Movies: 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....

Kurt Kren short...

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....

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 scatol...

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....

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 fur...

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'....

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....

The making of pictures becomes the central issue in itself in that, with an analytical single-picture procedure, picture-taking tourists on Vienna's St. Stephen's Place are captured and their faces animated to a dance....

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....

"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 no...

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 ...

A commission by Austrian TV station ORF documenting the anniversary celebration for Kunststücke....

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 ...

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 subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl....

Vacation pictures from Rome....

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 ...

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

Kren frames the image to suggest a proscenium, with a view to the harbor that conveys a literal sense of “tele-vision”. The static framing of the image and the clearly stratified mise-en-scène can hardly provoke interpretation. The sight of the girls...