Ursula Pürrer

In the year 2700, a comic book artist encounters a mysterious alien while seeking revenge against the pyromaniac who burned down her printing presses.

Sabotage acts are committed on the film theaters of a city for no apparent reason. Two secretaries of "Mega Film", which has been damaged by a sabotage act, decide to try to find the saboteurs in order to determine what their motives are.

In the year 2700, a comic book artist encounters a mysterious alien while seeking revenge against the pyromaniac who burned down her printing presses.

In the year 2700, a comic book artist encounters a mysterious alien while seeking revenge against the pyromaniac who burned down her printing presses.

In the year 2700, a comic book artist encounters a mysterious alien while seeking revenge against the pyromaniac who burned down her printing presses.

Games with muscles, games with power, SM games. The naked body employed as a prop. Perceptions of one's own body are the focus of Body-building, and it leaves the good-girl role far behind, sometimes in striking poses, sometimes in martial dress.

A filmic homage to Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons": Everyday objects and especially house plants are imbued with cubist dimensions – everything moves, everything is alive. Lesbian fellowship swims like fish in the water to a shore of ruins – this city can only be "ash". (Andrea B. Braidt)

Two nude, female-presenting figures perform a minimal waltz to Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” on a stage resembling a variety show set. Their repetitive movements are simple: arm to hip, slight hip swing, step forward and back. Behind them, a painted black canvas shows two blue clouds and a central vase with an abstract bouquet, tied with red-white-red barrier tape—evoking the Austrian flag. A painter’s table with a sponge juts into the frame. The setting and music, full of ironic national and artistic references, create an ambiguous, imperfect tableau. Directed by Ashley Hans Scheirl and Ursula Pürrer, the film is a remake.

These shorts, executed between 1984 and 1986 in Vienna, exude an amazingly fresh intimacy and vitality. Referred to by the filmmakers as "home movies", they record actionistic performances in the directors' own living quarters, with added soundtracks of intermittent percussive sounds.

Pürrer and Scheirl as naughty Easter bunnies create their own visual rhyme on Easter: Catholic excess and Christ kitsch become drowned out by undulating sounds and shimmering foil. Jesus pin-up and corpse of Christ reenactment included.

Two bed frames pushed together are traced from bottom to top by the camera and pass over to Scheirl in a suit, panning over her. This is followed by repeated vertical pans up high-rise buildings. In between is Pürrer with a fixed gaze and extravagant jewelry. The music is by the anarcho-punk band Crass.

A possible staging of spaces; artificial places, in which the laws—of physical, social or cultural origins—are expanded, changed, ignored, perverted or transformed.

Between the “red cuts” are dynamic images of Pürrer and Scheirl, some filmed from a screen, often against a red background or completely in red. You can see Pürrer lustful, rolling her eyes back, and throwing combative glances. On the hectic soundtrack you hear screams, sounds of fighting, things breaking.

The film is a garden full of flowers and plant leaves. They’re placed in the mouth and down inside the dress neckline; they’re danced with and set in motion. They become overlong toenails or breasts that are gently caressed or maliciously squeezed. All of this goes on accompanied by both classical music and punk. In the end, they wilt.

These shorts, executed between 1984 and 1986 in Vienna, exude an amazingly fresh intimacy and vitality. Referred to by the filmmakers as »home movies«, they record actionistic performances in the directors’ own living quarters, with added soundtracks of intermittent percussive sounds.

In Rhubarb and Sugar, Pürrer plays with rhubarb stalks, which in her hands and mouth are transformed into antennae, ears, and a tail. Monstera leaves are made to shake and tremble, as is Pürrer’s head, and pure sugar is eaten. The film is dedicated to Chantal Akerman.

Scheirl’s body, with brightly painted genitals and harshly lit face, is portrayed in fragments by the camera; Pürrer is also naked. Scheirl is then shown wearing a pink dress with a floral pattern. She lifts it up and pees while standing, before climbing into a tub next to a laughing Pürrer.

Night-Poster-Subway shows shots of modern urban life at high speed, accompanied by music from Circle X. As they pass by, the film captures houses, their facades and individual parts of them, trams, blue lights, advertising posters, all above and below ground. And in the middle of it all, Anna loves Maria – as it says on a white billboard.

Bodies and fluids, bodily fluids and fluid bodies.

The plant is padded and bounces, the heart is padded and drops. Objects fill the lead roles: swaying plants with succulent leaves; and vases, tall and lean like the torsos of young women. Metal and plastic foil, leather straps and piles of flour, enigmatic symbols and garishimages, all accompanied by shrill music and a tumult of voices, mechanical clattering, angry snorting and the cracking of a whip.

In front of the mirrored glass facades of the empty, newly built University of Economics and Business, Scheirl, Pürrer, Bauer, and Jurtschitsch perform and repeat film takes. Dressed in theatrical costumes, they run off, only to suddenly stop as if petrified. A duel, using iron clamps as weapons, ensues between Scheirl and Pürrer, which culminates in a kiss. Drawings by Pürrer recapitulate the events.

Lunatics in the subway Take a break at the diner Goggles seen from near Astrid is very seductive and reprimands the child Favorite family-shots sneaking in Make a move upside down Toilette and confusion in orange light Marching on the meadow and the simultaneous fall in the counter-post Astrid cannot hold back the laughter Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah (Scheirl)

The film is made up of sequences filmed from the television screen, such as advertisements and excerpts from the show “Aktenzeichen XY” (“File No. XY”) and shots of Pürrer and Scheirl. Pürrer poses with metal objects that she balances on her head or uses as a weapon; Scheirl wears a transparent tulle dress. They mark and count her birthmarks.

Unpunctuated sentences appear word by word on the screen, pointing to the temporality of the reading process and the instantaneity of their appearance. Various phrases comment on this fragmentation: "Irritatingly searching for a medium to express the simultaneity of spatial and temporal jumps" or "The concentrated gaze of the female fetishist experiences objects and movements in exactly defined excerpts." The body, too, as another phrase suggests, is split open (aufgesplittert). In this film about seriality, people are referred to as A or G" in their sexual relations with one another.

These shorts, executed between 1984 and 1986 in Vienna, exude an amazingly fresh intimacy and vitality. Referred to by the filmmakers as "home movies", they record actionistic performances in the directors' own living quarters, with added soundtracks of intermittent percussive sounds.