Friedl vom Gröller

The setting of the film was simple and straightforward: the now 77-year-old Friedl vom Gröller asks a (homosexual) escort to do a nude film session, has the man’s fine rib underpants pulled down by her younger accomplice, filmmaker Josephine Ahnelt – who, like a puppeteer, remains hidden behind a wooden wall – and exposes his member. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

A wink to the reaper that awaits us all, smile on the lips.

Portrait of the artist’s mother as an old woman. A farewell vignette, a final sketch from her nursing home, silent, aloof, clumsy, metallic gray, candidly-bluntly-awkwardly direct. And proud of what she has accomplished & what has remained incomplete, the lack of architecture & aesthetics & perfection & polish. Like all of Friedl vom Gröller’s films, "Bliss" is as brief and to the point as a shock or a slap to a government minister’s cheek. And as beautiful as a woman of a certain age who refuses to put on makeup, while rough gravel rattles in the stomach of a she-wolf.

Friedl vom Gröller´s Rust starts by gazing into the strained face of the saint. The artist herself reads "Holzschnitt", or woodcut, rather as "Höllenszene", a scene of Hell – perhaps because it appears as if animate nature is trying to force the giant to the ground. Gradually emerging from blurriness in the film, the hero defies fate – at least initially. In so doing, he sets the agenda for Gröller´s figures: Rust is about delaying the deterioration that comes with time. Three so-called "best agers" act according to the saying, "If you rest, you rust," training their muscles, stretching their fascia, staying on the move. (Anne Katrin Feßler)

A young man spitting cherry pits, with an off-screen accomplice, attempts to hit the camera´s lens with one of them. Various moods become apparent on the way to a certain goal: effort, failure, then finally success. A happy, lighthearted film.

An elusive 16mm miniature from the legendary Friedl vom Gröller, Conditio Humana intersperses footage of the crumbling sandstone façade of Pavia’s Basilica di San Michele Maggiore with the returned stares of three performers.

The setting of the film was simple and straightforward: the now 77-year-old Friedl vom Gröller asks a (homosexual) escort to do a nude film session, has the man’s fine rib underpants pulled down by her younger accomplice, filmmaker Josephine Ahnelt – who, like a puppeteer, remains hidden behind a wooden wall – and exposes his member. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

A wink to the reaper that awaits us all, smile on the lips.

Portrait of the artist’s mother as an old woman. A farewell vignette, a final sketch from her nursing home, silent, aloof, clumsy, metallic gray, candidly-bluntly-awkwardly direct. And proud of what she has accomplished & what has remained incomplete, the lack of architecture & aesthetics & perfection & polish. Like all of Friedl vom Gröller’s films, "Bliss" is as brief and to the point as a shock or a slap to a government minister’s cheek. And as beautiful as a woman of a certain age who refuses to put on makeup, while rough gravel rattles in the stomach of a she-wolf.

Friedl vom Gröller´s Rust starts by gazing into the strained face of the saint. The artist herself reads "Holzschnitt", or woodcut, rather as "Höllenszene", a scene of Hell – perhaps because it appears as if animate nature is trying to force the giant to the ground. Gradually emerging from blurriness in the film, the hero defies fate – at least initially. In so doing, he sets the agenda for Gröller´s figures: Rust is about delaying the deterioration that comes with time. Three so-called "best agers" act according to the saying, "If you rest, you rust," training their muscles, stretching their fascia, staying on the move. (Anne Katrin Feßler)

A young man spitting cherry pits, with an off-screen accomplice, attempts to hit the camera´s lens with one of them. Various moods become apparent on the way to a certain goal: effort, failure, then finally success. A happy, lighthearted film.

An elusive 16mm miniature from the legendary Friedl vom Gröller, Conditio Humana intersperses footage of the crumbling sandstone façade of Pavia’s Basilica di San Michele Maggiore with the returned stares of three performers.

May 2012 is composed of three visual elements. In the momentary opening shot the camera spies on riverside joggers from the Donaumarina U-Bahn station. Inside a nearby care home, two elderly women are eating. One is the artist´s mother. She stares into the camera, from where a loving hand reaches out to caress her face. Finally, we see a Christmas pudding decorated and surrounded by candles, all afire. The scene is reminiscent of the flaming Christmas tree in Anger´s Fireworks but was in fact inspired by a viewing of Po zakonu (By the Law) by Kuleshov. The flames burn strongly and race out of control, causing the camera to become agitated, breaking free from its static point of observation, perhaps in panic. The film is characteristic of Friedl vom Gröller´s project to break down the separation between daily life and the making of art, being a particularly compelling example of her recent works that meditate on the process of ageing.

In Maya Deren’s AT LAND, each vision of a foot hitting the ground took us into a new space via the magic of montage. DAS RAD works a similar transformation through the motif of a child’s handstanding wheel motion. Silent and in grainy black and white, the film takes us, simply but mysteriously, into a world of childhood. The ghosts of romanticism linger in the shots of misty hills. As in von Gröller’s ELITE (V’20), the gestures of everyday life become dance-like, and the camera itself gets involved in the dizzy, wheeling motion. Normal perceptions are literally overturned.

Filmmakers love shooting through windows, the various lockdowns were proof of that. Friedl vom Gröller, however, decided with typical playfulness to film the windows themselves, or their replacement, to be exact. As she observes workers moving around the frame, we are able to discover the cinema dispositif in everyday life in the brightness opening up behind them. The frame seems to be doubled until window and screen are the same. But more than creating a mere theoretical game, the director also cares for the silhouettes and faces of the people putting the new windows into place. New windows for a new gaze!

Based on the unusual idea that God's anus is visible on nights of the full moon, and determined to make a taboo visible, Friedl vom Gröller does not spare the audience the natural process of evacuation.

The focus narrows to short cuts relating to the place were the footage was shot, then moves to the portrait´s subject, Franz West, sitting at a wine tavern´s table. From this point on the film deals with the process of shooting film itself and the distribution of positions in front of and behind the camera. What does it mean, filming someone whose position of power is linked to the role behind the camera? The film shows what normally isn´t visible - the "layman´s" uncertainty when being filmed.

Although this film does not follow the genre of the city portrait in any way whatsoever, it nonetheless presents a documentation of the filmmaker´s sojourn in Rome. The starting point is relicts of an empire already ruled by a culture of travel and by tourism, its centuries-old structures; their monumentality, ambivalent beauty, transience, and omnipresent, ornamental grotesqueness. (Rike Frank)

Friedl vom Gröller invites a stranger to his small apartment in Paris and records his reactions to an unexpected striptease.

"I filmed Flo and Ken Jacobs in 2001 when they visited me in my studio (the School of Artistic Photography, Vienna). Our acquaintance, friendship began in 1974. Flo and Ken had witnessed the wild, avant-garde years of independent film in New York. They are practiced New Yorkers. Maybe that's why I thought I could be actionistic and surprising to them while filming: I took the contents of Ken's breast pocket. Ken got angry, as you can see. I hereby apologize in retrospect". (Friedl vom Gröller 2021)

Adama Diouf is an acquaintance, a neighbor, and a scholar, “… [A] covert mayor of Ziguinchor in southern Senegal. The formal philosophy professor, heavily influenced by French existential literature, is well known and highly esteemed in town,” says Friedl vom Gröller.

Wedding is a meta-amateur film, a reflection and a condensation of its form: black and white, silent, 16mm, and only two minutes long. A married couple expose themselves to a camera´s objective gaze, while at the same time face it with their own, resolute gaze-and the riddle of a fragmentary plot. The staging thematizes the material it uses through minor errors in the image, like those that appear at the beginning and end of every 16mm film reel, and "bad" cuts, ghostly in between frames. What happens between the images? (Stefan Grissemann)

It's composed of multiple jump-cut close-ups of a beautiful Roman Bacchante bust with garland braid and vacant eyes in the Louvre, as students and patrons mill about in the grand gallery flooded with light, casting their gaze upon the classical figure holding a basket of grapes.

Portrait of the artist’s mother as an old woman. A farewell vignette, a final sketch from her nursing home, silent, aloof, clumsy, metallic gray, candidly-bluntly-awkwardly direct.

Portraits and fragmented views of Paris intertwine.

Men, their faces in close-up, gazing face first into the camera one after the other is the opening motif of this barely three-minute film, which only right at the end, and after the credits reveals a view of the city of Rome; of a fountain and its water-jet, which at this point could also be ambiguously interpreted and here, as already in earlier films, through (humorous) breaks with and against itself, mirrors a direct interpretation. -Rike Frank

A short film with music written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

Friedl vom Gröller invites a stranger to his small apartment in Paris and records his reactions to an unexpected striptease.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

An ongoing portrait of Max Turnheim that begun in 2002 when he was 20 years old.

An ongoing portrait of Max Turnheim that begun in 2002 when he was 20 years old.

Gaelle Obiegly is a film about not being able to see, and a reversal of the gaze.

No synopsis available yet.

A young woman sits on a bench in a baroque park. The motion of the wind in the leaves, in her hair, and also the flutter of her eyelashes, the opening of her lips, her imperceptible smile are all made visible with the absolutely static camera. A large baroque birdcage symbolizes a hopeless emotional situation. (Friedl vom Gröller)

The lovesick Jelena spends her afternoons strolling among the tombs and leafless trees at Père-Lachaise cemetery. As she sings Françoise Hardy’s “Tous les garçons et les filles”, one old grave depicting a couple draws her attention.

Friedl vom Gröller invites a stranger to his small apartment in Paris and records his reactions to an unexpected striptease.

Four young women present themselves seductively, self confidently and with some signs of shame. The camera´s low angle creates – in spite of feminism – a provocative image of Eva’s everlasting attraction.

16mm short film

Photo session is a film about a pair. A human pair: man and woman, no longer young but when they laugh together they´re as exuberant as children. And an analogous pair: a reflex camera and a 16mm film camera recording one another.

A tiny picaresque set in Paris chronicling Kubelka’s coy encounter with an unnamed man.

A silent, black and white film portrait of two children set against the eponymous Swiss river, Ticino takes its cue from Franz West's famous "Adaptives" sculptures.

A salon piece in black and white. The filmmaker circles the amorous play. Gestures and blurs, intuitively precise in-camera edits condense the situation of debauchery and digression.

In *Eat* (1996), you eat breakfast with your feet propped up on the table, wearing only a bra and panties. After eating, you take out your dentures, lick them, and put them back in. As you do this, you look directly at the camera, as if asking an imaginary viewer to react. It’s a playful exploration of how you’re perceived in person, how you perceive yourself, forms of social behavior, and the roles you like to subvert. “Against conformity,” “against the rules”—two of your mottos. “Let’s misbehave,” so to speak.

Playing a part or stepping outside it. Lisa, who looks like Friedl vom Gröller´s sister, practises looking into the camera. She adjusts her gestures according to a vocabulary of expressions that has more to do with pain than joy. Only when the filmmaker joins her in the picture does the inscribed sadness disappear, and a loving, to an extent passionate warmth fills the space.

A pan along a gallery of large washing machines in a laundromat. Two women speak sign language and a third feeds coins into the machine. Language is made visible. Language is a craft and serves to interpret what is and what might perhaps be. A silent film from a mythical universe, a realm of women who ask questions and patiently and ironically question everything.