38/79: Sentimental Punk

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 very little. That was not the plan, but Kren decided to "adopt" the film in the end.

Four men, one woman and a cat in a room. The men drink and discuss. Things get a bit violent. The masochist acts out his desires by himself. Random fuss and sex occurs. Suddenly the woman gets her baby to change diapers. Odd things around the child. The cat gets abused. This is Otto Muehl going Fassbinder.

Kurt Kren records snapshots of visitors to Vienna who are photographed in front of the statue of Johann Strauss Jr.

In 9/64 O Christmas Tree Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl "action". The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials.

Kren’s 10/65 Selfmutilation is developed from a Gunter Brus “action”. What the film emphasizes is the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus’ action, pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they have been taken from an operating theatre. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation. (Stephen Dwoskin)

At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures.

Based on a Muehl Happening. The almost convulsive use of juxtaposition reappears here, but the captured gesture assumes a more erotic sensitivity, though the "action" itself was primarily a gradual destruction of the erotic.

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 scatological sado-masochistic actions and performances of Otto Muehl and Günter Brus which Kren filmed during his second period. In Zeichenfilm Balzac a male figure hangs himself, achieves a monstrous erection and ejaculates into a woman's mouth. She in turn hangs herself; he enters her vaginally then anally. Finally, she defecates on the left side of the frame wherein appears an eye of God while on the right in a cartoon box the words "Aber Otto" ("But Otto") materialize, a comic reference to Otto Muehl.

An eccentric homage to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder days of German filmmaking.

"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 Brus' use of silver paper for his action.

In the first action he filmed, 6/64 Mama und Papa, Kren’s editing leads to many interlocking continuous shots; central takes recur like a leitmotif, circular motion and networking can be observed throughout the film. Kren painstakingly weaves the fury in front of his camera lens into dense geometrical figures. Shot/countershot sequences alternate, lumping back and forth between single (!) frames, they turn the Actionist turmoil into ornaments, rigid geometrical patterns, the equivalent in time to what Mondrian used to distill on canvas in space. (Peter Tscherkassky)

A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.

A subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl.

Another try by the Viennese actionists around Otto Mühl, trying to shock the middle-class bourgeoisie with all sorts of explicit sexual and excretory processes.

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.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.