41ST INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #7 WEDNESDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2012
Peter Kubelka
photo: Ruud Jonkers
Essential viewing Peter Kubelka’s mesmeric work celebrates the essence of film, writes Ben Walters
“Burning fire or running water – these were my early cinemas. I was interested in the fact that the universe is so complex my brain cannot grasp it. I looked into the water and was fascinated.” To those who know his work, it will be no surprise that Peter Kubelka’s cinematic influences are so unconventional, so elemental. His practice has always been closer to the pursuit of natural philosophy than a career in the movies. Kubelka is at IFFR 2012 for two reasons: to attend the world premiere of Fragments of Kubelka, Martina Kudlác˘ek’s film about his life and work; and to deliver one of his extraordinary talks, in which he presents examples of his cinematic output – which totals barely an hour – in parallel with an explication of his theory of cinema, illustrated with exquisite objects from his collection of anthropological artifacts. Four hours long and four years in the making, Fragments was an unusually challenging project. “This was documentary as catch-me-if-you-can,” says Kudlác˘ek, who has also made films about Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas and Marie Menkin. “Kubelka has a radical integrity. He does nothing unless he’s convinced of it.” Cosmic understanding
Born in Vienna in 1934, Kubelka began experimenting with film as a teenager but quickly rejected the conventional model of narrative cinema, which he has described as “dead” and a “completely normative process (involving) paid imitators reading strange words written for them (alongside) some music to tell you how to feel”. Instead, he wanted to investigate the essential qualities of film as a medium – the forms of human communication and cosmic understanding
uniquely available by means of the projection of light through 24 frames of celluloid a second. A one-time judo champion, Kubelka retains a bullish yet dapper presence, his white hair neatly cropped, a fob watch adorning the three-piece suit he adopted early on. (“I called it my ‘protection suit’. It made me look like a Viennese bourgeois.”) To his side at his talk, held on Monday in LantarenVenster, were three tables covered with objects made of wood, leather, metal, ceramic and stone; their vintages ranging from a couple of decades to 20,000 years old. A stone-age seeding implement lay alongside a cinema clapperboard; a cowbell sat next to a metronome. Kubelka makes the familiar seem profoundly strange and the radically perceptive seem obvious. How, I wondered, had I not previously recognised that the washes of piped music that now surround us evince the same human tendency to alienate ourselves from the natural environment that led to the invention of shoes? (Kubelka showed us ancient African rhinoceroshide shoes and gorgeously inlaid Afghan sandals.) Or the shared lineage of the clapperboard and the rattle as devices to produce “‘now’ moments” of audiovisual synchronicity? “The baby learns that, in nature, things are in sync: where there is movement, there must be sound,” Kubelka said, displaying the similar-yet-different effects of a range of rattles, from the dried seed-pod of an African bread tree to an elegant wooden Japanese clacker and a nineteenth-century European gold, silver and ivory specimen. “In cinema, nothing moves. The word ‘movie’ is a lie. The movement is in the head of the beholder.” Using his jacket in place of a camera shutter, he illustrated how, in four still ‘frames’, the mind could infer a handkerchief’s fall – or its transformation into a rock. Film, he said, brings us into a world “where I am God and I can make things flow and I can stop things… When you sit
in a cinema, you sit in the head of a filmmaker. You see through his eyes and hear through his ears.” Materiality of film
And so we did, thanks to screenings throughout the talk of such pieces as Unsere Afrika-Reise (1960-66), which reconfigures footage taken when the artist was invited to document some businessmen’s African hunting trip; Adebar (1957), commissioned to promote a nightclub; and Schwechater (1958), intended to advertise the brewery of the same name. Each of Kubelka’s patrons had requirements (show us shooting animals; show people dancing; show models enjoying our beer), which he met. But none could have anticipated the extraordinary experiments into the potency and rhythms of light, darkness, sound and silence that he delivered. “I knew something about film that they did not know,” Kubelka said with a glint. “They thought that what you film is the film. Ha! The film is what reaches the screen, and in between is me.” He elaborated: “The camera just filming is nothing. I made a structure which said something about the complexity of audiovisual events.” An awareness of the materiality of film was crucial to such construction; Kubelka reminded us of the “body intelligence” of a pianist, shoemaker or painter. “Analogue film lets you work with your hands, like a tailor would.” Adebar was made “with scissors, glue and film”. If a strip of celluloid reached from Kubelka’s fingertip to his elbow, it lasted a second. Untranslatable into any other medium, these ‘metric’ films help bring us to “the hard core of cinema”, he said. “No poetry functions like this. No music functions like this … You can’t describe my film in words. You can’t hum it.” Kubelka scratched his credit directly into the stock; he displays strips of film as three-dimensional artworks in themselves. Little wonder, then, that Kubelka recoils at the general
condition of “digital slavery”, suggesting that “we are forced today into accepting it because our homeland has been taken away. I’ve been a filmmaker for 62 years and now it’s gone … But I don’t let my films be copied into the digital medium because I believe film will go on, as theatre went on” (after the advent of cinema). No concessions
Kubelka’s formal stringency presented numerous challenges to Martina Kudlác˘ek. He insisted that she shoot handheld, use available light, provide no subtitles (though he speaks English to reach the widest possible audience), and be upfront about the nature of the project. “The camera is part of the event; it must not be hidden.” Nor would he proffer any favours. “He wouldn’t hold up a photo twice so I could get it on camera,” she says, “or even give it to me afterwards. You never get a second chance.” Kudlác˘ek sees Fragments as a document of Kubelka’s ideas and a contextualization of his work – but, obviously, she wasn’t able to include actual excerpts of his films in her DV project. She was, however, able to shoot the projection booth while they were playing, or record their light falling back onto Kubelka’s face as he watches them. The artist remains unrepentant about the rigour of his approach. “All humans are more or less the same,” he says. “They have the same value and the same capacities. So if I make something that pleases me, there is a good chance I will find others (who also like it). It is the great pleasure of my old age to find that my supposition was correct: concessions are not a good investment.” Kubelka concluded his talk by screening his 1960 work, Arnulf Reiner, which rhythmically arranges and rearranges pure filmic units of white light and white sound. It’s an intense experience: captivating, mesmeric, overwhelming and unmistakably, irreducibly cinematic; the medium’s equivalent of gazing into a waterfall or fire.