this freezer-place is giving me ninety degree hot dog chai tea dreams
Friday, February 11, 2011
guilty pleasure
Cinema celebrates its birthday. A century which wants to be known as modern and be understood as neither linear nor circular, but accepted with jumps, tears, holes and cavities. The perception that film and its apparatus have offered aid in the formulation of this understanding. Camera lenses are turned on the world and bear witness to its existence, but it is quite another nature which "speaks to the camera as that which speaks to the eye" (Benjamin).
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. Picture after picture is about to be exposed in a form of collective unanimity. In the decades of his engagement with film, Kren has never conceived hermetically, and never permitted film, history and life situation to be set against each other. To allow the material, technical apparatus or conceptual purity to deflect him from the desire for filmic vision is foreign to his nature. He remains true to precise work and experiment, curious about communication with the world outside.
thousandyearsofcinema is not only bound up with this standpoint, but also shows a new direction. The soundtrack is becoming important, not as a scratched on noise, but as voice, as text. The passages, taken from Peter Lorre´s film The Lost, open up another realm where the element picture grates against that of voice. "I have seen these eyes before." A rapid sequence of images show the allegedly objective lenses of the cameras. On the soundtrack is someone who subjectively believes in the truth that he recognizes his opposite number, only to be curtly repudiated. A space containing Peter Lorre´s eyes is created by implication. A man driven, a lonely man, both before and after Hitler´s thousand-year empire. A man who cannot forget.
thousandyearsofcinema by Kurt Kren is a small utopia, a witness for the explosive power of the film medium set against the framework of 100 or 1000 years of (hi)stories. (Elisabeth Büttner)
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. Picture after picture is about to be exposed in a form of collective unanimity. In the decades of his engagement with film, Kren has never conceived hermetically, and never permitted film, history and life situation to be set against each other. To allow the material, technical apparatus or conceptual purity to deflect him from the desire for filmic vision is foreign to his nature. He remains true to precise work and experiment, curious about communication with the world outside.
thousandyearsofcinema is not only bound up with this standpoint, but also shows a new direction. The soundtrack is becoming important, not as a scratched on noise, but as voice, as text. The passages, taken from Peter Lorre´s film The Lost, open up another realm where the element picture grates against that of voice. "I have seen these eyes before." A rapid sequence of images show the allegedly objective lenses of the cameras. On the soundtrack is someone who subjectively believes in the truth that he recognizes his opposite number, only to be curtly repudiated. A space containing Peter Lorre´s eyes is created by implication. A man driven, a lonely man, both before and after Hitler´s thousand-year empire. A man who cannot forget.
thousandyearsofcinema by Kurt Kren is a small utopia, a witness for the explosive power of the film medium set against the framework of 100 or 1000 years of (hi)stories. (Elisabeth Büttner)
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