Essential Cinema: The films of Peter Kubelka

A somewhat new member of Anthology Film Archives, I attended my first Essential Cinema screening on Sunday, May 5th (read about the program here), that being the films of Peter Kubelka. A sixty-five or so combined minutes in length, Kubelka's films are vast in their ideas while often defying analysis and resisting categorization. Nonetheless, we can try.

Kubelka's first film, Mosaic in Confidence, runs the gamut of discombobulation, featuring black-and-white images of train locomotives (and the upsidedown POV of the back of a train in motion), a man and a woman doing outdoor laundry, extreme close-ups of the inner-workings of a light bulb, flashlights and lit cigarettes surrounded by darkness and fog, red filters, and stock footage from the 1955 Le Mans racetrack disaster. Unsubtitled German audio comes and goes throughout. 

Adebar, an extremely brief work featuring the silhouette of a couple dancing, their shadows rhythmically illuminated against a white background, proves that sometimes an effect can also be deemed a concept.

Schwechater, the infamous beef commercial that made Kubelka numerous enemies, features a woman (and later, women) drinking beer while exposed camera negative, noticeable grain, and abnormal beeping sounds work hard to make their presence known. A study in aggressive repetition, the action grows more frantic each time the sequence repeats. The Schwechater logo at the conclusion signifies an ironic summation of consumerism, or so we think...

Kubelka's fourth film, Arnulf Rainer, is like a stationary theme park ride with basic film imagery: white and black, light and darkness. Your eyes give over to the hypnotic flow and pacing of the imagery, even as an annoying sound on the audio track suffocates throughout. For some this will be headache-inducing, but for others, a fascinating light show.

Kubelka's most controversial film, Our Trip To Africa, is a film which took the man five angry years to make and, depending on how you look at it, could be called an ethnographic polemic. Featuring wild animals of the continent being shot down, sliced open, and lifted up onto trucks, the film certainly provokes. Its employment of (mostly) nonsync sound is notable and of particular interest to Kubelka. This is made apparent in the new documentary, Fragments of Kubelka, which also spends some time dissecting the shot of an African woman dancing for her male counterparts as she stares directly at the camera lens and through us. Our Trip to Africa fizzles out with a shot of a snow-covered village, but that turns out to be Kubelka's home, and not Africa's.

Titled after the one word spoken in the film, Pause stars Arnulf Rainer himself, mic'd up and searching for new physical sensations, adventures, and challenges. This includes (but is not limited to) Rainer smushing his face up against a window, roughly and combatively rolling through the grass, forcefully pulling his cheeks, and blowing through the cut-off bottom of a plastic cup. It stands as a unique collaboration between two artists working in different mediums, and worth mentioning is the sync sound featured throughout.

Kubelka's seventh film, Poetry and Truth, is perhaps his most performance based piece, featuring what appears to be outtakes and unused footage for television commercials, i.e. attractive women being fed chocolate, a man fixing his hair in the mirror, a girl playing with her baby doll, and even obedient dog clips. Repetition once again reigns supreme here, although this time the film isn't being repeated so much as are the actions of the on-screen performers. There's an argument to be made about whether this film or Pause is most reliant on the individual in the frame; void of humans, Kubelka's fourth, Arnulf Rainer, still captivates the most out of the seven.