First, a simple question. What is animation? Conventionally, we understand animation to be cartoon films, whereby pictures, objects, figures, dolls or such things are filmed frame by frame in order to simulate a course of movement. The movement is thus not filmed in real time, rather animated. If you think of this definition as parallel to the history of the Austrian avant garde and experimental films, which I will touch on here with a few examples, the borders become increasingly blurred between the two genres.

Material film – or Viennese formal film, as the artist and media theorist Peter Weibel called it – in particular shows a very direct relationship to abstract animated film. One of the most well known, radical and spectacular examples, which also served as a prototype for Viennese formal film, is Arnulf Rainer (1960) by Peter Kubelka, whose first performance – according to legend – cleared the cinema by the end of the film.  Composed exclusively of blank black and white film produced ‘only’ of light, darkness, sound (white noise) and silence, Arnulf Rainer counts as the most pointed of metric films, which in reduced form plumb the depths of the vocabulary of the cinema without using a film camera. Following an established score of 16 units to every 576 frames, Kubelka combines different themes which eventually generate a harmony which covers all elements of pictures and sounds.  “I have 24 communication possibilities per second and I do not want to waste a single one of them” – a fact which every maker of animated films has to deal with, at first as a purely technical consideration. (1)

The experimentation with material film in Austria in the 1960s also marked the filmmaking of Ernst Schmidt Jr., Kurt Kren, Peter Weibel, VALIE EXPORT, Gottfried Schlemmer, Hans Scheugl and others, and should remain part of the history of experimental films.  Fingerprint by Peter Weibel tells it quite succintly, in which Weibel does with a celluloid strip of film exactly what the title promises. Similarly reduced and emphasised is Filmisches Alphabet (Filmic Alphabet) by Ernst Schmidt Jr.: he films each letter of the alphabet from different company plaques one frame long and compensates the rigid elements of the (western) written language into 1 1/12 seconds film: animated movement. In Schnipp-Schnapp (Snip-Snap) and Filmreste (Film Scraps), on the other hand, Schmidt attacks and works on the film strip itself, scratching a large part of the film material to pieces afterwards and painting it over with black ink.  Filmreste – in this respect the most elaborate film by Schmidt Jr. – also sets a metric structure of 60 blocks, which are each based on 10 takes separated by a white frame.  The materials consist predominantly of old, badly lit or hardly useful film remains, principally Schmidt Jr.’s own films, industrial opening credits, as well as clips from material actions by Otto Mühl.  Combined with music, snippets of conversation and scratching noises, an extremely dense collage emerges, which on the one hand ensures the destruction of the material, and on the other hand comprises the intensive activity with the medium of the film. (2)

Filmisches Alphabet, Schnipp-Schnapp and Filmreste  were also part of Schmidt Jr.’s self-combined compilation of 20 films Destrucktionsfilme (Destruction Films), which support his anarchistic position in the dealings with material films.

Shooting in single frames as a fundamental technique of animated films is also, alongside the serial montage and shortcuts, a characteristic of the film work of Kurt Kren, a pioneer of structural films. For 24/70 Western, one of the least determined or directly political films by Kren, a poster which shows the My-Lai-massacre – a central theme of the anti-Vietnam war movement - served as source material.  The documented crime indeed remains recognisable in the editing; a real perception, however, is prevented.  Despite the use of a single rigid picture, upon viewing it takes on the effect of animation.  The very restless hand camera and extreme close-ups achieve a speeding up of the pictures and suggest a course of movement.  In 10/65 Selbstverstümmelung  (Self Mutilations) on the other hand – an action by Günter Brus, and one of the few material actions which Kren didn’t film in a single frame technique – the effect of the animation transfers itself directly onto the picture or formulates itself differently.  The materiality of the picture bears traits of animation, although 10/65 Selbstverstümmelung is not an animated film.  With a picture consistency from time to time comparable to a plasticine film, Brus covers himself and mistreats himself with dough-like material and various cutting implements such as razor blades, scissors, scalpels and needles.  Here, he infiltrates not only current body forms or body depictions – a common topic of animation – but also translates reality into a highly artificial use of forms. Beyond, the actions staged merely for the camera shows precise conceived fine art elements, whose masochistic effects often lead to censorship and a ban on performances. (3)

With the presentation of the 26/71 Zeichenfilm - Balzac und das Auge Gottes (Cartoon – Balzac and the Eye of God) within the framework of a 1978 programme ‘Film and sexuality’, Kurt Kren made acquaintance with the executive.  The police raged the event and confiscated the film, which was to remain the only trick film by Kurt Kren:  31 seconds long, frame by frame, drawn by hand direct-to-film.  The plot structure of the film combines the strangling of a man and woman with their sexual reactions.   There is ejaculation, fucking and shitting in the corner; causally the film is not so plain and clear.

Kurt Kren and/or the Viennese actionism also inspired a line of international artists from various different contexts (Gelitin, Elke Krystufek, Christoph Schlingensief, Jonathan Meese, John Bock...) whereby the artists’ film productions are commonly considered only as a part of the artistic activity.  With Mara Mattuschka, Hans Scheirl and Ursula Pürrer this enumeration can be built up: they widen their artistic practice through drawing and performance art, whose genre-specific elements are also to be discovered in their films.  Both of the films chosen for this programme – films which in their singular form stand contrary to appropriation art – combine real takes with animation.  Super 8 Girl Games shows two women who at the start shoot animated arrows playfully from their breasts then exchange bodily secretions which flow out of their armpits, mouth or nose.  A conscious regressive sound functions as soundscape; in the background of the scenes a wall is added, from whose upper half white clouds emerge on a blue sky.  The actions are based on simple, reduced, predominantly sexual (lesbian) codes and serve the bodily transformation.  The animation is used here as a field of minority self-portrayal, sado-masochist symbols mixed up with ‘child play’.  The body is also the subject in Kugelkopf, (Ball-Head) in which Mimi Minus – art figure and alter ego of Mara Mattuschka – the daily process of text production re-sets in a bodily reaction and transforms her body into a mechanical apparatus.  The shaving of the head, the action, which gradually becomes the centre of attention, can be read as a direct reference to The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer, though with the serious difference that Mattuschka makes the injuring and the subsequent bandaging of her head into a joyful and specifically self-made ritual.

For a completely different form, but also further animation, there is the found footage genre, which since the 1960s has continuously found application in the avant garde and experimental film as an artistic means of expression, and survives to the present day.  In the 1980s and early 1990s especially, found footage was the dominant form of the (post) avant garde film worldwide:  cinema-appropriation art. (4)

Also in Austria, people like Dietmar Brehm, Lisl Ponger, Gustav Deutsch, Siegfried Fruhauf, Thomas Draschan, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky, to name just the most well known ones, rework existing material to examine, destroy, defamiliarise or consequently recontextualise.  Outer Space drives this process to its limits: Tscherkassky takes out part of the B-movie The Entity by Sidney J. Furie (1983) and transforms the plot into a film material shocker, which greatly harasses the main actress Barbara Hershey.  Perforation and light tone trace act as attacker; a frequent overlapping of picture and distortion hurls Hershey through the restless twitching film landscape, forcing her body into the picture.  “Each individual frame of Outer Space was composed from one to five different takes of the released film, that of Dream Work (his sequel) already up to seven”.  The filming apparatus here doesn’t function as a ‘picture machine’ whose purpose it is to serve illusion, as we are familiar with from Hollywood (the most common source of supply of the found footage film makers) but rather acts as the opposite, the narrative impulse-giver, whose components are put openly on show. (5)

Ensuring the cinematographic process is also a main focus of the films of Martin Arnold and Siegfried Fruhauf, who, like Tscherkassky, stand in the tradition of Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka. Arnold transforms the single frame into stutters, to penetrate the deep structures of the film body.  He breaks conventional film actions down into their fragments, filtered out in consequent psychological, mostly patriarchal patterns of behaviour and, over light, varying repetitive loops he creates a new, but inherent narration.  In the œdipal melodrama Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, his most recent film for cinema and festivals, he no longer uses an optical printer, however, but rather sketches the film on the computer and gets it ready in the animation studio. 

Siegfried Fruhauf, born in 1976 and a student of Tscherkassky, also understands film as a sequence of photogrammes, and is interested in the production of cinematographic pictures.  This idea is directly illustrated in his early work Höhenrausch (Mountain Trip).  The film consists simply of single picture takes of filmed postcards or rural subjects which are ordered in a set-up of four: tree to tree, mountain peak to mountain peak, sky to sky... a panning shot to the right, which varies markedly in speed and folk music which pounds in the ears are further parameters in which four minutes of film time is compressed into a cinematographic panoramic picture. (6)

Since the end of the 1990s – parallel to the international successes of the Viennese electronic scene (Kruder/Dorfmeister, Radian, epy, Christian Fennesz, Sofa Surfers) – a young scene in Austria has been established, whose main focus lies in the discussion of specific qualities of picture and sound and their combination.  The label Austrian Abstracts, or Audiovisions, initiated by Norbert Pfaffenbichler, represents artists such as lia, Michaela Schwentner, reMI, Karo Goldt, m.ash, Jürgen Moritz, (n:ja) and Michaela Grill, who predominantly confront computer-generated, abstract visual worlds with electronic sound.  Analogies to contemporary graphic design and (music) clip-culture are fixed/arranged in a history of art contemplation as much as to early modern avant garde films in the 1920s and 1930s (Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttman, Viking Eggeling, Len Lye), without the video makers though calling on these explicitly.  The techniques, strategies, methods and style of animation also vehemently differentiate themselves in this genre.

Whereas lia uses a self-programmed software for her videos, for example, with which she directly edits external sound inputs on the computer and from that creates a language of forms, which balances between filigree video art and digital media design, Manuel Knapp and Michaela Grill use conventional 3D or video programmes like Final Cut Pro or After Effects for their transgressive picture surfaces.  The source material is changed until it is almost unrecognisable, and only in contextualising the videos it might be of interest that for example Trans consists simply of two photographs of the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfi, which show an unspoilt harbour landscape.  Manuel Knapp on the other hand animates in Accelerated Lines geometric line formations and inserts motion blur – a programme function for the simulation of movement – in order to generate such a “dynamic system that there no longer follows the idea of order and simplicity” (David Komary).  In contrast to Grill,  however, Knapp’s animation does not arise from the post production, but is programmed directly ‘live’ with the filter.  What is unquestionable in both videos is the relationship to drawing:  via movement and with the help of sound, intensive synaesthetic perceptions are produced.

Martin Arnold named his 2002 film installation Deanimated, in which he makes the figures of the American horror film The Invisible Ghost (1941) by Joseph H. Lewis disappear with the help of digital technology, until finally only the space of the film remains. This programme is called ‘De-animated’ as reference, its intentions, however, being the contrary.  It is an attempt to leave a film field or a territory not only one form – classical animation – but rather now and again to bring back into play already disappeared (historical) forms and their proponents which enrich the genre.


© Diemar Schwärzler 2006
This text originally appeared in the festival catalogue. 

Notes

1.  See Jonas Mekas:  ‘Movie Journal’ in Peter Kubelka.  Gabriele Jutz, Peter Tscherkassky, PVS-Verlag, Vienna, 1995 (page 30)

2.  Compare Ernst Schmidt Jr ‘Synthetic Reality: Marionette Film, Abstract Film, New Austrian Animated Film’.  In Ernst Schmidt Jr Drehen Sie Filme, Aber Keine Filme!  Filme and Filmtheorie 1964 – 1987  Linda Bilda, Secession, Triton Verlag, Vienna 2001 (page 252) Wiederabruck aus: Blimp, Graz 1985 (page 34)

3.  Compare Ernst Schmidt Jr:  ‘Kurt Kren and Structuralist Film’ in Ernst Schmidt Jr Drehen Sie Filme, Aber Keine Filme!  Filme und Filmtheorie 1964 – 1987  Linda Bilda, Secession, Triton Verlag, Vienna 2001 (page 237) Wiederabruck aus: Blimp, Graz 1985, page 42

4.  See Alexander Horwath:  ‘Singing in the rain.  Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky’ in Peter Tscherkassky, Alexander Horwarth, Michael Loebenstein, Filmmuseum/Synema-Publikation, Wien 2005, page 33

5.  See Peter Tscherkassky ‘Epilogue, Prologue, Autobiographical Notes Along the Lines of a Filmography’ in Peter Tscherkassky, Alexander Horwarth, Michael Loebenstein, Filmmuseum/Synema-Publikation, Wien 2005, page 155

6.  See ‘Die Essensz der Bilder’, interview with Siegfried Fruhauf, www.arte.tv/de/film/kurzschluss/Mittwoch/899016,CmC=899094.html