era, the cinema of Joe Dante has always stood out as a rare beacon of fearless originality. Blending humor with terror and trenchant political satire with sincere tributes to the moviegoing act itself, the "Dante touch" is best described as a free-for-all orgy of movies, memories and mischief. For the first time, this colourful universe—from Hollywood Boulevard to Gremlins to Small Soldiers and beyond—is comprehensively explored in an English language volume featuring a career-encompassing interview, new essays by Michael Almereyda, Jim Hoberman, Christoph Huber, Gabe Klinger, Violeta Kovacsics, Bill Krohn, Dušan Rebolj, John Sayles, and Mark Cotta Vaz, as well as a treasure trove of never-before-seen documents and illustrations.

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Olivier Assayas is best known as a filmmaker, yet cinema makes only a late appearance in this volume. A Post-May Adolescence is an account of a personal formation, an initiation into an individual vision of the world. It is, equally, a record of youthful struggle. Assayas' reflective memoir takes the reader from the massive cultural upheaval of France in May 1968 to the mid-1990s, when the artist made his first autobiographical film about his teenage years, L'Eau froide. The movement of thought and creation known as Situationism is the golden thread that connects and, in part, inspires his memoir. This book also includes two essays by Assayas on the aesthetic and political legacy of Guy Debord, who played a decisive role in shaping the author's understanding of the world and his path towards an extremely personal way of making films. A Post-May Adolescence was first published in French in 2005. Its expanded English edition makes a valuable companion to the first English-language monograph on Assayas' body of work, Olivier Assayas, edited by Kent Jones, also published by the Austrian Film Museum.

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In his 1929 Hollywood production The Case of Lena Smith, director Josef von Sternberg vividly brought to life his youthful memories of the turn of the 20th century through the story a young woman fighting the oppressive class system of Imperial Vienna. Critic Dwight Macdonald called it “the most completely satisfying American film I have seen.” And yet, only a short fragment survives. Assembling 150 original stills and set designs, numerous script and production documents and essays by eminent film historians, the book reconstructs one of the legendary lost masterpieces of the American cinema. It also includes essays by Janet Bergstrom, Gero Gandert, Franz Grafl, Alexander Horwath, Hiroshi Komatsu and Michael Omasta, a preface by Meri von Sternberg, as well as contemporary reviews and excerpts from Viennese literature of the era.

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Since the 1990s, "found footage film" has flourished internationally. Among the filmmakers that gained prominence in this context of "applied media archaeology" is Gustav Deutsch, an outstanding case. His work& mdash;including the series Film Is or Welt Spiegel Kino& mdash;has been shown widely at film festivals and in the contemporary art world. The first monograph to follow his entire thrity-year career, Gustav Deutsch explore the artist as he works in film, video, and installation, featuring essay contributions by Linda Williams, Tom Gunning, Scott MacDonald, Nico de Klerk, and Alexander Horwath.

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Born in a small town in Lower Austria, Michael Pilz has realized over 100 films since the 1960s. His breakthrough came with a veritable massif central of European documentary cinema: Heaven and Earth (1979-82), an epic work about the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. Since then, he has been a "solitary man", crossing the borders between film forms just as easily as those between art, cinema, life. This richly illustrated book is the first monograph about Michael Pilz. It includes several essays dealing with his work, an extensive conversation, selected texts and film treatments written by him, and a complete annotated filmography.

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In a four-decade-long career that generated more than forty films and numerous stage productions, Werner Schroeter became one of the most important directors in Germany and Europe since the late 1960s. After making a flurry of short films in a climate of feverish artistic experimentation and political upheaval, Schroeter soon gained recognition for Eika Katappa (1969) and The Death of Maria Malibran (1971), early mature works showcasing avant-garde performance as iconoclastic expression of rebellion and pathos. Following a decade of uncompromising experimental work, his deeply humanist features Il Regno di Napoli (1979) and Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980) brought him broader success. Yet Schroeter maintained his reputation as an enfant terrible of the German cultural scene with controversial stagings of operas and plays and with smartly observed documentaries on art, film, and politics.This volume traces Schroeter’s career as a filmmaker from early and rarely discussed works such as Salome (1971) and Willow Springs (1973) to his late 1970s breakout hits and later complex and mature art-house productions such as The Rose King (1986), Malina (1991), and Nuit de Chien (2008). The volume is supplemented by Schroeter’s own writings and conversations and includes an interview with his long-time collaborator Elfi Mikesch as well as an authoritative and completely updated filmography.

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In a career spanning five decades, Robert Beavers has distinguished himself as one of the most important American avant-garde filmmakers. From My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure, his cycle of 18 films made across Europe since 1967, to Pitcher of Colored Light (2007) and The Suppliant (2010), intimate portraits shot in the U.S., Beavers has produced a deeply original film language framed by his use of colored filters and mattes. His investigations of the handwork of anonymous artisans complement his dialogues with Ruskin, Leonardo, and Borromini in Ruskin (1975/1997), From the Notebook of… (1971/1998), and The Hedge Theater (1986/2002). This volume contains critical investigations of Beavers' most important films and a collection of the filmmaker's own writings. Occupying a unique space between poetry and philosophy, his aphoristic meditations vivify his own work and generously illuminate the art of film.

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?Films, in their generic, stylistic, and rhetorical variety, are modes of experience that provide a sense for the unexpected dynamics of urban life and historical reality. This understanding of cinema, as loving as it is theoretical, inspired the writings on film which form a central part of the wide-ranging work of Austrian historian Siegfried Mattl. From the political imaginary of well-known "historical films" by Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, John Woo, and Todd Haynes, to inter-war comedies and post-war educational films highlighting the changing socio-economic textures of Vienna, and on to amateur films that offer surprising views of how Austrians adapted themselves to Nazism or consumer culture, Mattl´s investigations are rich in historical context and re-evaluated material. Written with humor and a critical view of power relations, his essays and studies – some published for the first time – also enter into dialogues with Siegfried Kracauer's and Jacques Rancière's concepts of cinema's historicity. Exploring imagescapes of Red Vienna, of Haneke's white, or of Dylan's blues, Mattl invites us to look back at, and look out for, the ephemera that make up history.

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This is a three-volume set about the founding, the 50-year history, and the collections of the Austrian Film Museum. Volume 1 (in German) is a work of historical research, describing in detail the establishment and development of the institution—from postwar Viennese film culture and its protagonists to the tenth anniversary of the Film Museum in 1974. Volume 2 (in German, with some parts in English) extends the time-frame to the year 2014 and offers a richly illustrated anthology of essays, documents, memoirs, and correspondence. It highlights the major retrospectives staged by the Film Museum over a period of 50 years and celebrates many of the visiting artists as well as the writers who contributed to the museum's international recognition and to its curatorial positions. Volume 3 (in German) focuses on the museum's holdings by picturing and describing 50 objects from various subfields of the collectionVand suggesting a non-dogmatic reading of film history.

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Claudia Preschl's study focusses on female performers in comedies between 1910 and 1918. The book is a contribution to the rediscovery of this early "other" cinema in which comediennes such as "Rosalie", "Léa" or Asta Nielsen played a decisive part. Lachende Körper describes the variety of preposterous body-language and shows how anarchistic body-politics and rebellious strategies of Gender in Early Cinema can be decoded for today.

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Over the past few decades, French filmmaker Olivier Assayas has become a powerful force in contemporary cinema. Between his first feature Désordre (1986) and such major works as L'Eau froide, Irma Vep, Les Destinées Sentimentales, demonlover and, most recently, L'Heure d'été and Carlos, he has charted an exciting path, strongly embracing narrative and character and simultaneously dealing with the 'fragmentary reality' of life in a global economy. He also brought a fresh perspective to the problem of politics after '68, a subject that he revisits in his memoir A Post-May Adolescence (published as a companion book to this volume) and in his most recent film Après-Mai. This first English-language book about Olivier Assayas includes a major essay by Kent Jones, based on his two decades of correspondence and exchanges of ideas with the filmmaker, as well as contributions from Assayas and his most important artistic collaborators. The central part consists of individual essays on each of his works, written by Chris Chang, Larry Gross, Howard Hampton, Kristin M. Jones, B. Kite, Glenn Kenny, Michael Koresky, Alice Lovejoy, Greil Marcus, Geoffrey O'Brien, Jeff Reichert, Richard Suchenski, and Gina Telaroli.

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Canadian-born filmmaker and photographer John Cook (1935-2001) was one the key figures in the "Austrian New Wave" of the 1970s. A maverick, Cook almost single-handedly introduced a type of freewheeling auteur cinema reminiscent of both Italian neorealism and the works of the French nouvelle vague. This volume offers a German-language section of essays, interviews, and an annotated filmography, and a brief autobiography by Cook in English.

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