A Sentimental Punk is a two-part retrospective presented in association with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Canyon Cinema Foundation and The Lab. Curated by Megan Hoetger and Black Hole Cinematheque. Completely different programs each night. Join us for Program Two on Sunday, September 23. Details here.
Admission: $15 general/$10 for members of Cinematheque and The Lab. Advance tickets available here.
Series pass (admission for both screenings): $25. Series pass available here.
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"In the disputed histories which built the house of film he [Kren] was momentarily but unforgivably denied; now he haunts the house with rude and playful shadows." – Mark McElhatten, Curator of “Views from the Avant-Garde,” New York Film Festival, 1997-2013
Pioneering Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna 1998) is an elusive yet persistent figure in twentieth-century histories of both performance- and film-based experimentation. His practice was idiosyncratic to say the least, staked in experimentation across media communication platforms in film and the visual arts no matter where that took him—from cooperative theaters, midnight screenings at commercial theaters, fringe film festivals in abandoned subway stations and punk shows in warehouses; to art schools, artist studios, galleries and international art and film festivals, across nations and continents. In projects ranging from pseudo-pornographic collaborations with the Austrian performance art group known as the Vienna Actionists, to meticulously durational records of everyday space and time, to self-reflexive ‘documents’ of film cooperative life and experimental worlds, Kren combined and re-combined structural film techniques with inquiries into social space, re-constituting what ‘film about film’ or ‘film as film’ might mean. (Megan Hoetger) Full Series details here.
A Sentimental Punk: Day One
PART 1: Filming Media Cultures
Keynote introduction by series curator Megan Hoetger
SCREENING:
49/95 Tausendjahrekino (1995)
20/68 Schatzi (1968)
22/69 Happy End (1969)
30/73 Co-op Cinema Amsterdam (1973)
2/60 48 Köpfe aus dem Szondi-Test (1960)
24/70 Western (1970)
29/73 Readymade (1973)
43/84 1984 (1984)
50/96 Snapspots (for Bruce) (1996)
PART 2: Material Fusions
Introduction by Steve Anker
SCREENING:
13/67 Sinus Beta (1967)
15/67 TV (1967)
5/62 Windowlookers, Garbage, etc. (1962)
17/68 Green-Red (1968)
11/65 Helga Philipp Painting (1965)
4/61 Walls-Positive-Negative (1961)
1/57 Versuch Mit Synthetischem Ton [Test] (1957)
3/60 Trees in Autumn (1960)
37/78 Tree Again (1978)
31/75 Asyl (1975)
Image Credit: 31/75: Asyl (1975), film score, by Kurt Kren. Image from the Archives of San Francisco Cinematheque.