Filmmuseum on Location:
Film Museum on Location
On January 27, 2009, in the framework of its series Film and Music, the Vienna Konzerthaus will present one of the Austrian Film Museum’s recent rediscoveries, which was jointly restored in 2004 by the Film Museum and the George Eastman House in Rochester: The Mandarin, produced in 1918 in Vienna under the direction of Fritz Freisler. Long considered a (lost) Austrian classic, the film now testifies to a "pre-Caligari" cinema of paranoia and the supernatural which was already “in the works” during the final years of World War I. The new score, written by Martin De Ruiter and commissioned by the Amsterdam Filmmuseum Biennale, will be performed by the Max Tak Orchestra.
On January 1, the Lentos Museum in Linz will inaugurate the city’s year-long activities as the 2009 European Cultural Capital with a large-scale exhibition entitled Best of Austria. 30 Austrian museums have been invited to select the "three finest works" in their collections and to present them in the framework of the exhibition.
In order to adequately present the Film Museum’s contribution throughout the entire duration of the show, the Lentos and the Film Museum have transformed one of the museum spaces into an “Invisible Cinema” auditorium. Three 35mm masterpieces from the collection – Gaston Velle's La Peine du talion (1906, 6 min), Len Lye's Trade Tattoo (1937, 5 min) and Peter Kubelka's Schwechater (1958, 1 min) – will be shown: not as ‘installations’ or as a continuous loop, but as repeated ‘acts of projection’ that are defined by their specific duration. Projections start at the full hour and half hour.
