Kurt Kren

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

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.

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

Introduces the films ‚Körperanalysen’ (body analyses), an overview of Actionism movies from 1964-1970 (a. o. Kurt Kren, Otto Mühl, Ernst Schmid Jr.), compiled and presented in a documentary format by Peter Kasperak.

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.

Introduces the films ‚Körperanalysen’ (body analyses), an overview of Actionism movies from 1964-1970 (a. o. Kurt Kren, Otto Mühl, Ernst Schmid Jr.), compiled and presented in a documentary format by Peter Kasperak.

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.

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

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)

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.

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

Kren had composed a diary-like piece containing subtle irony with his 27/71 Auf der Pfaueninsel (On Peacock Isle). The lengthy titles which are one minute long, in which five people are ceremoniously introduced, are followed by only twenty seconds of pictures. These pictures, filmed by Kren have a wobbly quality to them, as the camera surreptitiously looks from far off at a group of people walking away. "Family movie" is the bracketed subtitle of this film.

Kurt Kren short

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.

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.

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)

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.

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'.

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?

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

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.

11/65 Bild Helga Philipp is an optical abstraction of an optical abstraction: Kren has simply intercut filmed movements and sections from an Op painting by Helga Philipp - the result is motion opticals.

Kurt Kren records snapshots of visitors to Vienna who are photographed in front of the statue of Johann Strauss Jr.

Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)

Sinus Beta is almost a sort of teaching film about bodily behavior in different situations. The film also produces, through the heterogenic photographic materiality of the primary elements, a cross-section of the methods, used in capturing the body in a still photograph. (Mubi)

"It became easier to understand Kren's method of approaching film when he illustrated his matter-of-factness with a story: he was asked to shoot and deliver a film, for a festival, given four day's notice, which he did ('foot'-age shoot'-out'). He normally takes a long time with a film; this one he terms a "rape." He removed his name and copy-right from the piece. "Probably my last film." I asked whether he'd ever seen a print. "Yes, it's great," he replied..." (April Rapier)

A silent short film by Kurt Kren.

Kren in New Hampshire, New England. Together with friends he lived from the demolition of wooden houses and sale of the wood. Kren was the "nail puller". (Hans Scheugl)

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.

'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'

Kurt Kren filmed pieces of feature films in the cinema without looking through the viewfinder. The missing sexual climax from the cinema was added by Kren in the form of insights and views from Otto Muehl's Libi Aktion.

Kren’s last film to include any direct reference to Otto Muehl is 12/66: Cosinus Alpha, a 10-minute film that completes a cycle of elaborate sensual montages and materials.

A short film by Kurt Kren.

Almost as if entering the picture frame by chance, mute characters lean out of Viennese apartment windows, simply to have a look.

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)

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.

Kurt Kren short

I took a photograph of the view out of the window and had a very large negative made from it, which I fastened to the lens hood attacement in front of the camera. I tried to bring the negative into alignment with the real landscape which I could see through the camera. Then I filmed for months, changing the focus from near to far and then back again. (K.K.)

Kren shows the cinema (mentioned in the title) during and after film presentations. He uses single-frame and time exposures 5 to 30 seconds long. Sometimes sunlight comes through the open door into the theater changing the colors in the film remarkably. Black spots appear when the lights inside the cinema are turned off. The film is uncut and was recorded with a shoulder tripod over a period of three weeks.

A "stroll" at various locations: the St. Marx Cemetery, the Prater park, Carnuntum. We see people taking walks, construction workers, people flying model planes and other little observations. Kren also used a short segment of found footage in colour which shows a woman in a bikini.

Zeichenfilm - Balzac oder das Auge Gottes is a play on the idea of trick film. And trick film it is. The 30-second work is shown twice in case the viewer missed something the first time: in crude hand-drawn animation Zeichenfilm ... evokes the scatological sado-masochistic actions and performances of Otto Muehl and Günter Brus which Kren filmed during his second period. In Zeichenfilm Balzac a male figure hangs himself, achieves a monstrous erection and ejaculates into a woman's mouth. She in turn hangs herself; he enters her vaginally then anally. Finally, she defecates on the left side of the frame wherein appears an eye of God while on the right in a cartoon box the words "Aber Otto" ("But Otto") materialize, a comic reference to Otto Muehl.

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).

This film shows, with the use of single-frames, Kren's diary-like notes from 1968 to 1976, especially his entries about the work on the three previous films. At the very end a fragment of a failed first attempt of Keine Donau (No Danube) is shown. The coffee company can also be seen, which has given the film its name.