Acting
Günter Brus is a controversial Austrian painter, performance artist, graphic artist, experimental filmmaker and writer.
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.
"Action" by Günter Brus. At first Kren did not want to show the film, because the image is underexposed. A copy of the negative material turned out to be better than the original material and so Kren did show the film. The film's title relates to Brus' use of silver paper for his action.
A kind of home movie made in Brus' apartment. Brus' Christmas wishes can be seen on a poster which he painted and which he holds for a short time in front of the camera.
A collage of many visuals. A man urinates; a man has a drink. A man defecates; someone eats a meal. 16/67 September 20: ‘The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film'.
A short documentary on Arnulf Rainer, famous for overpainting portraiture presenting the "face farce" concept.
A portrait of the Austrian avant-garde artist Otto Mühl/Muehl (1925-2013), whose work combined sex, violence, gastronomy and bodily effluence with unbridled abandon.
An experimental, bizarre and a very different shooting of an association between the sexes.
Four young men affected by psychological motorcar reactions and effluents that get more excited, crazy and freaked out as times passes.
Four men, one woman and a cat in a room. The men drink and discuss. Things get a bit violent. The masochist acts out his desires by himself. Random fuss and sex occurs. Suddenly the woman gets her baby to change diapers. Odd things around the child. The cat gets abused. This is Otto Muehl going Fassbinder.
Kren’s 10/65 Selfmutilation is developed from a Gunter Brus “action”. What the film emphasizes is the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus’ 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 theatre. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation. (Stephen Dwoskin)
A subversive and experimental film from Otmar Bauer and Günter Brus.
"The Manopsychotic Ballet" was the last important action by Otto Muehl before he retired from the art world after a decade of painting and performance and focused on his commune as an alternative way of living. It marked the end of a very prolific phase of actions that followed the legendary Art and Revolution action by the Viennese Actionists in Vienna in 1968. As a result of this performance, Muehl and Günter Brus were prosecuted and could no longer exhibit publicly in Austria.
A collection of shorts made between 1964 & 1970 by the extreme avant-garde performance art group The Vienna Actionists. Including short films Sodoma, Mama And Papa, Oh Sensibility Leda Und Der Schwann, O Tannenbaum, Stille Nacht, Cosinus Alpha, Scheiss-Kerl, Impudance In Grunwald, Psychotik-Party, and the infamous Otmer Bauer Presents