Kurt Kren

A portrait of the Austrian avant-garde artist Otto Mühl/Muehl (1925-2013), whose work combined sex, violence, gastronomy and bodily effluence with unbridled abandon.

A kind of home movie made in Brus' apartment. Brus' Christmas wishes can be seen on a poster which he painted and which he holds for a short time in front of the camera.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature. The third part was realized by Peter Tscherkassy based on a concept by Ernst Schmidt Jr.

Documentary by Hans Scheugl on Kurt Kren.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

In a TV film about the film Casablanca, Kren is meant to read aloud three letters that Groucho Marx wrote to Warner Bros., because they wanted to take legal action against him over A Night in Casablanca. The recorded material could not be used on television and was meant to be destroyed. Kren found it and showed it uncut with its repetitions.

"This film is an attempt in focusing. I visited Kurt Kren in Vienna. (Kurt Kren is considered to be the father of the European underground film.) Kurt Showed me lots of documents, papers and letters, all about the fights he had with many restaurant owners in Vienna. But the film I made is not about these fights; I tried to focus on the eye of the hurricane, the eye of Kurt Kren. Is this Kurt Kren or isn't it?" (HHK)

A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.

No synopsis available yet.

A homage to the Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, his two films "1000 Years of Cinema" and "Snapspots" and his way of working; and that with a slight wink.

Hans-Peter Hochenrath and Birgit Hein made a documentary film about me for the Saarland Network and wanted me to make a self-portrait. Instead of pointing the camera lens away from myself, I pointed it toward myself. I rewound the film over and over again so that multiple exposures were produced, while I was repeatedly fading in and out.

The Austrian avant-gardist Otto Muehl may well be the most scandalous filmmaker to ever work in cinema, and Sodoma stands as his most famous work. This creation takes the experiments a bit further down the road.

A kind of home movie made in Brus' apartment. Brus' Christmas wishes can be seen on a poster which he painted and which he holds for a short time in front of the camera.

In the first action he filmed, 6/64 Mama und Papa, Kren’s editing leads to many interlocking continuous shots; central takes recur like a leitmotif, circular motion and networking can be observed throughout the film. Kren painstakingly weaves the fury in front of his camera lens into dense geometrical figures. Shot/countershot sequences alternate, lumping back and forth between single (!) frames, they turn the Actionist turmoil into ornaments, rigid geometrical patterns, the equivalent in time to what Mondrian used to distill on canvas in space. (Peter Tscherkassky)

A collection of shorts made between 1964 & 1970 by the extreme avant-garde performance art group The Vienna Actionists. Including short films Sodoma, Mama And Papa, Oh Sensibility Leda Und Der Schwann, O Tannenbaum, Stille Nacht, Cosinus Alpha, Scheiss-Kerl, Impudance In Grunwald, Psychotik-Party, and the infamous Otmer Bauer Presents

Kren’s 10/65 Selfmutilation is developed from a Gunter Brus “action”. What the film emphasizes is the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus’ action, pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they have been taken from an operating theatre. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation. (Stephen Dwoskin)

A collection of shorts by Kurt Kren. Some are based on performaces by Viennese Actionists such as Günter Brus and Otto Mühl.

In a TV film about the film Casablanca, Kren is meant to read aloud three letters that Groucho Marx wrote to Warner Bros., because they wanted to take legal action against him over A Night in Casablanca. The recorded material could not be used on television and was meant to be destroyed. Kren found it and showed it uncut with its repetitions.

Based on a Muehl Happening. The almost convulsive use of juxtaposition reappears here, but the captured gesture assumes a more erotic sensitivity, though the "action" itself was primarily a gradual destruction of the erotic.

This three-minute film was far more akin to the American-style "happening" in that the content was not particularly extreme. It was built up from items such as broken bicycle parts, a nude model, pieces of furniture, and these elements were then obscured or transformed by having a layer of paint thrown on them.

Kurt Kren recorded the last television debate in the Reagan/Mondale election campaign. In the viewfinder, the television filled the entire picture, but the viewfinder did not match the lens entirely so that the television screen in the picture was very little. That was not the plan, but Kren decided to "adopt" the film in the end.

"Action" by Günter Brus. At first Kren did not want to show the film, because the image is underexposed. A copy of the negative material turned out to be better than the original material and so Kren did show the film. The film's title relates to Brus' use of silver paper for his action.

Kren's second film and the first he cut according to a strictly serial, sequence technique: in various frame sizes, the 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" are shown in pre-specified lengths (between one and eight frames).

A collage of many visuals. A man urinates; a man has a drink. A man defecates; someone eats a meal. 16/67 September 20: ‘The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film'.

Kren on his way from Vermont to California. Kren says that his various cars are the thread which runs through the story. (Hans Scheugl)

At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures.

A man's head is seen in silent close-up using single-frame shooting and time exposure.

The first embodiment of (a) concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren's Bäume im Herbst, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience.

Vacation pictures from Rome.

A silent short film by Kurt Kren.

A report about an Underground Festival on tour through Germany and Switzerland.

Kurt Kren films an anti-war poster in extreme close-up moves to subvert the quick responses of viewers to its loaded imagery.

Kren filmed, in microscopic detail the reflection and refraction of the light in/on a glass bottle. However, the bottle itself (the whole body) is never seen. What is seen is much more the emanations of light from the glass and its clarity. (Michael Palm)

In 9/64 O Christmas Tree Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl "action". The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials.

A fragment: Impressions of the atelier of painter Wolfgang Ernst (who also worked as a composer or the films of Kren and Schmid). Unfinished due to arguments while filming. First screened June, 1st 1995 as a loop with live-music by Wolfgang Ernst. (Hans Scheugl)

The film uses slides - photographic planes - which show different surfaces and finishes of a wall, which have been erroded by time. Kren stacks the positives and negatives of these pictures quickly one after the other, so that a moving relief-type structure develops through this combination of "two eyes." A mysterious ambiguous image manifests itself before us, surrounded by all kinds of possible mythological connotations. What is there to see?