Movies: Kurt Kren

Kren shows the cinema (mentioned in the title) during and after film presentations. He uses single-frame and time exposures 5 to 30 seconds long. Sometimes sunlight comes through the open door into the theater changing the colors in the film remarkab...

"Action" by Günter Brus. At first Kren did not want to show the film, because the image is underexposed. A copy of the negative material turned out to be better than the original material and so Kren did show the film. The film's title relates to Bru...

Zeichenfilm - Balzac oder das Auge Gottes is a play on the idea of trick film. And trick film it is. The 30-second work is shown twice in case the viewer missed something the first time: in crude hand-drawn animation Zeichenfilm ... evokes the scatol...

'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. ...

The making of pictures becomes the central issue in itself in that, with an analytical single-picture procedure, picture-taking tourists on Vienna's St. Stephen's Place are captured and their faces animated to a dance....

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. T...

"It became easier to understand Kren's method of approaching film when he illustrated his matter-of-factness with a story: he was asked to shoot and deliver a film, for a festival, given four day's notice, which he did ('foot'-age shoot'-out'). He no...

An experimental, bizarre and a very different shooting of an association between the sexes....

A collage of many visuals. A man urinates; a man has a drink. A man defecates; someone eats a meal. 16/67 September 20: ‘The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film'....

Sinus Beta is almost a sort of teaching film about bodily behavior in different situations. The film also produces, through the heterogenic photographic materiality of the primary elements, a cross-section of the methods, used in capturing the body i...

Almost as if entering the picture frame by chance, mute characters lean out of Viennese apartment windows, simply to have a look....

Hans-Peter Hochenrath and Birgit Hein made a documentary film about me for the Saarland Network and wanted me to make a self-portrait. Instead of pointing the camera lens away from myself, I pointed it toward myself. I rewound the film over and over ...

A report about an Underground Festival on tour through Germany and Switzerland....

A man's head is seen in silent close-up using single-frame shooting and time exposure....

The third of the "bad home movies". Kren moved, along with his Thunderbird from New England in winter to the warmth of Texas. Part of the film was shot in Austin. (Hans Scheugl)...

A portrait of the Austrian avant-garde artist Otto Mühl/Muehl (1925-2013), whose work combined sex, violence, gastronomy and bodily effluence with unbridled abandon....

Kurt Kren recorded the last television debate in the Reagan/Mondale election campaign. In the viewfinder, the television filled the entire picture, but the viewfinder did not match the lens entirely so that the television screen in the picture was ve...

11/65 Bild Helga Philipp is an optical abstraction of an optical abstraction: Kren has simply intercut filmed movements and sections from an Op painting by Helga Philipp - the result is motion opticals....

Kren filmed, in microscopic detail the reflection and refraction of the light in/on a glass bottle. However, the bottle itself (the whole body) is never seen. What is seen is much more the emanations of light from the glass and its clarity. (Michael ...

The film uses slides - photographic planes - which show different surfaces and finishes of a wall, which have been erroded by time. Kren stacks the positives and negatives of these pictures quickly one after the other, so that a moving relief-type st...