Writer
Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?
Director
Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?
Director
Alpine Passage is a film comprising individual images about a journey over Alpine passes. The mountain remains before us, impressive as a painting, and in front of that the sort of architecture that makes it possible for us to examine the mountain up close. A panorama view from a mountain pass cannot exclude a view of Alpine road architecture completely.
Director
Snow, fog, clouds—and in the midst of it all, a barely perceptible massif. Or, better yet, a white noise from which contours gradually emerge and just as steadily dissolve back into: As though ghost lights in the digital image-fog that dominates the expanse of this composition. A mountain peak, only vaguely discernible for the longest time, that halfway disappears again the moment it appears.
Director
Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.
Director
A little story of passions is told in "la petite illusion": heavy breathing garnished by a jazzy bass line, a kiss, a woman falls into water at night. While the work's title is an ironic reference to Jean Renoir's 1937 La grande illusion, the association is a dead end: Neither the images nor the soundtrack contains a direct quotation of Renoir's pacifist fable, nor is a similar motif touched upon. The patina of early sound film which is celebrated in "la petite illusion" stands as the sole vague connection to the «grand illusion» - the sound and the look, the aesthetic stereotypes of Francophone cinema made between the wars. Michaela Schwentner's chromatically ascetic electronic manipulation of found sounds and images is a study of emotional images from the history of cinema which is carefully kept in the air.
Director
A bridge with an arched metal structure stretching over it is visible on a white field. The colors are subdued - gray and black, various shades of brown, blue and green - though they seem quite intense on the light background. The places connected by the bridge aren't visible; portrayed as an isolated structure, it becomes the focus of an analysis in the medium of film.
Director
The trio Radian (the track «tester» is taken from their new CD «Juxtaposition», which was released in fall 2004) and Michaela Schwentner, who has translated several pieces by the three well-traveled sound researchers into images, are a proven team. This is a classic music video, though not really. The visuals are too autonomous, even if Schwentner goes along with the sounds at precisely their rhythm, reflects and emphasizes the growing intensity, and helps accentuate the fractures in the soundscape. The audio level is treated with greater respect than in conventional music videos, and the musical foundation is left unaltered rather than being (re)interpreted.
Director
Dynamic recycling of treated and degraded video, structured to a track by electronic sound artists Radian.
Director
It crackles, it hisses, it dazzles the viewer. While »it» is a short music video with the simple title #Z, »it» also denotes the obvious reference to the imagination's power (or compulsion) to form an image of the noise and light's origin. #Z is sustained by this tension between its existence as a product and the source of something else in the same way as all information conveyed through audio-visual media. The fundamental difference in this case is that no answer is supplied to the question of what »it» in fact is.
Director
transistor shows an excellent model for a direct coupling of sound and image. Accompanied by short, choppy segments of noise fragments, geometric gridworks appear with equal abruptness, as in a visual staccato: empty picture frames, lines and planes in varying intensities, light, semi-light, bold, extra-bold, etc. This not only places a visual matrix underneath the rasping, eruptive sound as a foundation, it also reveals the underlying matrix-like quality, the locking function in the digital culture as the interface at which graphic and acoustic elements have always overlapped. If structural film traditionally proceeded from the assumption that the visible world could be reduced to a geometric and conceptual image, Schwentner re-contextualizes such reduction processes: A kind of a dynamic structural model of an electronic culture which is crossing the genre is made visible. (Christian Höller)
