Peter Kubelka: The Essence of Cinema - ICA Cinema, 6pm
56th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (10-21 October 2012) DAY 2
Every day (from October 10 to October 21) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in
London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here
is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't
worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always
some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each
screening. Here is the information you need to get those standby tickets.
One of the joys of the Festival is the excellent Experimenta strand and here's a rare opportunity to see a complete retrospective of the works of influential Austrian avant-garde film maker Peter Kubelka.
If you want an introduction to
his work I can thoroughly recommend an article by Michael Brooke in the
November edition of Sight & Sound, out now. Brooke writes: "All [Kubelka's work] are screening in Festival retrospective but Kubelka's fourth film Arnulf Rainer (1960) is getting most attention. Named after its backer, it is one of the purest works of cinema imaginable, stripping the medium to its essentials: clear and black frames, white noise and silence. From these primitive building blocks, Kubelka created a coruscating viewing experience, offering action (flickering at varying rhythms and speeds), suspense (one or more elements sustained for long enough to create keen anticiaption of their eventual interruption) and constant interplay between the sudiovisual elements (sometimes in perfect synch, sometimes decidedly not). It fascinates both as a projected experience and as a physical art-object."
The Kubelka films being screened tonight are:
Mosaik Im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence) (1955)
Adebar (1957)
Schwechater (1958)
Arnulf Rainer (1960)
Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) (1965)
Pause! (1977)
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) (2003)
The Kubelka season at the Festival also includes a lecture by film maker and a live performance of his new work Monument Film at the NFT on Sunday 21 October plus a documentary called Fragments of Kubelka at the ICA on 13 October.
Here is Arnulf Rainer. (Play at maximum volume)
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