HOLY GAZZOLI!
The following screening is at
Zeitgeist Theater Experiments in New Orleans.
This is a must see! November 28 & 29!
For info click HERE!
WILHELM HEIN, a pioneer figure of German experimental cinema since the 1970s will be at Zeitgeist (in New Orleans) with experimental filmmaker ANNETTE FRICKfrom Berlin to screen and discuss their own work and some of the masters of European radical cinema- Otto Muehl and Kurt Kren. As a filmmaker and organizer, he, along with his former wife, Birgit Hein, has had a considerable influence in the development of the experimental film movement in Europe. Zeitgeist is only one of two venues Wilhelm Hein & Annette Frick are visiting (along with Millennium in NY) in their first visit to the U.S. in over a decade. So this is major. Attendance is mandatory!
Friday, November 28 @ 9:30 p.m.
WILHELM HEIN: YOU KILLED THE UNDERGROUNDFILM OR THE REAL MEANING OF KUNST BLEIBT.. BLEIBT.. REEL FIVE (2001-2008) 55 min. Assembled from over 10 years of footage he shot and collected, Wilhelm Hein’s “You killed the Undergroundfilm…Project†is a fascinating and challenging example of what it means to make politically relevant underground film in an increasingly rented world. The films title is partly taken from a text of a performance by Jack Smith at the 1974 Cologne Art Fair that Hein documented and uses here in the films prologue. On the soundtrack we hear Smith’s familiar, almost comforting, nasal drone bemoaning museums, the art market and artists whose images suck the life out of their subjects, and the thinning of art. Images of Hein next to various public sculptures and monuments in Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia accompany parts of Smith’s rant. In this sequence, as in many others (for instance, the witty nod to Andrew Warhola set in Warsaw and scored with A Night In Tunisia), Hein’s unexpected combination of sound and image, of references and citations, calls to mind what might be one of the films central concerns: what can underground film tell us about the changes in Eastern Europe over the past 15 years? Hein’s revue-like film demonstrates the relevance of asking the question while offering numerous ways of answering it. The film functions as a burlesque show of aesthetic strategies and possibilities, invoking either directly or indirectly a mix of Heins favourites, including Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Nick Zedd, Arnold Schoenberg, Derek Jarman, Kurt Kren, Jerry Tartaglia, Samuel Beckett, Pete Seeger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and many more. Hein never slips into a mode of irony or cynicism while poignantly and beautifully juxtaposing an earnest humanitarian Michael Jackson song with some re-edited Japanese porn. With his sexy, playful and contemplative film, Hein asks of the underground what Jack Smith asked of Maria Montez: give socialist answers to a rented world! This rare program of Wilhelm Hein’s experimental films also include JEN SEIT a moving postcard to the late Jack Smith which he shot in Köln, Germany in 1993 and stars Zeitgeist founder Rene Broussard as Bacchus.
Plus Otto Mühl EARLY FILMS: Funebre l966 6min, Grimuid l966 9min, Zock Exercises (Das Ohr, La Dolorosa, Kardinal, Michelangelo) l967 12 Min, Psychomotorische Geräuschaktion 1967 12 Min, Wehrertüchtigung l967 8Min, Amore l967 3 Min. Otto Muhl’s aim was ‘to overcome painting on canvas through staging the process of its destruction’. He made rhizomatic structures with scrap iron (“Gerümpelplastiken”), but soon he, along with Hermann Nitsch, Adolf Frohner & Kurt Kren proceeded to the “Aktion” in the vein of the New York Happenings and Fluxus. Gradually, Muehl began to distance himself from “Aktion”. He regarded the “happening as a bourgeois artform, mere art”.
Saturday, November 29 @ 9:30 p.m.
FILME VON ANNETTE FRICK featuring JOYCE IN PREUSSEN (4 min.-2002-04), COSMIC ELEMENTS (6 min.-2002-2004), CHAUSSEESTRASSE 7 ODER HEUT GEFALL ICH MIR (16 min.-2003), SECHSMALSIEBEN (2 min.-2002-04), ALLENT GUTE KOMMT VON OBEN (6 min.-2004) and other works by ANNETTE FRICK.FILME VON KURT KREN – 2/60 48 HEADS FROM THE SZONDI TEST (4 min.-1960), 3/60 BAUME IM HERBST (5 min.- 1960), 13/67 SINUS BETA (5 min.-1967), 15/67 TV (4 min.-1967), GRUN ROT (2 min.-1968), VENECIA KAPUTT(30 Sec-1968), 20/68 SCHATZI (2 min.-1968), 22/69 HAPPY END (4 min.-1969), 49/95 TAUSEND JAHRE KINO (3 min.-1995). Berlin Photographer and filmmaker, ANNETTE FRICK, will be present to discuss her work. Ms. Frick, well known for her photographs of drag queens and the gay community in Berlin, will be screening several atypical short films. “COSMIC ELEMENTS is a camera-less film which I exposed and then developed using the type of photogram technique which even Man Ray experimented in. This film original is neither digital nor producible on video, and was created without a great tech
nical apparatus and without financial means. In an almost abstract but very definite manner the film attempts to do justice to the primitive forms of plants in all their complexity and similarity.” – A.F. “The photographer Annette Frick shows with her films in a dramatic way, what is lost in the age of digital images: the beauty of the film as material, the light of the projector which goes through the film and the unique possibilities to transform life into the screen.†(Wilhelm Hein 2008).
KURT KREN (1929-1998) was one of the great masters of personal cinema in Europe. His singular films were often very short and meticulously constructed. In the mid-1960s he filmed some of the performances of the Direct Art movement in conjunction with Otto Muehl and Gunter Brus. Zeitgeist hosted Kurt Kren in 1994.