Kurt Kren
The Complete Works

June 3 to 15, 2006

The complete works of Viennese avantgarde filmmaker Kurt Kren (1929–1998) last less than four hours, but they rank amongst the most intense and greatest surveys of the possibilities of cinema.
 
Throughout his life Kren constantly surprised his audience with new approaches; his masterpieces from 40 years of film work have their roots in a vast diversity of ideas. Early films such as 2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Test and 3/60 Trees in Autumn show precisely what their titles promise; yet thanks to his virtuoso use of rapid montage, the subject matter cannot be grasped conventionally by the eyes of the viewer.
 
Kren's films on Viennese Actionism are similarly radical. They are not mere "documents" of the happenings staged by Otto Mühl and Günter Brus, but genuine crystals of Cinema – they represent a kind of "thinking with the hands” (on the camera).
 
Kren's unique landscape and time studies from the 1970s such as 37/78 Tree Again and 31/75 Asylum belong to the most beautiful films of the decade. In Asylum, a precise score allows him to visualize the "impossible" intersection of the seasons in one image. Despite his kinship to structuralism, Kren's cinema is above all a triumph of the personal, an empire of expanded seeing, built from the smallest of all things.
 
This is evidenced in broken beer bottles (17/68 Green-Red), a Vietnam poster (24/70 Western), 36 slides of a concert (38/79 Sentimental Punk), or tourists taking pictures in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral, as in 49/95 tausendjahrekino (A Thousand Years of Cinema.) The latter's soundtrack, taken from Peter Lorre's bleak re-emigration film Der Verlorene (The Lost One), also tells us a lot about the deeply autobiographical nature of the works which the frequent emigré Kren created.
 
The Retrospective of the Complete Works of Kurt Kren takes place in cooperation with the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist: Kurt Kren-The Uneasiness of Film, curated by Thomas Trummer, which is being shown from May 10 to August 13 in the Atelier Augarten.