Kurt Kren | WatchedThis
Kurt Kren
Directing
Biography
Kurt Kren was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria from a Jewish father and a German mother. From 1939 till the end of World War II, Kren lived in Rotterdam, where he was sent to with one of the Children's Transports. In 1947 Kren returned to Vienna, and his father provided him a job at the National Bank. He began making films in 1957. 2/60 48 Köpfe Aus Dem Szondi -Test (1960) was his first serial film and 3/60 Bäume Im Herbst (1960) confirmed this structural orientation. He realized in the 1960s his most famous films with the Viennese actionists, where his skill of short film blossomed. In 1966, he took part in the « Destruction in Art Symposium » organized by Metzger in London. In 1968 he visited the USA for the first time, showing his films in New York and St. Louis. This very year he became a founder of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative. After a participation in a happening "Kunst und Revolution" ("Art and Revolution") at the University of Vienna in 1968, Kren's films were confiscated and he was fired from the National Bank. He participated in 1970 in the International Underground Film Festival (London) and in 1971, in the Cannes Film Festival. He then moved to Cologne for five years. Retrospectives were set up by the London National Film Theatre in 1976 and the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1979. He was also involved in the Dokumenta 6 of Kassel in 1977. From 1978 to 1989, Kren lived in the USA and presented lectures for universities and schools. He did many jobs such as security officer in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Within this period he made his bad home movies as he used to call them inspired by his travels across the country. He finally returned to his native Vienna in 1990. He died from pneumonia in Vienna in 1998.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Homage to Kurt Kren
A homage to the Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, his two films "1000 Years of Cinema" and "Snapspots" and his way of working; and that with a slight wink.
Home Movies 1971-81
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Exit... But No Panic
A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.
10c/65: Brus Wishes You a Merry Christmas
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.
Birth of a Nation
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Becoming Otto
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.
Sodoma
The Austrian avant-gardist Otto Muehl may well be the most scandalous filmmaker to ever work in cinema, and Sodoma stands as his most famous work. This creation takes the experiments a bit further down the road.
29/73 Ready-Made
In a TV film about the film Casablanca, Kren is meant to read aloud three letters that Groucho Marx wrote to Warner Bros., because they wanted to take legal action against him over A Night in Casablanca. The recorded material could not be used on television and was meant to be destroyed. Kren found it and showed it uncut with its repetitions.
Portrait: Kurt Kren
"This film is an attempt in focusing. I visited Kurt Kren in Vienna. (Kurt Kren is considered to be the father of the European underground film.) Kurt Showed me lots of documents, papers and letters, all about the fights he had with many restaurant owners in Vienna. But the film I made is not about these fights; I tried to focus on the eye of the hurricane, the eye of Kurt Kren. Is this Kurt Kren or isn't it?" (HHK)
36/78: Rischart
Hans-Peter Hochenrath and Birgit Hein made a documentary film about me for the Saarland Network and wanted me to make a self-portrait. Instead of pointing the camera lens away from myself, I pointed it toward myself. I rewound the film over and over again so that multiple exposures were produced, while I was repeatedly fading in and out.
Production
15/67: TV
Kren frames the image to suggest a proscenium, with a view to the harbor that conveys a literal sense of “tele-vision”. The static framing of the image and the clearly stratified mise-en-scène can hardly provoke interpretation. The sight of the girls does so all the more. Kren, the gentle voyeur - who turns the viewer into a secret accomplice - observes three teenagers, and probably like them, awaits a rendezvous. (Thomas Trummer)
15/67: TV
Kren frames the image to suggest a proscenium, with a view to the harbor that conveys a literal sense of “tele-vision”. The static framing of the image and the clearly stratified mise-en-scène can hardly provoke interpretation. The sight of the girls does so all the more. Kren, the gentle voyeur - who turns the viewer into a secret accomplice - observes three teenagers, and probably like them, awaits a rendezvous. (Thomas Trummer)
15/67: TV
Kren frames the image to suggest a proscenium, with a view to the harbor that conveys a literal sense of “tele-vision”. The static framing of the image and the clearly stratified mise-en-scène can hardly provoke interpretation. The sight of the girls does so all the more. Kren, the gentle voyeur - who turns the viewer into a secret accomplice - observes three teenagers, and probably like them, awaits a rendezvous. (Thomas Trummer)
31/75: Asylum
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.
31/75: Asylum
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.
31/75: Asylum
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.
6/64: Mom and Dad (An Otto Mühl Happening)
In the first action he filmed, 6/64 Mama und Papa, Kren’s editing leads to many interlocking continuous shots; central takes recur like a leitmotif, circular motion and networking can be observed throughout the film. Kren painstakingly weaves the fury in front of his camera lens into dense geometrical figures. Shot/countershot sequences alternate, lumping back and forth between single (!) frames, they turn the Actionist turmoil into ornaments, rigid geometrical patterns, the equivalent in time to what Mondrian used to distill on canvas in space. (Peter Tscherkassky)
10/65: Self-Mutilation
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)
49/95: thousandyearsofcinema
The making of pictures becomes the central issue in itself in that, with an analytical single-picture procedure, picture-taking tourists on Vienna's St. Stephen's Place are captured and their faces animated to a dance.
8/64: Ana - Action Brus
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.
Gallery
