The Letter

Confusion results when a young man walking through a park joins in a game of tennis.

Kristl was a member of the prestigious Zagreb Studio of Animation and his early works as painter and filmmaker had brought him instant acclaim and instant censorship. He fled Croatia and lived in Germany; he died there in 2004. Poor People, a “collective scream” of Cold War fear, was produced just after he left his country.

Interview film with the protagonists of the New German Cinema in 1966.

Kristl plays a prisoner who can smile only when he sees The General.

Poor and unhappy, Rafael leaves Pauline and tries his luck at the roulette, but loses his last coin. Fate gifts him with the miraculous "Shagreen leather" that fulfills all wishes. In his new, luxurious life he wins the heart of wonderful Foedora. But with the power of the leather comes a rule: for every fulfilled wish it becomes shorter, and so does the life of its owner. Using the leather abundantly, Rafael soon spends his time.

A group of men, women and Kristl with his camera debate how to resist authority in all its forms. All cinematic professionalism is avoided as Kristl explores how to live and make films politically.

In The Dam, although it is an experimental film, Kristl eschews the necessary earnestness in addressing his subject. The manufactured, unambiguously humorless profundity proffered up by other German contemporaries is absent here. Laughter is allowed. Kristl takes the dreadful liberty of tomfoolery, sending up himself, the characters, the action, "tragedy," and everything else, including the audience, that might be held sacred. Within the framework of the action, we recognize a love triangle, one of the simplest of dramatic configurations. Not only the basic idea, but also numerous particulars, both in subject and style, are reminiscent of the films of Roman Polanski, which Kristl doubtless saw and holds in esteem. We meet two men: one is meant to embody the outsider, the artistic, intellectual, individualist. The other looks like the embodiment of the well-to-do man, the burgher, the functionary, the capitalist. The two battle for the favor of an indecisive and domineering girl.

"Don Kihot" is a satirical, Klee-esque meditation about Don Quijote in the contemporary militaristic and regimentistic world.

Satirical cartoon featuring a jewel robbery.

Allegory of men's use of fire to kill, when it was given by Prometheus to help them.

Cartoon showing the "Utopes" - talented, unconventional, double-faced creatures. They are split by a uniformed man with a sabre - individually forced into submission by totalitarian ideology.

Vlado Kristl rejected the word anarchy. Nor did he like the word utopia, nor the term experimental film. As a matter of fact, he didn't like any words if they weren't freed from the conventional ways of thinking. Following the shooting of "Kunst ist nur ausserhalb der Menschengesellschaft" he was only pleased when hardly anything he expressed in his poems performed, thrown and hurled against any hostile and alien environment by Carola Regnier was understood. - Markus Nechleba

Short film about car racing.

A medium-length film by Vlado Kristl.

Vlado Kristl's great mini show.

The boy and the girl are suddenly separated from the picture book by a hand, which tears off a page from the book and makes a paper airplane in which the boy remains trapped. In her attempt to help the friend, she couldn’t achieve anything if all the children’s drawings in the city did not help her.