Kurt Kren

Consists of five silent sequences filmed inside a dockside cafe. (bfi)

A meadow, a lake, the silhouette of a hill, trees. 21 days of the same view in Saarland. 21 days with five different cut-outs in a mask before the camera, which finally reveals a complete panorama. The landscape changes with the advancing seasons and becomes slowly delirious in its technical alienation. (imdb)

Kren's 48 heads refer to a psychological procedure known as the Szondi Test. Running four minutes and shot at various speeds, Kren's film fragments faces in extreme close-up: eyes, chins, hairlines, foreheads, with an occasional block of images using full-face. The film ends on mouths, viewed so closely as to be nearly abstracted. In 48 Köpfe body parts lose their original identification and become the subject of formal concerns. (Regina Cornwell, The Other Side: European Avant-Garde Cinema 1960-1980)

Experimental film in which the camera acts as a subjective observer. (BFI)

Kren juxtaposes blocks of images in montage sections cut to different rhythms and speeds. The "window lookers" - old people who rest elbows on pillows at windows - view the activities on the streets below: this action begins and ends the film and is repeated within the work many times. (Regina Cornwell, The Other Side: European Avant-Garde Cinema 1960-1980)

Kren's next film was 7/64: LEDA AND THE SWAN, also based on a Muehl materialaktion. 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. (Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is)

In 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.

With the making of his sixth film, 6/64: MAMA AND PAPA, Kren introduced subject-matter that was considered at that time to be highly revolutionary or even explosive. He began filming 'actions' and 'happenings' staged by Otto Muehl and Gunter Brus, and by the Vienna Institute for Direct Art. (MUBI)

Kurt Kren was asked to shoot and deliver a film, for a festival, given four day's notice, which he did. This is the result. (filmvideo.at)

This three-minute film was far more akin to the American-style "happening" in that the content was not particularly extreme. It was built up from items such as broken bicycle parts, a nude model, pieces of furniture, and these elements were then obscured or transformed by having a layer of paint thrown on them. (imdb)

Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (imdb)

Kren's 10/65: Self-Mutilation emphasizes the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus's action, pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they have been taken from an operating theater. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation. (Mubi)

Kren didn't want to show this film at first because it's underexposed. A copy of the reversal footage proved to be better than the original, and Kren finally did show it. The title refers to the fact that Brus used silver paper for the action. (Mubi)

The London Film-Makers' Cooperative calls this film the "Eating, Drinking, Pissing and Sh*tting film". (imdb)

I took a photograph of the view out of the window and had a very large negative made from it, which I fastened to the lens hood attachement in front of the camera. I tried to bring the negative into alignment with the real landscape which I could see through the camera. Then I filmed for months, changing the focus from near to far and then back again. (Kurt Kren) (Mubi)

At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures. (imdb)

'I have seen these eyes before.' In thousandyearsofcinema Kurt Kren turns his perspective around with a quiet and unsettling irony. The images appear. One eye tightly shut and the other pressed against the viewfinder. This is the standard position which Kren captures in single frames. Uncountable photographers, with their acutely-angled cameras directed at St.Stephan's Cathedral whizz by (imdb)

A surprisingly apt title.

Meditation on green and red bottles. (KG)

In 4/61 Mauern-Positiv-Negativ und Weg (4/61 Walls-Positive-Negative and Path) Kurt Kren uses slides - photographic planes - which show different surfaces and finishes of a wall, which have been erroded by time. (sixpackfilm.com)

In 1968 Kren made SCHATZI, which explores the irony of a formal image device, the interplay of positive and negative superimposition, involving the viewer in the material interaction only to reveal finally that the picture is of an army officer surveying a field of corpses. (lightcone.org)

Kren: It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. (MUBI)

Short film by Kurt Kren.

In crude, hand-drawn animation, Balzac und das Auge Gottes evokes the scatological, sadomasochistic actions and performances of Otto Muehl and Günter Brus. (Regina Cornwell)

A film that was created as an advertisement for the Viennese city paper Falter. It comprises five quickly cut recordings made in Vienna's subway.

Painting Helga Philipp.

The Exposure (s)

A man overlayed several times.

A humorous reading of some letters by Groucho Marx.