MONUMENT | FILM | CINEMA | SPACE

Peter Kubelka’s Monument Film

digitally recomposed by students of the academy of fine arts vienna (location: Anatomiesaal) and the KunstUni Linz (location: parking lot)
4x 9216 frames or 6:24 min
Film Premiere: May 19th/June 17th 2014

In his storyless, color- and image-free structural film “Arnulf Rainer” (1960), one of the pillars of modernist cinema, Peter Kubelka presents the hard core elements of cinema: light and darkness, sound and silence.

Four decades later in 2012 he made its negative response, Antiphon: what was white before is now black; where there was sound there is now silence. Comprising a double projection of Arnulf Rainer and Antiphon, Kubelka’s latest project Monument Film is, in his own words, his final testament to the medium: Arnulf Rainer and Antiphon are screened individually, then both films are projected side-by-side and lastly superimposed on top of each other. (Pamela Jahn)

In our course we digitally recomposed  this six minutes and 24 seconds of film, “made out of transparent and black 35mm frames, deafening white noise and the relative silence of the untouched optical soundtrack.” (Stefan Grissemann)

Our screenings were rare moments to test a reworked historical media art project in two authentic and very different locations: one of the most loaded architectural spaces of the ]a[ academy of fine arts vienna: the “Anatomiesaal” and a parking lot at the KunstUni Linz.