A Little History of the Austria Filmmakers’ Cooperative

The screen comes to life with a blindingly bright white field illuminating the words: materialaktion mühl; 6/64; mama und papa; copyright kren. It’s dark again. A pair of lips appears in the center of frame. Floating. Suspended for a few seconds. The screen goes dark again. When the image re-appears it shows a naked woman (Annie Brus) with her legs splayed open, head thrown forward in an ecstatic pose, and red paint running down her torso. Once her iconically-centered body disappears from the frame, things are set off into a frenzy of movement, not to come to a resting point, like the one offered by Brus’ body, for the remainder of the four minutes. The moving image that confronts a viewer in Kurt Kren and Otto Mühl’s Mama und Papa (1964) is a raucous flurry of flickering parts—mostly body parts—that, more often than not, are almost unrecognizable outside of their gritty yet seductively glistening surface textures. The bodies that appear in the film, including both Mühl’s and Brus’s, are captured from multiple and continually shifting angles as the two engage in various erotic(ized) gestures, from a dry session of coitus more ferarum, to nipple suckling, to indiscernible scenes of fleshiness. These gestures, though, are never shown in their entirety. Instead, they reemerge over and over again, as fragmented, interrupted, and obsessively repetitive image sequences...

“Rude & Playful Shadows: Collective Performances of Cinema in Cold War Europe” is a historical examination, which engages rigorous discursive and performance-based analysis of underground film screening events that crossed the West/East divide and brought together an international group of artists and filmmakers during some of the “hottest” years of the Cold War period. At its center, the study investigates the practices of two pioneering filmmakers, Austrian Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna, 1998) and German Birgit Hein (b. Berlin, 1942). Tracking their aesthetic, ideological, and spatial reconfigurations of the cinematic apparatus—their “performances of cinema”—in Austria and former West Germany, the dissertation demonstrates how Kren and Hein were progenitors of influential new viewing practices that operated in the tacit geopolitical interstices between nation-states and underground cultures. Contemporary art, film, and media scholarship tends to move in one of two directions: either toward aesthetic inquiries into the appearance of moving images and other

time-based arts in the visual art museum since the 1990s, or toward the politics of global media

distribution in the digital age. “Rude & Playful Shadows,” alternatively, takes two steps back,

seeing these strands of inquiry as interlocked sets of historical conditions. Practices such as those

of Kren and Hein, this study contends, were vital to the formation of contemporary arts curatorial

models. Importantly, if not paradoxically, they also remain crucial models for conceptualizing

noncommercial and anti-institutional underground circulation and the kinds of convenings such

movement fosters.

Each chapter of the study looks at different screening event forms in which Kren and Hein

partook, considering how these forms developed under different sets of materials circumstances

and in response to different sets of political aspirations. Through its analysis of these event forms

and practices of “eventing,” “Rude & Playful Shadows” sheds new light on pre-histories of

today’s transnational time-based media networks, offering critical revision of the conventions for

reading allied histories of art and film, film and performance, performance and art.