Friedl vom Gröller

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

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!

What goes missing in a time when mouths are covered by masks? At the beginning you see a set of replacement teeth. This still life opens the film, which bears the ominous year 2020 as its title. Even the very first image speaks volumes: a taboo object, almost surrealistic in its loneliness, stands naked in front of us. Only in the following shot is it contextualized. The dreaded set of dental instruments keeps the dentures company. Another shot shows the filmmaker herself who, as a patient, is feeling the agony caused by the tools. Her eyes see only the glare of the dentist’s lamp. Then, in place of her gaping toothless oral cavity, there appears the radiant image of a face adorned with teeth – followed by a nightmarish panning shot, where we see the dentist with his mask-covered mouth.

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.

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.

A cheerful ritual in praise of Mami Wata, a mermaid-like water spirit of life, sex and healing. A joyful show of Friedl vom Gröller's particular sense of humour as well as another short song of praise for the unique beauty to be found only in 16mm film.

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)

“La mia Camera” means my room, a balcony with curtains, (and my film camera). The main characters are the wind and its dancing playmate, the curtain. The wind always needs a partner, otherwise it cannot appear. On this hot summer day he shows his exuberant, wanton, but also thoughtful, contemplative nature. Sometimes, when you're alone, everything seems animated."(Friedl vom Gröller)

Winter in Paris begins with a still-life of a window sill and beautifully detours to a gruesome-erotic allegory of death.

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.

Portraits and fragmented views of Paris intertwine.

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.

Oppressive and childlike, erotic symbols and surreal moments.

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

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)

The title appears in thick boldface print. A short sequence of documentary snapshots, filmed off found paintings. These images pick up on figures from everyday life and religious practice, and according to the signature, were painted on public walls by a certain “Papisto Boy”. Two men are seen standing in front of an old whitewashed industrial building, smoking and talking. They turn toward the camera with their arms around each other, to pose for a portrait – the camera remains distanced. A tilt guides our gaze up to the underside of the tin roof where metal has been eaten away by rust. Off-screen the sound of drums is heard.

A pan on a dilapidated square, doubled with an another pan showing a series of portraits of local men staring into the camera lens.

Friedl vom Gröller's Poetry for Sale is a portrait of a young man peddling verse on the Paris metro. Reinforcing the antiquated nature of his actions, vom Groller constructs a classical scene then cedes control to her subject, with his seductive confidence, beau-laide looks and incantatory offer.

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.

The natural law of capitalism as expressed by a hungry boa constrictor.

The film virtually opens with a false lead, showing a poster for for Shiseido cosmetics – the kind of sign we are accustomed to seeing in display windows of perfume shops or department stores. The upper portion of the poster is painted over with the title of the film and the lower with the name of the filmmaker. The poster shows the beautiful and complacent face of a woman, at its center her large Asian eyes, a deep and trusting gaze. A hand reaches into the image – probably that of a man – trailing a long transparent strip across the poster.

NEC SPE, NEC METU follows upon Gutes Ende (Bliss) and Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Me too, too, me too), and it is the third film of Friedl vom Gröller to record visits to her mother in a nursing home. Like the life of her mother, the film itself is consumed by an involuntary force accelerating like a spiral heading toward the end.

Im Wiener Prater is not about the amusement park that one normally associates with this name. The spectacle in the film takes place in a much more basic sense. Right at the start, we see a camera tripod left standing, and instead, the filmmaker has set off to track down a woman (artist Martina L.). Carefully, concealed—with a thoroughly male-coded gaze—she approaches the unsuspecting woman who is out taking a walk. What we are then shown, a close-up of a woman urinating, activates a quasi-childish delight in investigating taboos: Evident here are both a conscious reference to Viennese Actionism and the counterpart to one of Gröller´s early films, Boston Steamer (2009) about the process of anal excretion. Yet rather than the close-ups of anatomical details and the associated sexualization, what is actually `unsettling´ about Im Wiener Prater is the gaze forced upon the viewer: this woman looks at us, questioning and self-confidently—now that´s pure cinema of attraction.

Past the newsstand, the hairdressers, by the dry cleaners. A door opens into a sick room. A very old woman lies there in her bed. Her body is lusterless and haggard. But her gaze is firm, withstanding that of the camera.

A publication offering a selective retrospective of the work of photographer and filmmaker Friedl Kubelka – known as a filmmaker under the name of Friedl vom Gröller.

The continuation of a portrait of Gaelle Obiegly. The focus of the film is not a portrait, but rather a wide variety of cable cords in a cellar, attached to diverse light sources. A pageboy, a film projector, the person named in the title, and three other women.

A group of people in a room eating pizza, drinking, conversing, perhaps having a party.

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.

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

A young woman's body becomes the medium for the viewer’s projections of the stories and biographies that are imagined about her.

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 2010 silent short film directed by Friedl vom Gröller. The film screened at Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2011.

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.

Five older women, loosely grouped in two rows, gaze into the camera. At times only details of their faces can be seen, a sixth woman walks through the picture, joins the others. The image flickers briefly, disappears, and the scene begins again from the start, this time with a slightly displaced camera perspective.

Paris in June 2009. The title leads us to expect a personal diary entry made in a city that has often been used as a setting for ideas of love. In Gröller´s short film, which does nothing to conceal the excitement, the romantically charged eroticism becomes a gentle but undisguised form of pornography. The sex act is finally performed with a dildo, an erection does not ensue. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

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

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)

The film by photographer and filmmaker Friedl vom Gröller is the short portrait of a woman full of secrets. The viewer can observe her but is not given any information about who she might be: a perfect mirror for our own projections.

This was supposed to be a trial film for the artist to test her defective camera. In Allegory, Friedl vom Gröller stands in the foreground of the scene, anxiously looking into the camera. A circle of women behind her gradually lends the film movement, as their initial earnestness gives way and they traverse the film frame, cheerfully talking. Allegory contrasts Gröller´s melancholy with the cheerfulness of her students. (Christa Benzer)

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 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.

In this work the situation of shooting film as experienced by the subject and filmmaker is most clearly visible in the loving and then hurt facial expression of the mother, who in the end disregards the filmmaker´s instruction and disappears from the picture. The variety in the characters´ reactions is made apparent by the way the father, who doesn´t show his feelings, "sticks it out." While this is happening the viewer is left to deal with this discomfort by him or herself.

An experimental film.

In a series of films made in the 1990s Friedl Kubelka introduced a new element: her participation in the film by interacting with the subject. These films are designed in such a way that the camera films a frontal view of the apparently motionless face, and a touch-a caress of the hair, a kiss, a hug-demonstrates the artist´s relationship with the subject being portrayed, who react in various ways, whether through a lightening of facial expression, a smile or intensified squinting. This matter of involvement represents the specific nature of this series of portrait films, ensuring Kubelka an outstanding position in the field of avant-garde film.

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 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.

Filmed photo portraits Erwin, Toni, Ilse, is one of Friedl Kubelka’s first films. Influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and Existentialism, it was shot in the late 1960s at 16 frames per second and have not been edited.

16mm short film

16mm short film