How to Do a Trickfilm

Sabotage acts are committed on the film theaters of a city for no apparent reason. Two secretaries of "Mega Film", which has been damaged by a sabotage act, decide to try to find the saboteurs in order to determine what their motives are.

A man gazes into the camera, breaths, speaks, and blinks. In playfully formal austerity, Thomas Renoldner explores the borders of the cinematic genre. Real film becomes stop-motion, language a hammering noise staccato. The film draws comical and intellectual potential from the transformation of organic movements and sounds into mechanical ones, from the dissolution of the world into abstraction and rhythm.

Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.

In 1833, mathematician Simon von Stampfer introduced the stroboscopic disc in Vienna—one of the earliest cinema prototypes. The discs feature all forms of animation: abstract and narrative, documentary and (quite literally!) experimental. This film is based on images from Stampfer’s discs.

The confrontation of “kind of” an avant-garde film with “kind of” a music video, and consequently puts questions about the standard taboos and clichés of different filmgenres. Both avant-garde film and music video use music and sound “typical for their genre”.

The film is uncommonly poetic and refined. The pictures come from a book by Federica Pagnucco and Linda Wolfsgruber, realized with printed characters in wood and lead. An old printing tecnique, well blended with wood-printed shapes, which gives a special aura of magic to the book, and subsequently to its animated version, thanks to the participation of Thomas Renoldner and the evocative soundtrack by Peter Rosmanith. It is a precious film owing to the rare suspension of the atmosphere and time, actually fixed and focusing on small things, habits, interstices, in the end, worlds...